Opowieści starego antykwariusza by M.R. James

Here then surely is a man altogether at peace with himself and the world, living a calm and orderly life, working steadily and hard, enjoying his leisure. He did not marry but he had many friends and when he returned to Eton as Provost, with relief, he delighted in the post, was happy and comfortable with staff and boys, down to the smallest and youngest, to whom he was often found chatting happily at the edge of the playing fields on pleasant afternoons.

He travelled extensively in Europe, generally by bicycle, and reckoned to have visited all but two of the cathedrals of France. He was a naturally brilliant linguist and even taught himself Danish and Swedish in order to read writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and the Sagas in the originals. He had a passionate interest in the Apocrypha and his translation of the Apocryphal New Testament is still a standard work. His enthusiasm for everything he did carried him on.

He was a bibliographer, palaeographer and antiquarian, and catalogued every medieval manuscript in the Cambridge colleges, a massive work of patience and dedication. He had studied classics at Cambridge, became assistant in classical archaeology at the Fitzwilliam Museum and later, as a Fellow, then Dean, of King’s, lectured in divinity. Montague Rhodes James is now best remembered for his two collections of Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, which were - or so he would have had everyone believe - mere light-hearted attempts to entertain friends at Christmas, first at King’s College, where he was Dean and then Provost, and later at Eton, where he was also Provost.īut James, although somewhat unhappily in charge of King’s, was one of the best Provosts Eton ever had and he was also a scholar of distinction, packing more solid achievement into his lifetime than most men who did not have any sort of administrative work to occupy them. I feel sure he looks like that in Paradise. If you could have seen him afterwards you would have rejoiced, every line gone and looking like a young man again and a most beautiful profile … and strangely enough … a great likeness to my mother appeared. The radiogram proved such a pleasure to him and I can see him now after dinner … listening so intently, with his pipe in his mouth and matches strewn around. During the tedious weeks of illness a group of Monty’s closest friends had made him the present of ‘a radio- gramophone of the latest type’ and he had taken to it immediately. We can be reasonably confident in claiming that after reading about his last weeks, during which he was ill, tired, weak and bored but probably not in pain, and even more on learning what his sister Grace said of his final days.

James died at peace with himself and the world.

Opowieści starego antykwariusza by M.R. James