"'T Is Sixty Years Since" at Harvard

IT is three years since I promised The Atlantic Monthly that, by way of closing a series of reminiscences, I would attempt a comparison of Harvard College sixty years ago with the college of to-day.

The subject is an interesting one, and is very apt to come up at class dinners, as old gentlemen, in a figure, pick over their walnuts. If Mr. Hill will pardon a parenthesis, let me say that a hundred years ago and more George Washington would frequently “ sit over his walnuts ” two hours, really picking out the meats and nibbling at them, with the accompaniment of one only glass of Madeira. The subject is an interesting one, but it has proved so interesting that I have never put pen to paper until now. For le mieux est l’ ennemi du bon, alas, and one does not very willingly handle a theme which so many other men can work out much better than he.

I am set on it, at last, by the accident that I have been reading this week Mark Pattison’s extraordinary and therefore amusing memorials of his own life in Oxford, to which place he went four years before I went to our Cambridge. The book, quite worthless in itself, is amusing, and indeed edifying, when matched in with Stanley’s, Ward’s, Newman’s, and a dozen other memorials of Oxford life at the same time. To an American graduate it is simply amazing as well as amusing, because it exhibits a habit of life — one hardly says of thought — among undergraduates as different from our undergraduate life as the life of Mr. Kipling’s four-footed friends is different from the life of Thyrsis and Amyntas in Arcadia. Let me try my hand and memory in giving to the undergraduate of to - day some notion of what undergraduates at out Cambridge did, and what they thought about, fifty or sixty years ago. Possibly this may show how it happened that a few of them turned out to be of some use in the world.

As matter of familiar speech or language, let me begin with saying that, in the thirties, it was not the habit of Harvard College men or boys to say that they were of Harvard or from Harvard. We knew what such words meant, and Amherst or Williams men used them to us, not we to them. We spoke of ourselves as Cambridge men, — as a Balliol man now might say he was from Oxford. This means, I think, that we all wanted to hold to the phrase in the Constitution of Massachusetts which speaks of the “ University at Cambridge.” Mr. Everett afterward introduced this on the college programmes and catalogues. It showed that a man was somewhat fresh if he said he was from Harvard. The present fashion came in a little after.

Professor Beers has just now written a pleasant book which he calls Initial Studies in American Letters. He says good-naturedly that “ the professors of literature in our colleges are usually persons who have made no additions to literature ; and the professors of rhetoric seem ordinarily to have been selected to teach students how to write, for the reason that they themselves have never written anything that any one has read.” And after this friendly joke on his own craft, he adds that “ the Harvard College of some fifty years ago offers some striking exceptions to these remarks.” I will own that, as a Cambridge man, I read with some pride and much pleasure his list of the seventeen years after 1821, in which there graduated Emerson, Holmes, Sumner, Phillips, Motley, Thoreau, and Lowell. He had only to go a little farther to have added Higginson and Parkman. Let me say, in passing, that the inaugural address delivered by Edward Channing in 1819, when he assumed the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric at Cambridge, is still worth reading; and let me also say that we Cambridge men are a little surprised that in Dr. Beers’s list we do not find the name of Frederic Henry Hedge. The years of which I am now to speak, of my own undergraduate life, are years included in the period of which Dr. Beers speaks with such approval.

The Oxford of Stanley, Ward, and Pattison, and the Harvard of the same time, touch at only one point. In each, the freshman, on entering, if he thought at all, was amazed at the indifference with which some of his teachers handled the business of education. Here was poor Pattison, an unlicked cub from Yorkshire, who when he was eighteen years old turned up at Oxford. Poor boy, he says he went there with an idea that Oxford was a place for teaching and learning. He went to his first lecture, what we should call his first recitation, without any of the niceties of scholarship, not well grounded in the Greek grammar, and he had not been shown how to read Greek. To his amazement, he found that Dennison, his teacher, did not, in the whole course, make a single remark on Alkestis or Hippolytus which did not come from the notes at the foot of the page. “ In less than a week,” he says, “ I was entirely disillusionized as to what I was to learn in an Oxford lecture-room.”

Stanley, four years after, made just the same remark. Stanley had been well trained at Rugby. He went up to Oxford supposing that he was to be taught something. Here is his account, written after a month at Balliol: “ Alas, most truly was it said that the last year at school surpassed a hundredfold the first year of college. ... We construed in the old way, word for word in turn, with one or two unimportant remarks from the tutor.” Two out of three classical lectures he finds absolutely useless.

