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Vale: Preofessor Merlin Peiris, A Classicist Par Excellence – By Michael Roberts Source : thuppahis Punsara Amarasinghe, in The Guardian, 18 December 2022, where the ttile runs thus: “Prof. Merlin Peiris: The last of the Mohicans leaves the stage” The greatest quality that would aggrandize Merlin’s name above the current mediocre scholars in Sri Lanka is his intellectual tolerance towards dissent. The demise of Prof Merlin Peiris embodies the end of an epoch representing the humanities academia in Sri Lanka as he was obviously the last of those great doyens who lived when the country’s humanities education was prospering in those halcyon days at the edge of the British rule. Prof. Merlin was one of the first students of the maiden batch of Peradeniya University when it was shifted from Colombo in 1950 and began his flair for classics even before he entered the university under the wings of Noel Phoebus at St. Peter’s ...