Long Presidential tenure can go to the head, and sitting on this Chair your President has sometimes wondered how he may appear to Fellows and guests. The extreme images are Laurence Olivier as Richard III, writhing malevolently and misshapenly on his throne, and Reynolds's ‘Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse’, shown at the Royal Academy in 1784 and now in Dulwich College Art Gallery, in which the actress has adopted an imposing, even monumental, Michelangelesque pose, which she claimed to have invented. But I am fairly certain that these theatric tableaux are not true to life, and that the reality is closer to the somewhat tentative, inconsequential and ephemeral image of Lord Leicester, later Lord Townshend, who served as President for twenty-seven years, two centuries ago, long before a normal seven-year limit was introduced in 1876, to be replaced by the present five-year limit in 1906, as shown in the caricature which the Society purchased last year. At least your President is spared the humiliation of wearing the cocked hat, which threatens to drown Lord Leicester.