Mallory, James Russel

ENCAENIA, MAY, 1968
JAMES RUSSEL MALLORY
to be Doctor of Laws

It is a touching Valedictory for me when I am vouchsafed two former pupils to present for honorary degrees.

Is it because or in spite of me that, having studied Rome and the Romans, you each branched out into Political Science, and each held those Chairs, yourself at McGill, and Morgan at Memorial? And that the latter became a Vice-President, and you a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada?

I make no claim for myself, but I believe of Latin that it schools a man's intellect and disciplines his prose. Certain it is that your book, Social Credit and the Federal Power in Canada, has won fame as a model of decisive thinking, and that its style, to quote one of many laudatory reviews, "abounds in striking phrases and cogent illustrations". Suffice it that I did you no apparent harm.

I remember your keen features and sharp wit as outstanding in a Sophomore class that had an intellectual bounce and vitality the like of which I never encountered before or since, a class that, in a compulsory subject, were avid for learning and, given a lead, could teach themselves.

But my most enduring recollection is of you in that now legendary Roman banquet, the high tide of that year, in which, wreathed and toga'd, you, the sharpest Roman of them all, joined in celebrating the bi-millenium of Horace, drank our mock Sabine, and sang -- with glorious disregard for sense or century -- Integer vitae along with Gaudeamus igitur and O how bella, my puella!

Your Maecenas salutes you, the novus homo who has joined the Optimates of his Rome and who, after leaving my sustaining hands, learned so soon to 'swim without cork'.

Ave, Jacobe, atque Vale.

From:
Cattley, Robert E.D. Honoris causa: the effervescences of a university orator. Fredericton: UNB Associated Alumnae, 1968.