There is a peculiar propriety that I am sure was not lost on our Honorary Secretary in placing this meeting just at the close of the Twelfth Night season, with its longstanding linkages to thefest orfesta orfiesta orfite or (I am trying to be as ecumenical as possible here) feast of fools. In the early Church, it will be recalled, as also sometimes in the Guilds and Inns of Court, and in royal and noble households generally, it was customary to bring forward at this season some minor subdeacon, orjourneyman, or apprentice-barrister, or perhapsjust some lout from the scullery, and let him play for a night at being pope, king, lord, guildmaster, or, as we see in this instance, president; after which, like Bottom awaking from that famous dream which the eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, nor man's hand is able to taste, he was allowed to shrink back unobtrusively to the condition from which he had been raised. This practice, I am happy to report, still obtains in the Modern Humanities Research Association. After tonight, I am assured, I have no duties except to go away, stay out of the Honorary Secretary's hair for the next twelve months, and deliver to him at some point a copy of these remarks. And even these remarks, I have been assured, best serve their purpose if they manage to induce in as many of you as possible that restful state of semi-consciousness which medical authorities agree should always precede the more exacting exercises of eating and drinking that await us downstairs. A similar propriety, I like to think, will be detected in my decision to talk about Pope. For besides being the Twelfth Night season, with whose presentation of theworld-upside-down ironists and satirists have always had a natural affinity, this is also the opening of a new year. Nineteen eighty-four. The Orwellian Magnus Annus. Ushering in an Age not of Gold but Plutonium how appropiate the name is! Ushering in also a scheme of things in which Newspeak and Doublespeak chatter at us from every government telly, Big Brothers spring up like dragons' teeth, and, in the laboratories of Armageddon, fusion replaces fission as fast and here I borrow Swift's poignant terms for those dying of starvation in the Ireland of his day 'as fast as can be reasonably expected'. Starvation, it needs no emphasizing, brings a death that is lingering and painful, but it is less so by several quantum leaps than Hiroshima and Nagasaki suggest our own may be. But how, you will be asking, is Pope relevant to all this? He is relevant because, like certain other figures of his time, he saw clearly and communicated vividly what most of our leaders today seem incapable of understanding: that human achievement is fragile, the human hold on civilization precarious. One quick glance at the world around us as we sit here this evening should suffice to persuade even the most hardened optimist that the perception was sound: torture, starvation, mass murder,