Here, then, is young Lambkin, in his nineteenth year, richly but
soberly dressed, and eager for the new life that opens before him. He
was entered at Burford College on October the 15th, 1861; a date which
is, by a curious coincidence, exactly thirty-six years, four months,
and two days from the time in which I pen these lines.
Of his undergraduate career there is little to be told. Called by his
enemies “The Burford Bounder,” or “dirty Lambkin,” he yet acquired the
respect of a small but choice circle who called him by his own name. He
was third _proxime accessit_ for the Johnson prize in Biblical studies,
and would undoubtedly have obtained (or been mentioned for) the
Newdigate, had he not been pitted against two men of quite exceptional
poetic gifts--the present editor of “The Investor’s Sure Prophet,” and
Mr. Hound, the well-known writer on “Food Statistics.”
He took a good Second-class in Greats in the summer of 1864, and was
immediately elected to a fellowship at Burford. It was not known at the
time that his father had become a bankrupt through lending large sums
at a high rate of interest to a young heir without security, trusting
to the necessity under which his name and honour would put him to pay.
In the shipwreck of the family fortunes, the small endowment was a
veritable godsend to Josiah, who but for this recognition of his merits
would have been compelled to work for his living.
As it was, his peculiar powers were set free to plan his great
monograph on “Being,” a work which, to the day of his death, he
designed not only to write but to publish.
There was not, of course, any incident of note in the thirty years
during which he held his fellowship. He did his duty plainly as it lay
before him, occasionally taking pupils, and after the Royal Commission,
even giving lectures in the College hall. He was made Junior Dean in
October, 1872, Junior Bursar in 1876, and Bursar in 1880, an office
which he held during the rest of his life.
In this capacity no breath of calumny ever touched him. His character
was spotless. He never offered or took compensations of any kind, and
no one has hinted that his accounts were not accurately and strictly
kept.
He never allowed himself to be openly a candidate for the Wardenship of
the College, but it is remarkable that he received one vote at each of
the three elections held in the twenty years of his residence.
He passed peacefully away just after Hall on the Gaudy Night of last
year. When his death was reported, an old scout, ninety-two years of
age, who had grown deaf in the service of the College, burst into tears
and begged that the name might be more clearly repeated to him, as he
had failed to catch it. On hearing it he dried his eyes, and said he
had never known a better master.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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