Whether schoolboys of today are still brought up as I
was (for my great good) on Page's Horace I am not very certain. Whether, if they are, they will have noted and approved the distinction conferred on Dr. T. E. Page in being added to the commendably select fellowship of Companions of Honour, I am less certain still. To the world at large Dr. Page is known by his housemastership at Charterhouse and his editorship first of Horace, and then of the Loeb Classical Library. To a narrower circle there is something even more distinctive about him—his trousers. Ever since his Cambridge days (he went up to St. John's in 1869) he has had these garments constructed of a strange thick grey material never probably seen enveloping any other human frame. It comes, or came, from St. Kilda, and the real tragedy attached to the evacuation of that island a year or so ago was not the severance of the islanders from their household gods, but the dilemma in which an eminent scholar was likely to be placed when friction wrought its inevitable effect on his existing wardrobe. But to the profound relief of all his friends a substantial bale of the cloth in question was discovered somewhere in northern Scotland, and the situation was saved.
Previous page
