Laudator Temporis Acti

Ronald Storrs (1881-1955), Orientations (London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1937), pp. 10-11:

For permanent inspiration in the great humanities there was none to compare with the Sixth Form Master, Thomas Ethelbert Page. As a housemaster, as a schoolmaster, he was compassed about by details and difficulties with which he should never have had to cope. He had none of the technique of coaching or of cramming, but those who sat under him, as I did for three years, had the opportunity of drinking in the quintessence of scholarship. If the object of classical study is to create, not mere grammatical, syntactical or textual erudition but the deepest and broadest education, a love of spiritual greatness increasing through life — Macaulay’s scholar reading Plato with his feet on the fender: T. E. Lawrence in the desert with his sole volume, Aristophanes — then it is a tragedy that T. E. Page, one of the few who could inspire as well as teach, was not in the prime of life appointed a University Professor of Latin or of Greek or the Master of some great college. But it is a tragedy of which no sixth-form Charterhouse boy can complain, and for which some of us must always feel and express, though we never can repay, an infinite debt of gratitude.

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