My coming to Cambridge has been an 1 experience. From whatever country one comes as a student one cannot 2 the influence of the Cambridge 3 ---and they go back so far! Here, perhaps, more than anywhere else, I have felt at one and the same time the past, the 4 and even the future. It’s easy to see in the old gray stone buildings how the past moulded the present and how the present is giving 5 to the future. So let me tell you a little of what this 6 town looks like and how it came to be here at all. The story of the University began, so far as I know, in 1209 when several hundred students and 7 arrived in the little town of Cambridge after having walked 60 miles from Oxford. Of course there were no colleges in those early days and student life was very 8 from what it is now. Students were of all 9 and came from anywhere and everywhere. They were 10 ; some even banded together to 11 the people of the countryside. Gradually the idea of the college 12 , and in 1284, Peterhouse, the 13 college in Cambridge, was 14 . Life in college was 15 ; students were forbidden to play games, to sing (except sacred music), to 16 or fish or even to dance. Books were very 17 and all the lessons were in the Latin language which students were 18 to speak even among themselves. In 1440 King Henry VI founded King’s College, and the other colleges 19 . Erasmus, the great Dutch scholar, was at one of these, Queens’ College, from 1511 to 1513, and though he wrote that the college beer was “ 20 and badly made”, he also mentioned a pleasant 21 that unfortunately seems to have 22 . “The English girls are extremely 23 ,” Erasmus said, “soft, pleasant, 24 , and charming. When you go anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive. They kiss you when you go away and again when you 25 .” Many other great men studied at Cambridge, among them Bacon, Milton, Cromwell, Newton, Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson.