True, all the ingredients that created a Charles P. Robshaw would be there: the dependability and industriousness inherited from his Yorkshire father, and the soaring wit, poetry, and sparkling imagination inherited from his celtic mother.
Yes, the ingredients would be there, but there would be no way to duplicate the recipe, for the world that created my father has long since vanished, and we now live in a fast, impatient, and electronic age.
Today I mourn the passing not only of my father, but the passing of a slower, more civilized generation. His death, to me, is also the end of an era: an era capable of producing a brilliant, scholarly, kind, patient, and totally spactacular human being.