With Thackeray we are hard on the heels of our own age. The modern period of Trinity’s history begins with the mastership of William Whewell, whose name is inseparable from his college. The twenty-five years of his mastership, from 1841 to 1866, form a very distinguished epoch. As scholar, organiser, and benefactor to the foundation, he was pre-eminent. The famous epigram which said of him that “Science was his forte and omniscience his foible” was in the main true, but he carried to everything he attempted an immense interest and a sound judgment. His statue very worthily completes the group in the antechapel. It was erected during the mastership of his successor, William Hepworth Thompson (* Herkomer) the Platonist, famous for his erudition and his _bons mots_. Before his elevation to the mastership, Dr Thompson had been Regius Professor of Greek. The men of his generation who belonged to the Society were men of the highest eminence; the best known are, perhaps, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (* Richmond, Dickinson), the commentator on St Paul’s Epistles and Bishop of Durham; James Clerk Maxwell,* Professor of Experimental Physics in the University; the late Arthur Cayley (* Dickinson), the greatest mathematician whom Trinity boasts since the days of Newton; and the Public Orator, W. G. Clark (bust by Woolner), Thompson’s life-long friend. When Thompson died in 1886, he was succeeded by the present master, Dr Butler, who had been Head Master of Harrow and Dean of Gloucester. Beneath these rulers, and with the highest prestige in the world as her tradition, Trinity fully justifies her distinction as a royal foundation and a nursing-mother of sound and religious learning. To select from the present society is invidious; but the names of Professor Henry Sidgwick, Professor Michael Foster (* Herkomer), Dr Henry Jackson (* Furse), and Professor Jebb, are of European repute, to say nothing of the present vice-master, Mr Aldis Wright, editor of Shakspeare, and Mr John Willis Clark, the present Registrary, whose investigations in Cambridge history and antiquities are well known everywhere. In the Church one may point to the theologian Dr Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to Dr Farrar, Dean of Canterbury, and to the late Charles Alan Smythies, Bishop of Zanzibar; among politicians, to Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald Balfour, and Sir William Harcourt; while of doctors, lawyers and men of letters the crowd cannot be numbered. XVII EMMANUEL COLLEGE