George F. Hoar: “You may well be amused to think how many political reputations have risen and set during your long and sunny reign.”

We are here in the sweet silence of a summer morning, eighteen hundred years after such a scene, and able mentally to catch some glimpse of it; some echo of the storm that has left behind it so ineffaceable a mark.

To go fully into the role of the number three in British traditions would require a profound study; but it may be useful briefly to note its influence on the Bardic poetry-- the Triads, where the subjects are all grouped in threes.

The language Statius uses is more simple than mine; but this is substantially the picture he gives: and I know of nothing that so impresses on the imagination the thunder of the power of the Roman Empire as this creation in the wilderness…

And the Greeks, in turn, owed their astronomy to the Egyptians, with whom the year was reckoned as of three hundred and sixty days; and this three hundred and sixty-day year gives us the clue to the forty-day period for holding the Forest…