Lambkin's Remains

It is without a trace of compunction or regret that I prepare to edit the few unpublished essays, sermons and speeches of my late dear friend, Mr. Lambkin. On the contrary, I am filled with a sense that my labour is one to which the clearest interests of the whole English people call me, and I have found myself, as the work grew under my hands, fulfilling, if I may say so with due modesty, a high and noble duty. I remember Lambkin himself, in one of the last conversations I had with him, saying with the acuteness that characterised him, “The world knows nothing of its greatest men.” This pregnant commentary upon human affairs was, I admit, produced by an accident in the Oxford Herald which concerned myself. In a description of a Public Function my name had been mis-spelt, and though I was deeply wounded and offended, I was careful (from a feeling which I hope is common to all of us) to make no more than the slightest reference to this insult.

The acute eye of friendship and sympathy, coupled with the instincts of a scholar and a gentleman, perceived my irritation, and in the evening Lambkin uttered the memorable words that I have quoted. I thanked him warmly, but, if long acquaintance had taught him my character, so had it taught me his. I knew the reticence and modesty of my colleague, the almost morbid fear that vanity (a vice which he detested) might be imputed to him on account of the exceptional gifts which he could not entirely ignore or hide; and I was certain that the phrase which he constructed to heal my wound was not without some reference to his own unmerited obscurity.

The world knows nothing of its greatest men! Josiah Lambkin! from whatever Cypress groves of the underworld which environs us when on dark winter evenings in the silence of our own souls which nothing can dissolve though all attunes to that which nature herself perpetually calls us, always, if we choose but to remember, your name shall be known wherever the English language and its various dialects are spoken. The great All-mother has made me the humble instrument, and I shall perform my task as you would have desired it in a style which loses half its evil by losing all its rhetoric; I shall pursue my way and turn neither to the right nor to the left, but go straight on in the fearless old English fashion till it is completed.