I had known and loved him for more than half a century, and when I saw the news in _The Times_ of the following morning my thoughts went back to the last occasion when we met at a rather remarkable gathering of old Balliol contemporaries which had taken place annually during all that period, nothing but the sternest necessity keeping any of us away. We had dined together once every year since 1867, generally on the second day of the University cricket match, and we met for the last time under the presidency of Sir Horatio Shephard, long a distinguished Indian Judge, on July 6, 1914. Although there was a full attendance, two or three had dropped out of our ranks since the last meeting, when twenty-three out of a possible twenty-four had been present, but gaps were to be expected when the youngest of the gathering, myself, was on the verge of seventy, and I voiced a pretty general feeling when I proposed that after our next dinner (actually the 46th) we should wind up voluntarily, finishing in 1915 with a special Jubilee Festival. My resolution was carried unanimously, but, alas for the vanity of human wishes! in one short month Armageddon was upon us, and in 1915, when the day came round for the University match and our dinner, the rival blues, both sides one khaki-clad phalanx, were fighting side by side ‘somewhere in France’ or on the shrapnel-swept heights of Gallipoli; and we ourselves, with sons and grandsons at the front, had no heart for festivities. Our ‘Balliol dinner’ was fated to die a natural death, but it should not be allowed to come to an end ‘without the meed of a melodious tear.’ I typed a copy of the book in which all our meetings are recorded in the hands of the successive presidents, from the first dinner, under the presidency of Archer Clive, in 1867, at the Castle Hotel, Richmond, with all the names of those attending, excuses for absence, and comments upon the quality of the menu, the wine, and the waiting. We were forty-three in all from first to last, and the bright promise of that generation of Balliol undergraduates had in many cases ripened into fulfilment. Among politicians we numbered the Marquis of Lansdowne, the Earls of Morley and Jersey, Matt Ridley, afterwards the first Lord Ridley, and Sir William Anson, even more distinguished as an embodiment of the spirit of Oxford, Warden of All Souls, Vice-Chancellor, and historian of the Constitution, than as a member of Parliament, Privy Councillor, and Minister of Education. We had altogether three Heads of Colleges, Anson, our dear Master of Balliol, and Wright Henderson, Warden of Wadham; Wood was Head Master of Harrow, while Raper and Papillon held their place high among choicest representatives of Oxford scholarship. John Julius Hannah, Dean of Chichester, Canon Argles, and a round dozen of beloved Rectors and Vicars, doing excellent and unostentatious work in various country parishes, represented the Church. Then we had the head officials