A toast to Roger Scruton

In clubs and other admirable locations throughout the civilised world, glasses have been raised and toasts proposed. But this was not a prelude to drinking-song conviviality. Voices were sombre, eyes misty. Thousands of friends were in stricken mourning, lamenting the passing of a great man: a friend to many, a prophet to many more.

Roger Scruton had seemed to be a young 75-year-old, with a zest for life expressed in such profusion, from the rigours of intellectual mountaineering to the joys of domesticity, to the glories of art and music, to the pleasures of the hunting field.

His death, ridiculously premature — what do you mean going off duty so early, old friend, when the world has need of you more than ever? — has evoked an anguished sense of loss. Because no one thought of him as obituary material and everyone assumed that we could count on him to fight in the front line against the Gramscian long march through the institutions, he was not properly evaluated.