IN THE most informed and most sympathetic of all the
many tributes to Dr. Gilbert Murray this week, Mr. Ivor Brown mentioned how undergraduates of his generation used to bicycle 'on rainy winter afternoons up the Victorian solemnity of the Woodstock Road to Gilbert Murray's house.' More than a generation later, undergraduates were still bicycling to Dr. Murray's house—though, this time, up the more strenuous road to his house at Boar's Hill. Like Mr. Brown, they found that 'the pedalling through the puddles was superbly rewarded.' Dr. Murray's life has been a life of example, and this has been far more important than the precise value of his translations or his advocacy of particular policies. 1 do not know which of the many stories told about him I care for best : the true gentility of manner which often made him lead a young woman under- graduate into his garden and pluck her one of his roses and then offer it to her with the kindest of compliments; or the occasion, on VE Day, on which he addressed a luncheon meeting of the Oxford University Liberal Club, and made sixty-odd under- graduates who had felt that they wanted to be out joining in the frolics feel that they were privileged to be sitting at his feet. Everyone who has come into contact with him feels the better for it and—even more remarkable—that mankind as a whole could he better as well. Dr. Murray may live for many more years, but his example will long outlive him.
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