THE LATE ARCHBISHOP ALEXANDER. [To THE EDITOR OF THE "
SPECTATOR."] SIR,—I can remember vividly, though not like "Lector" verbatim, the then Bishop of Derry's sermon on the Trans- figuration. It was preached at St. Mary's on November 4th, 1882, at a time when we still crowded the undergraduates' galleries to hear him and Magee and Church and Vaughan and Jowett and the present Bishop of Hereford, then Presi- dent of Trinity. I have a cutting from the old Oxford
University Herald in which "Lector's " passage reads as follows :—
" If 'light and sweetness' be best, which, with the Transfiguration before us, shall we accept—Schopenhauer or Christ ? Some of us, I suppose, have been invited to subscribe and for the purpose of erecting a sculptured emblem for Arthur Schopenbauer. What shall it be ? Something to represent the so-called demoniacal element in nature; some image of the will, which only is immortal, imprisoned in the evitable circle of successive existences ; a marble presentment of a putrefying mule with the loathsome thing (the Necrophorus vespillo, or burying beetle) that burrows and fattens and breeds in it a chiselled symbol of a bankrupt present working in that agony for a bankrupt future ; and underneath on the plinth= Darkness and rottenness, a tribute from a select circle of English admirers, who have committed the absurd but unavoidable blunder of coming into existence in the worst of possible worlds,'"
You may think it worth while to repeat this extract, partly because it illustrates a curious possibility in criticism. In no less than five points " Lector's " memorria obviously superior to the contemporary report ; dzmonic is better than demoniacal, mould than mule, inevitable cycle than evitable circle, battens than fattens, and all possible than possible. Few people would believe a recollection twenty-nine years old to be more correct than a newspaper printed within a few days ; but in this case it is so. As to mould and mule, however, I should conjecture that both are wrong, and that "Lector " is nearer to the sound and the reporter nearer to the look of the right word. Dr. Alexander probably said " a putrefying mole " ; that animal is a favourite with the burying beetle.—I am, Sir, &o.
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