Our next candidate, COLIN PETER SMYTHE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and distinguished as an editor and publisher, is an Englishman and a graduate of this College who has devoted himself with great energy and success to the ever wider dissemination of Anglo-Irish literature. More than thirty years ago he established a publishing company, Colin Smythe Ltd., that has produced a great deal of significant work in this genre, and he has taken particular care to ensure that the life and writings of Lady Gregory remain in the public eye. As the general editor of the Coole edition of the works of that illustrious woman, he is the author of much illustrative material throughout the volumes of the publication. If you propose to visit Coole Park, where ‘books were nearest to her mind and trees to her heart’*, his Guide, now in its third edition, should certainly be in your hand. He has also devoted scholarly attention to all the major figures who formed part of the Irish literary revival....

His edition of the collected works of AE is in progress, and he has contributed significantly to the interpretation of the plays of W. B. Yeats. His expertise in this field of learning has led to Visiting Professorships at the University of Ulster and at the Universidada Moderna in Lisbon, In 1983 he was selected to open the Yeats Summer School in Sligo. You see before you one who from his deep and simultaneous involvement in publishing and in literary research has become a bookman extraordinary. He has also put before the public an occasional slim volume of his poems, including a notable in memoriam tribute to a great Dane that loved to lie near the fire, and was buried in the garden ‘wrapped in favourite blankets’. We salute a scholar from England who studied as an undergraduate within these walls and has always shown a strong attachment to this College and this country. He is on many counts worthy to receive his University's highest honours, and I ask you to show your good opinion of him by a rich and varied burst of applause.

*Sean O'Casey