His body was removed the same evening to St. Faith's Chapel, in Westminster Abbey. Here on the following Thursday morning, February 11, at 9 A.M., the funeral service was said. The chapel { 35} was filled with his friends, who had come from Cambridge and elsewhere. His body was buried the same afternoon at Eastbourne in the same grave with that of his sister, the Deaconess Cecilia, who had passed away five months before.
The inscription on the memorial card issued to his friends was:
CUM CHRISTO VICTURUS DE MORTE AD VITAM MIGRAVIT DOMINICA IN SEXAGESIMA ANNO SALUTIS MCMIV AETATIS SUAE XXXVII.
And, doubtless, unto thee is given A life that bears immortal fruit In those great offices that suit The full-grown energies of heaven.
The two following sketches of Forbes Robinson's life at Cambridge have been contributed, the first by the Rev. T. C. Fitzpatrick, Fellow and Dean of Christ's College, and the second by the Rev. Digby B. Kittermaster, of Clare College, now Head of the Shrewsbury School Mission in Liverpool.
'College life has changed a good deal since the days when a young graduate, on his election to a fellowship, was advised not to see too much of the undergraduate members of the College, that the division between the senior and junior members of the College might be preserved. A custom of that kind, once established, is not easy to break, for traditions of all sorts, good and bad, live long in College.
'Fortunately, the relations between the undergraduates and the fellows of the College are gradually becoming more natural, to the benefit of the whole body. Forbes Robinson will be long remembered for the influence that he exerted in this { 37} direction, and what he has effected it will be comparatively easy for others to carry on.
'It is my desire to give some slight impression of his life in College, and I do not wish to say much about his teaching work. I must mention, however, what frequently struck me, the great joy he had in teaching; his success was not surprising. When he found (in January last) that he could not take up all his lecture work he would not allow another to give in his place the course of lectures on Church History. "I want," he said to me, "to give them myself in my own way," and he hoped to have given them this Easter term. I was not surprised to hear from a pupil of the interest that he and others found in a similar course of lectures which he had given the previous year. "He put things so," the pupil told me, "that you could not forget what he had said."