An account of the proceedings at the celebration of the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the College, June 22, 1898.

  • Gonville and Caius College
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An account of the proceedings at the celebration of the five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the College, June 22, 1898. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    But, best of all, those younger men will have learnt the lesson which is impressed more profoundly upon age than upon youth, and which I venture to say has a stronger fascination for Canon Beechey, our oldest graduate present, than for any one of us less venerable: they will have learnt this invaluable lesson that, great as may be the love of college in the heart of the newest freshman, that love burns more fiercely still in the hearts of that vaster assembly which we may fittingly call Greater Caius,—Caius beyond the walls—a kind of greater self, of whose good opinion we here, the lesser self, are jealously sensitive, whose allegiance we value as beyond price, whose faith in the unimpaired vitality of this, their sometime undergraduate home, is, we would fain hope, unbounded. I give you the health and wealth of the Bachelors and Undergraduates as represented by Mr Punnett, Shuttleworth Scholar, and president of the Bachelors’ Combination Room. Mr Punnett replied : He paid a graceful tribute to the Fellows and Tutors of the College, unapproachable as they might seem to the Freshman on first acquaint- ance, and recognised in them as he grew older in Academic life not so much the irresistible machinery which draws the hapless under- graduates into triposes and other examinations, as rather the true friend of the younger members, whom the Tutor might be supposed to address in Kingsley’s words, “ Be good, sweet [child], and let who may be clever.” Pointing out that the authorities of the College supported with sympathetic interest the athletic as well as the intellectual successes of the Undergraduate members, he declared himself confident that the Undergraduates of 1948, as readily as those whom he represented in 1898, would come forward to maintain the reputation of the College at any crisis of its career. So ended for many a red-letter day in the annals of the College. Others proceeded to prolong it into a red-letter night and to watch the dying out of the illuminations in the Gonville Court. But nearly all appeared fresh and gay in the morning at the various relays of breakfast in the Combination Room. By midday the Long Vacation had begun.