This paragraph is more appropriate than it seems. I am
late in offering congratulations to Mr. J. R. M. Butler on his election to the Regius Professorship of History at Cambridge, but so was R. C. Lehmann in producing (in 1889) his most brilliant of congratulatory odes "on a recent happy event," to wit, the birth of the same Mr. Butler, whose father and mother were both Senior Classics. That Mr. Butler should have become a historian was obviously all wrong. Mr. Lehmann never conceived such a thing possible. As he rightly assumed, the omens were far other : "Yet if he when his teething-time approaches, should to cry elect
He will cry, I am persuaded, in the purest Attic dialect . He will subjugate hexameters and master elegiacs As easily as Rajah Brooke made mincemeat of the Dyaks . If asked to choose a story-book this prodigy will nod at us And demand the Polyhymnia or the Clio of Herodotus."
Oh, what a fall is there, my countrymen. But he inspired Lehmann's ode.
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