ACADEMICAL ORATIONS.*
IB April, 1907, the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, made arrangements for the publication of speeches delivered on the occasion of conferring honorary degrees. Professor Tyrrell, who held the office of Public Orator from 1899 to 1904, was to edit them; he was to include such of the speeches of his predecessor, Professor Palmer, as he could recover—some, unfortunately, are lost—his own, and those of his successor, Dr. Purser. The result is a delightful book, full, we need hardly say, of wit and felicitous allusion, all expressed, of course, in the most elegant Latinity. Lord Roberts, for instance, is most appositely compared to Julius Caesar. He has achieved so much, and described what he has achieved so well, that it is Caesar alone that he has "in agendo et scribendo aemulum." Lord Strathcona is presented for a degree, and the Orator expresses his regret that great roads are no longer called as in Roman days by the names of their projectors. Did the custom still hold, then with the Via Appia and the Via Flaminia, monuments to noble names of Rome, we should have in the Canadian Pacific a Via Stratheoniana, Dr. B. P. Grenfell, of papyrus fame, is intro- duced with an admirable summary of his work ; its variety, for instance, is noted. He brings out of the land of Egypt documents of the most diverse interest, now a budget, so to speak, of Ptolemy Philadelphus, and now a lost ode of Sappho,—"commissi calores Aeolia,e fidibus puellae." In this work he was as busy as a bee, but, unlike that industrious creature, he enjoys in summer, and sets before us that we ma,y enjoy, the wealth which he has accumulated in winter. Another eminent excavator is honoured in the person of Dr. A. J. Evans. He, we hear, has vindicated the Cretans from the charge made by one of their own poets, and endorsed by an Apostle, that they are "always liars." The Labyrinth, celebrated by so many poets, the very Dictaean Cave in which the bees fed the youthful Jupiter, are found to be realities. May we not hope, so the Orator concludes, that some day the Minotaur himself may be found a new attraction "civibus suburbans nostra animalium vivaria festo die visentibus" P Trinity College has, we know, anticipated its older rivals by conferring degrees upon women. This liberality, not to speak of other remuneration, has provided its Orator with new oocasions of elegant compliment. Miss Jane Barlow, Mrs. Bryant, and the Hon. Miss Emily Lawless are among the persons thus distinguished. Of the first of these the Orator truly says that no one "tam ferns et vere ferreus eat at Idyllia illa Ifibernica vel ullum alum ex libris emus praestantissimis immotus et siccis oculis perlegerit." For indeed "liens ipsa vitam nostratium hodiernam depinxit."
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