Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/253

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keep his hands free for science and for clinical instruction.

The highest praise that he could find for one of his masters at McGill was to say that he resembled Thomas Arnold, of Rugby. The molding of the Arnoldian tradition is plainly visible in Osler. It is easy, furthermore, to trace in his writing the influence of Matthew Arnold as a powerful formative influence. Under a photograph of himself with his little son on his back he has written jocosely: "And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid"—which is the last line of Arnold's sonnet "The Good Shepherd with the Kid." He praises Locke for the "sweet reasonableness," which is Arnold's phrase for the master quality of Jesus. When he leaves the United States he applies to himself the lines of Arnold's Empedocles:

I have loved no darkness,
Sophisticated no truth,
Nursed no delusion,
Allowed no fear.

He is like Arnold in his love for the Bible and for the classical moralists, and like him in this: Externally gay, affable, full of quips and drolleries, eminently companionable as he was, one recognizes that the groundwork of his character was stoical. Self-mastery, the performance of duty, unmurmuring acceptance of destiny were lessons that he learned early and never forgot.

Shortly before he left this country—to return only for "week-ends," as his friends put it—he made what the newspaper men distorted into his most notorious public utterance: his remarks on the uselessness of men over forty, whence the verb "to Oslerize." As a matter