Such is the task in which you may be called to share. When you have entered upon it and have learnt something of its trials and responsibilities, as well as of its joys and rewards, you will look back with gratitude to the training you received within the walls of this College. You will feel even more keenly than you do now how much you owe to the patient kindness and educational skill of your teachers and to the healthy stimulus of contact and competition with your class-fellows. Most heartily do I wish you success in your several careers. Following up the paths which have been opened for you here, may it be yours to enlarge still further the circle of light which science has gained, and to wrest from Nature new aids for the service of mankind. FOOTNOTE: [102] An address to the students of Mason University College, Birmingham, at the opening of the session, on Tuesday, 4th October, 1898. X The Roman Campagna[103] Among the capitals of Europe Rome has long had the unique distinction of standing in the midst of a wide solitude. Other cities in their outward growth have incorporated village after village and hamlet after hamlet. As their streets and squares merge insensibly into a succession of villas and gardens, cottages and hedgerows, followed by the farms and fields of the open country, so the noise and stir of causeway and pavement gradually give way to the quieter sounds of rural life. But with the Eternal City this normal arrangement does not hold good. For sixteen centuries she has kept herself within her ancient walls which still surround her with their picturesque continuity of rampart and tower. Inside these barriers we still encounter, by day and by night, the 'fumum et opes, strepitumque Romæ.' But outside the gates we find ourselves on a lonely prairie that sweeps in endless grassy, almost treeless, undulations up to the base of the, distant hills. The main roads, indeed, that radiate from the city, are bordered on either side, for the first mile or two, with a strip of suburban _osterie_, booths and shops, varied here and there, perhaps, by a villa and its grounds. But these fringes of habitation are too narrow and short, and cling too closely to their respective arteries of traffic, seriously to affect the solitariness which broods over the intervening landscape up to the very foot of the walls.