On Wednesday week Mr. Kipling made a remarkable speech at
Edinburgh University, when the. degree of LL.D. was con- ferred upon him. He dealt with the University's great tradition, in prose that the anthologist of the future ma5 deem not unworthy to stand beside that of a Lincoln or a Traheme. Their tradition, he said, had been handed down from John Knox. How had it proved when the greatest si all testa had been applied to it—when "the bitter and grinding dispensation" of the war overtook us ?
"Here, as elsewhere, the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children. The sons of your University were constrained, like their forbears, so to use themselves in matters of conscience as they should answer to their Maker. All earth has witnessed that they answered as befitted their ancestry, that they endured as the strong influences about their youth had taught them to endure. They willingly left the unachieved purpose of their lives in order that all life should not be wrenched from its pur- pose, and without fear they turned from these gates of learning To those of the grave."
The passage has a fall whioh puts it in the first rank of the prose inspired by the war. A better inscription for a wai memorial could hardly be found than the concluding phrase.
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