I copy these words from the Oxford men of that time, because such was exactly our experience in the classics at Cambridge. Our two tutors who had charge of Greek and Latin were young men who had graduated within two years, and, I suppose, wanted to earn their living while they were preparing for professions. We measured them in our first fortnight, and formed the opinion, which I have never changed since, that they knew little more of Latin and Greek than we knew ourselves. I am quite clear that Washburn, our head scholar at the Boston Latin School, could have given either of them points on the Latin and Greek languages. Those of us who had had the advantage of being decently fitted for college went in to the recitations of that freshman year, not with defiance, but with indifference. If we had read the text through before we went in, we knew perfectly well that we should be taught nothing in the hour in which we sat there. I ought not to say this without adding that when, a year after, Jones Very was made tutor in Greek, all this was changed. His boys are grateful to him, not simply, as I am, because he is one of the prophets of our time, but because he compelled them to appreciate Thucydides and Herodotus.

The experience of the afternoon with Benjamin Peirce was that of real education. He was still young, — only twenty-eight years old. If we wanted to have anything explained to us, we might go to his table and sit down with him and have a perfectly friendly talk ; of which the consequence was that we learned something from a teacher. In the course of my life I have not had more than five such experiences with persons who took the name of teacher. Mr. Edward Everett’s epigram is perfectly true, that in general a person who is called a teacher is a person who hears you recite a lesson which somebody else has taught you.

I think this detail worth repeating, because it shows the difference between the mere perfunctory foolery of a tutor, who is in his place for a year or two, and the work of a professor, who has the honor of the college at stake, and who, if you please, has his own reputation before him and behind him. As things must go in the world, a boy is apt to leave a first - class preparatory school, probably under the charge of a leader in education, to enter college. He enters college, and he finds that the leaders of the college are engaged with seniors and juniors, and the freshmen are turned into the hands of boys who graduated perhaps only three months before, who have had no experience in teaching, and who are just trying to find out whether they have any gifts in that line. The boy is a fool if he does not feel such a contrast. I owe this remark to Dr. James Walker, so many years president of the college.

There were not then twenty instructors, tutors, and professors in what President Quincy used to call the “ academy,” the college proper. Of the professors among these, the names of John W. Webster, Henry Ware, Jared Sparks, Henry Longfellow, Cornelius Felton, Benjamin Peirce, and Joseph Lovering are remembered. Several of these men, certainly Longfellow, Lovering, Peirce, Felton, and Sparks, were men of genius, who interested the pupils even if they did not teach them. Emerson’s rule applied : “ It is of no great consequence what you study ; the question is, with whom you study.” And yet Felton, who knew Greek, as we all realized, who was an enthusiast about Greek literature, and in private life would fire one with his enthusiasm, never in the recitation-room went a hair’s breadth beyond the work of the most humble construer. The upshot of the whole classical training of the college, as far as I was concerned, was that at the end of the junior year I detested the whole business. We were permitted then to elect some of our studies for the senior year, and I gave up Latin and Greek gladly. As I am very fond of language, and as accident afterwards brought me back into the enjoyment of the classics, my experience has a certain interest. It shows the power of four or five men to blunt a natural appetite by sheer negligence. I am not aware that at the university I received from the appointed teachers the slightest assistance in Greek or Latin, or that any enthusiasm for classical literature came to me from any of them.

But, as I have implied, with mathematics all this was different. Here was Peirce, a leader of leaders, perfectly willing to take by the hand the most ignorant freshman. You felt confidence in him from the beginning, and knew he was your friend.

The common thing to say about Peirce was that the steps of his ladder were so far apart that, though he ascended it easily, other people fell through. Very likely this was true, but he kindled you with the enthusiasm which you needed. I have never forgotten the awful rebuke he gave to the class one day, when some fellow had undertaken to cheat at the blackboard. Peirce cut short the formal mathematics to give a lesson about truth. The mathematics were the voice of God ; we were in that room because we wanted to find out what truth was ; and here was a son of perdition who had brought a lie into that room. We went out from the recitation-room sure that we had been very near God when we listened to that oracle. That sort of relation between teacher and pupil shows what is really meant by “ education.”

