Many men are counting their balances by millions.  Money was never so abundant, and nothing that is good to be done with it. ("Hear, hear,” and a laugh.) No man knows—­or very few men know—­what benefit to get out of his money.  In fact, it too often is secretly a curse to him.  Much better for him never to have had any.  But I do not expect that generally to be believed. (Laughter.) Nevertheless, I should think it a beautiful relief to any man that has an honest purpose struggling in him to bequeath a handsome house of refuge, so to speak, for some meritorious man who may hereafter be born into the world, to enable him a little to get on his way.  To do, in fact, as those old Norman kings whom I have described to you—­to raise a man out of the dirt and mud where he is getting trampled, unworthily on his part, into some kind of position where he may acquire the power to do some good in his generation.  I hope that as much as possible will be done in that way; that efforts will not be relaxed till the thing is in a satisfactory state.  At the same time, in regard to the classical department of things, it is to be desired that it were properly supported—­that we could allow people to go and devote more leisure possibly to the cultivation of particular departments.

We might have more of this from Scotch Universities than we have.  I am bound, however, to say that it does not appear as if of late times endowment was the real soul of the matter.  The English, for example, are the richest people for endowments on the face of the earth in their Universities; and it is a remarkable fact that since the time of Bentley you cannot name anybody that has gained a great name in scholarship among them, or constituted a point of revolution in the pursuits of men in that way.  The man that did that is a man worthy of being remembered among men, although he may be a poor man, and not endowed with worldly wealth.  One man that actually did constitute a revolution was the son of a poor weaver in Saxony, who edited his “Tibullus” in Dresden in the room of a poor comrade, and who, while he was editing his “Tibullus,” had to gather his pease-cod shells on the streets and boil them for his dinner.  That was his endowment.  But he was recognised soon to have done a great thing.  His name was Heyne.

I can remember it was quite a revolution in my mind when I got hold of that man’s book on Virgil.  I found that for the first time I had understood him—­that he had introduced me for the first time into an insight of Roman life, and pointed out the circumstances in which these were written, and here was interpretation; and it has gone on in all manner of development, and has spread out into other countries.