After that, it would have been quite unthinkable to stop. The Delegates ceased all their querulous complaints about the cost—it would, after all, have been lèse-majesté in the extreme to indulge in pettifogging arguments over money with the Dictionary a now royally connected enterprise. Murray was suddenly given to dreamily predicting when all would be gathered in: `1908 at soonest. 1910 at latest.' The Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths—who would later give the celebratory dinner to mark the completion of the enterprise—contributed £5,000 in 1905 to help with the production of Volume VI, which held Bradley's edit of the letters L and M, and Craigie's of the letter N. The Goldsmiths' crest adorns an opening title page: `This Sixth Volume is a Memorial of the Munificence of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths who have generously Contributed Five Thousand Pounds towards its Production'—and Oxford expressed, in private, its profoundest thanks as well. 2
At the same time Murray also began to notice something else of a physical significance: for the first time since he had started work back in Mill Hill nearly twenty years before, the number of quotation slips that were waiting in the pigeon-holes to present themselves for selection and inclusion was diminishing. He reported to the Philological Society (which, though it had been sidelined as the principal producer of the Dictionary, was still sympathetically interested) on the change:
… when we reached the end of A and had emptied all the A pigeon-holes, & packed up all the A slips used and unused in strong boxes, the additions to the later material were so great that we had more slips in the Scriptorium than when we begun … the same thing happened at the end of B; and even at the end of C when one fifth of the material was used up, the what that remained occupied more space than the original whole. Now, however … it begins to be apparent that the material in the Scriptorium has undergone considerable diminution, and we shall now be able to use the vacant pigeon holes … for the materials for the letters after T which have hitherto … had to be stowed away in rather inaccessible positions.
Oxford, now fully aware that it was on the verge—still a very wide verge maybe, but a verge nonetheless—of creating a publishing epic, of making a national asset of truly historic proportions, decided to celebrate. They decided to do what Oxford was very good at: to give Murray and his now rather discreetly merry men a full-dress, all-stops-out, no-holds-barred formal dinner.
It was all the happy idea of the new Vice-Chancellor, John Magrath—a man who had first become interested in the Dictionary the year before, when during the row about the `Webster ratio' he had been impressed by Murray's staunch refusal to bow to Gell's insistence on trimming. He was described as being `picturesque', with a flowing beard and a kindly smile (and a fondness for swimming naked in that stretch of the River Cherwell known as Parson's Pleasure). He was also intellectually and socially a quite remarkable figure, having decided as an undergraduate to take degrees in classics and mathematics at the same time, 3 then to take holy orders and become an ordained deacon, to become President of the Union, and to row and swim for his college. He had a fellowship at—and in due course became Provost of—the Queen's College, and it was here that he decided to honour Murray. The dinner—where by tradition all are summoned by a scholar sounding a fanfare on an ancient silver trumpet—was a very grand affair indeed.
James Murray at first pooh-poohed the idea—three days' worth of carousing (for some guests planned to stay awhile) and letter-writing would take him away from work. Magrath pulled out all the stops to persuade him: `I trust that the gathering will give you an indication that more people sympathise with you in your self-denying labours than perhaps in moments of depression, disappointment or annoyance you have been fully able to realise.' It worked. The editor in time came around, and in the event, enjoyed himself hugely.
Everyone of note was there, dining by candlelight on what all remarked was a glorious late autumn evening. Massed along the immense tables that glittered and glistened with the finest china, crystal, and silver were Murray and Bradley and the newly appointed Charles Onions and William Craigie, all the more junior editors and sub-editors and assistants, as many of the immense Murray family as could attend, the entire colloquium of Delegates, an entire pie of new-suited printers under their eagle-eyed Controller, most of the elderly stalwarts of the Philological Society from London, correspondents from newspapers at the better end of Fleet Street, schoolmasters from Mill Hill, the newly ennobled (as Lord Aldenham) Henry Hucks Gibbs, and a small army of the volunteer readers too—Miss Brown of Further Barton was there, a Reverend Smith of Putney too. And though W. C. Minor was unavoidably detained, and Fitzedward Hall was understandably absent also, it was whispered that the Thompson sisters might have made it from Reigate to Oxford High Street, and some say they were spied getting rather mischievously tipsy on their small glasses of amontillado.
Once Her Majesty had been toasted and her Jubilee'd status remarked upon, and once the cigars had been lit, there were fully fourteen speeches—Frederick Furnivall, irrepressible and as flirtatious as ever, made the longest, slyly attacking the universities (Cambridge included) for being so slow in their admission of women. Sir William Markby, a Delegate, a former Calcutta judge, and a fanatical supporter of temperance, responding to the toast to the Clarendon Press, made a speech that must have caused Murray some wry amusement:
We have never hesitated in the performance of what we consider a great duty which we owe to the University and to the nation, and we have never felt any doubt as to the ultimate completion of the work under the able editorship of Dr. Murray and the co-operation of those associated with him in this great work.
If Murray saw some irony—or even some mealy-mouthedness on Markby's part—he sensibly held his tongue.
He was in any case to be doubly cheered by winning yet another award that night: in this case both he and Bradley were that night made honorary members of the Netherlands Society of Arts, Science, and Literature. This was merely the latest in an immense string of honours to be added to the catalogue that Murray was busily amassing—his name on the fascicles' title pages is underpinned by an ever-enlarging paragraph that lists his collection of distinctions. Already he possessed degrees from London and Edinburgh; in the years following he was to be given honorary doctorates by the Universities of Durham, Freiburg, Glasgow, Wales, the Cape of Good Hope, Dublin, and Cambridge; he was inducted into Academies in Vienna, Ghent, Prussia, Leyden, and Uppsala and was also made, to his particular pride, a Foreign Correspondent of the Académie FrancËaise. He was a member of the Edinburgh Royal Society and the American Academy of Arts, and was on the Council of the British Academy.
He was given a knighthood in 1908: when he received the letter from Herbert Asquith—`a slight and too long delayed recognition of a great work greatly conceived and greatly executed,' the Prime Minister wrote—he rather scoffed at the idea of calling himself Sir James, `as if I were a brewer or a local mayor'. He later said he would have preferred to have been granted the infinitely more exclusive token of state congratulation, the Order of Merit. But in the end he proved gracious: he dressed up in his court robes and fixed on his sword and his jewelled slippers with the great glee of the dandy, and went happily off to the Palace to collect his prize from the King.