I tried, in an earlier paper, to give some sense of the freshness and vitality of Longfellow’s intimacy with his classes, and of Edward Channing’s with his. I should be glad to speak at more length of Pietro Bachi, about whose life there was an element of mystery. All I knew of him was that he was an accomplished Italian gentleman, who made friends of us, and who interested us vitally in the literature of Italy. Mr. Sparks read a few lectures while I was in college, and was perfectly willing to make us companions and to talk with us about American history as a master has a right to talk. With Dr. Webster, also, and with Mr. Harris, the instructor in natural history, we were on intimate terms, and once in a while we got some bit of information from one of them or the other. For the rest, four years of college were, so far as the staff went, four years of mere mechanical drudgery. The bell rang, and you went in to the exercise. You sat through an hour, and heard other men blunder through it. Nobody told anybody anything, and nobody gave anybody any light.

My father published the Boston Daily Advertiser, and so I was one of the few boys in college who had a daily newspaper. After breakfast I used to walk round and get the paper, and was therefore ready to take it in to the eight-o’clock recitation. I used to fold it lengthwise, so that I could turn it over without annoying my neighbors, and read it as the recitation in what they called philosophy went on. When I had done this a week or so, the teacher asked me to stop after the recitation, and remonstrated with me. I said : “ You see I make no concealment of it. It seems a pity to waste the hour, and I bring in the paper to read it at that time. ” I then asked what good there was in my listening to a lot of men stumbling over something which only half of them knew anything about. He assented very frankly to my view of that part of the business. He did not pretend that he assisted by a word the process of learning. He only said he thought the newspaper was bad for the discipline of the place; and I said, if it was his wish that I should not read it, I would not. I closed the conversation by asking him a question on the subject we had in hand, which he could not answer. This anecdote, I think, is worth telling as an illustration of the view which both parties took of the transaction which was called a recitation.

So was it that, for most of us who had any enthusiasm or ambition, the work of the college, so called, was, generally speaking, a sad bore. In my junior year I was so annoyed by a bit of petty tyranny on the part of one of the teachers that I went to Boston and told my father that I must give it all up. I said that I would not bear it any longer; that I wanted to go to work, and I would go to work wherever he would place me. He was a very wise man, and, among other things, he knew how to deal with boys. He told me that he knew very well that this particular person was my inferior. It was one of the misfortunes, he said, of such institutions that they had to enlist a great many inferior men in their management, but that I would find, as I went through life, that I had a great deal to do with men inferior to myself, and that he wanted me to take this experience as a part of the training of the university, His confidence in me would never be abated, he was pleased to say, and I might go back to Cambridge with that feeling. So I went back. I have never changed my opinion about the person who was involved, from that day to this day, but I have been grateful to my father for handling a pettish boy with such wisdom.

On the other hand, if we did not profit much from the functions of the staff, we had a good deal of time left to us in which to work out our own salvation. And as I look on the Cambridge of today, I am disposed to ask whether now young fellows who want to work are not kept up to the rack a little too closely. I sometimes think, if I may follow out the parallel with horses, that we got as much from that part of the time when we were kicking our heels in the pasture as we got from the time when we were tied up in the stalls. Anyway, this is what happened: We had, on the average, three recitations a day, sometimes four. For each recitation it took an hour to prepare; at least, that was the rule I laid down. The thing was a thing to be done. I gave to it an hour ; never more, and seldom less. If it could be done in that time, well; if it could not, why, so much the worse for the thing. I was not going to fool away any more time over that. Here were six hours, then, provided for, out of the fifteen. For the rest what? There was not nearly so much of athletics as there is now. There was no gymnasium, but there was, in summer, a circle of six miles radius where anybody who had legs could go in search of wild flowers or of butterflies, or to practice at a mark with pistols, or, if it were at the right season, even to look for partridge or quail or plover. A man could walk over to Revere Beach and collect shells, if the three recitations and the two chapel exercises did not come in at too close periods. Boats on the river were prohibited, under the statute, which we had all agreed to obey, forbidding us to keep “ horses, dogs, or other animals.”

Then there was the library, — a very poor library, as libraries now go, but it had fifty thousand books in it, and a good many of them were books worth reading. We were permitted to go in and out and find pasture. We took down just what we chose : nobody helped us, and nobody hindered us. There were not many recent books there, but there were a few.

I forget what it was, but something set me on the explorations of the Pacific coast. I read from the invaluable Ebeling collection ever so many things that are of use to me every day of my life now. Very likely this matchless collection gave a direction to my reading ever since, so I am very grateful for it, and to Mr. Eliot who gave it to the college. I used to hunt over the bound volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Heaven knows what I found there, but I found something. In short, I taught myself how to work up a subject in this precious freedom of the library.

