VIII - DR. CAIUS: AN APPRECIATION

Summary

Our University and our various colleges have a long and noble list of benefactors to record. In not a few of these cases, if we enquire into the facts of their personal history, or read between the lines of the ancient deeds in our Treasury, we shall find that the wreck of an earthly life, or the utter disappointment of all family hopes, had something to do with the gifts. Our founders are not always, nor perhaps in the majority of cases, to be found amongst those whom the world commonly reckons as the prosperous and the happy.

But, amongst all our many benefactors, I doubt if, in some respects, a more tragic figure can be found than that of John Cains. Picture him, in middle life, about the time when he was contemplating the refounding of this college. He was already, by his industry and economy, in possession of an ample fortune, and might, like so many others in Elizabethan days—for instance, like his medical contemporaries, Wendy and Butts—have made it his ambition to “establish a family” in the country. That aim he entirely set aside. Or, he might have devoted his fortune to founding a new and important college. This he might easily have done, and have left poor Gonville Hall to linger on in obscurity and decay. He preferred to sink such personal ambition, and just to add his name to the ancient and restored college.