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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    Nor do we find entire consolation in the conspicuous figure of Samuel Clarke, acknowledged to be the first metaphysician in England before he was thirty years of age. Neither in his own age, nor in ours, does he commend himself convincingly as a champion of the faith, and ex- positor of sacred mysteries. One could wish for his fame that he had been faithful to his first love, mathematics, or that in the profession of the law, he had given us possibly another Lord High Chancellor, and in any case a worthy rival of Murray and Yorke®. But in spite of a chequered and stormy career at College, perhaps exaggerated by tradition, and his own tendency to be a boaster of idleness, —in spite of his too celebrated indulgence in strong adjectives and participles. Lord Chancellor Thurlow looms out so large upon the canvas of his century’s history, and played a part so conspicuous on that stage where Pitt and Fox, Burke and Sheridan were protagonists, that our College is proud to have numbered him among her sons. It was not in tangible achievement, for legal authorities refer to no memorable judgments, and political history denies any statesmanlike performance, but in the quality of will and strength, in that attribute which made his contemporary Samuel Johnson the centre and oracle of a group where far greater talents were to be found— it was thus that Thurlow made his reputation, and (with- out a Boswell) handed it down to posterity. Who does not remember the passage in Lord Campbell’s Life, where the caustic biographer, brimful here as ever with the scandalous chronicle and gossip of his subject, yet rises ® Clarke signalised himself, while yet an undergraduate, by translating into Latin Rohault’s Physics, which became a University text-book. His fame is shown by the reference to him in the “Ode on a Distant View” already referred to above: “ In morals as in arts supreme, “ Clarke, thy seraphic soul I hail; “ Let bigots mark its placid stream, “Unmoved by passion’s wayward gale;” etc.
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