They gave out as a subject for a Bowdoin dissertation The Difference between the Imaginary Beings of the Poets and Those of Folk-Lore. I wanted the money for a Bowdoin prize badly, and I wrote on this subject, of which I knew nothing. But I went to the library, I dipped through Pope’s Homer, Dryden’s Virgil, and all the recent translations of the prominent Greek and Latin classics, — I had no time to take them in the original, though I was ashamed that I did not, — and I wrote my essay accordingly. It was a good, deserving piece of hack-work, I guess. I have never read it from that day to this, but I know it got a second prize. Morison, my classmate, got another second prize, and we were both told that neither of the essays was good enough for a first prize. I learned the other day that Mr. Emerson came out in exactly the same way with both of his Bowdoin essays, and any mortification of mine certainly would have been soothed by that discovery. But I have no recollection of any sense of mortification, and I tell the story now simply to show how good a thing a good library is. If Mr. Hill will pardon another parenthesis, I will say that there was nothing which Emerson liked to discourse about more than this very matter of the good of an open library, where a person may rove about at his will. And Dr. Wayland said to me the very same thing. He opened the whole library of Brown University to every pupil he had there. He told me that they never lost a book but one miniature edition of Shakespeare, and he said, “ And that is doing good to somebody somewhere, now.”

In the next place, we had the college societies. Observe there was no professor of botany ; there was nobody who taught anything of natural history, excepting that Mr. Harris delivered a few lectures on botany, and Dr. Webster a few on mineralogy. But a lot of the fellows got together who were interested in such things, and we spent a great deal of time on our collections and on our studies in connection with them. A man took the habit of research from such work in such fashion that he never lost it. Alpha Delta Phi was founded in my day, and did for us exactly the same thing in matters of literature, in history, and in classical study. Janies Russell Lowell, I rather think, wrote his Beaumont and Fletcher lectures for Alpha Delta, of which he was a member. I know that I did some of the most solid work of ray college life in Alpha Delta. And there again the stimulus of coöperation, of friendship, of mutual sympathy, did for us what it was not worth the while of the staff to try to do. The debating societies were much more of an element in college than they are now, and most of us then and there had a chance to learn how to stand erect and speak without a trembling of the knees. I dare say the debates were wretched, but we did learn not to be afraid of an audience.

Our connection with the outside world was very close. Certainly we knew more of its affairs than the average undergraduate does now. This seems rather strange to say, in the presence of the newspaper life of to-day, but I have within ten years met a well-trained grad= uate, who had taken high rank in modern Cambridge, but did not know that there was any question of copyright between England and America. He had never heard of it. When I was a chaplain at Cambridge, between the years 1886 and 1888, I was constantly seeing young gentlemen who came to me for advice about their career after they should leave college, who had not the slightest idea of the duties of a civil engineer, of a mining engineer, of a clergyman, or of the superintendent of a factory or a railroad. These same men could have told me all about nines and elevens, and such things which I did not know. What I mean to say is that the university is now so large a world that the fellows are much more satisfied with its home concerns than they were then. On the other hand, we were crazily interested in politics. We were just on the beginning of the anti-slavery conflict, and we knew we were. We had our opinions, such as they were, on every important subject which the men of the time were discussing. Nobody pretended to talk about indifference ; the word had not yet been applied to college life.

And to bring to an end such hasty generalizations, we were interested in literature, as the average undergraduate of to-day is not. Let me repeat what I said three years ago. Emerson had come from England. He had the first published volume of Tennyson, and we copied Tennyson’s poems and passed them from hand to hand. Somebody in Philadelphia had printed Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats in one volume, and we had that volume on our tables as a textbook. I had read every one of the principal poems of the prominent English poets from Chaucer down to Cowper, before I was a junior. I do not believe that there was a man in the Harvard Union who had not read Paradise Lost, and who was not reasonably well up in his Chaucer or his Spenser. In brief, literary ambition was the ambition before every man in the class. Although there were a great many stupid men and a great many lazy men, every one of them felt that it would be a disgrace if he were not in touch with literature. I need not say that the presence of Henry Longfellow was a great satisfaction to us in such a habit. I think it more likely, however, that Lowell, who was an undergraduate, showed Tennyson’s poems to Longfellow than that Longfellow showed them to Lowell.

