Anniversary Dinner 1964

Abstract

I am deeply sensible, Mr President, of the honour which you have done me, the merest and sheerest outsider in any scientific circles, in your command to me to propose tonight the toast of the Royal Society. I suppose year by year on the occasion of your Anniversary Dinner you have quoted to you that Monarch (I stumble over adjectives) your Founder, I suspect your self-styled Founder, the granter at any rate of your Charter; and I suspect that year by year you have quoted to you the almost incredibly offensive words of one of his subjects. It is a fairly offensive operation to write an epitaph on your sovereign anyway, but to write an epitaph on your sovereign before your sovereign is dead seems to me to be almost grotesquely discreditable, and when John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote as follows—and I quote the version which the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has sanctified at any rate to me—“Here lies a great and mighty King whose promise none relies on; he never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one.”