The Academic Committee of the Royal Literary Society met on
Friday week to hear a commemorative address on the late Mr. S. H. Butcher from Professor Gilbert Murray. Such discourses, Professor Murray observed, ought to be honest and serious appreciations, not formal and uncritical eulogies. They might be difficult to utter in some cases, but there was no difficulty in speaking frankly of Butcher, since about him there was no ill to be said. Within his memory no one had left so strong an impression of being almost universally beloved and admired. Professor Murray noted how the spirit of public service had marked Butcher for its own, and how all kinds of educational calls drew him away from the work he would have done as a scholar. In that direction his work was potential rather than actual, for his written work, though of high quality, was limited in extent. But judged by the test of the main duty laid on Greek scholars —that of living again in understanding and imagination the great hours that have once been lived, and of keeping alive great things of the spirit which would otherwise die—he was a great scholar and a leader among English Hellenists. Professor Murray's address was throughout marked by the quality which he ascribed to Mr. Butcher as a speaker—" • kind of inevitable rightness."
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