Considering the hard things I have said about the indifference of the staff in the recitation-room, I am bound to say that I am afraid we rejected in a very cubbish way their advances in private. I ought to say, what I observe poor old Pattison says, that I feel mortification now for the hardness or coldness with which we almost always received the overtures of officers who were entirely our superiors, who wanted to come into closer touch with us. I was afterwards on the most intimate terms with George Frederick Simmons, a charming and accomplished man, — a little too fine, perhaps, for this world. I am, therefore, personally led to reflect with shame on the sternness with which I had refused every effort which he made, when I was in college, to render my life agreeable to me. He was a proctor, who lived in the next room to me when I was a freshman.

I lived for two years in the same entry with Jones Very, whose sonnets, written at that time, have been of value to me since which I will not try to express. He was our proctor. But I have no recollection of ever entering his room, though he offered me his hospitality in the most cordial and courteous way. I make these two mortifying confessions because I think they may be of use to men who are as young now as I was then. A few years afterward I lost my only opportunity of talking with Allston because I had some ridiculous evening engagement, which of course I have long since forgotten. Hæc narratio docet what young people who hear me preach know very well, — that it is always well to talk with people who are wiser than you.

All these personal reminiscences may readily be compared with observations made now in any of the great colleges. There is hardly a detail to which I have referred where matters are not quite different now. Of such details I will speak before I have done. There is certainly an interesting question how far, with us, they have been affected by the very important changes which have come into the government of the university between that time and this. A college which was little more than a high school has been changed into a university. How far did this change come from pre-ordained changes of method of administration, and how far is it the result of the growth of the country in wealth and of the growth of the world in intelligence ?

Old Dr. Dwight, who was a very wise as well as a very amusing person, now wholly forgotten, says in his journal, when he visits Bowdoin College, that the plan of the government of that college is the same as that of Harvard College, namely, that it has two boards of government, whose only business is to quarrel with each other. The method of government of Yale College, of which he was president, was quite different : it was governed wholly by Dr. Dwight, and any boards that there were stood out of his way. There are who say that this system has been continued at Yale in later times. Anybody who cares for the history of such things might make an amusing study of the parallels and contrasts to be run between Yale and Harvard for a hundred years, resulting from this radical diversity. The theory of Harvard College was that “ The Corporation,” as it is still called in very oldfashioned circles, was the executive of the college, and the Board of Overseers a sort of advisory or visitatorial body.

From time to time, from very early times, the professors and tutors would protest ; sometimes they would come almost into revolt. Edward Everett published a pamphlet to show that the professors were the proper Fellows of the college, and ought to have some voice in the management of it. But here was the Corporation, the “ We are seven ” of Dr. Weld’s amusing poem, who had the keys and the money and the power. The Board of Overseers, by the original charter, consisted of the “ Governor and Deputy Governor of the State, all the magistrates of this jurisdiction, and the teaching elders [that is, the ministers] of Cambridge, Watertown, Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, and Dorchester, and the President of the college of the time being.” This cumbrous board, after various changes, in 1814 became a board made up mostly from the Senate of the State ; that is to say, of forty laymen. There were also fifteen ministers of Congregational churches, and sundry and various people by subsequent election ; and this lasted till 1852. Since 1866, thanks to an admirable arrangement driven through, one might say, by Mr. Darwin Erastus Ware, the Overseers have been made up of the president and treasurer, and thirty persons chosen by the alumni at annual meetings. This practice has resulted in giving a Board of Overseers of very great ability. It has the confidence of the community and of the college.

But, oddly enough, the Board of Overseers has not, and never has had, any direct power excepting in one contingency. When there is no president, the Corporation may not choose a president except by the permission of the Overseers. During that interregnum the Overseers may frighten the Corporation as much as they choose or can. Excepting at that time, they can annoy them a good deal, but can do nothing directly. President Eliot put the thing admirably in his inaugural, when he said : —

“ The real function of the Board of Overseers is to stimulate and watch the President and Fellows. Without the Overseers, the President and Fellows would be a board of private trustees, selfperpetuated and self - controlled. Provided as it is with two governing boards, the University enjoys that principal safeguard of all American governments, — the natural antagonism between two bodies of different constitution, powers, and privileges. While having with the Corporation a common interest of the deepest kind in the welfare of the University and the advancement of learning, the Overseers should always hold towards the Corporation an attitude of suspicious vigilance. They ought always to be pushing and prying. It would be hard to overstate the importance of the public supervision exercised by the Board of Overseers. Experience proves that our main hope for the permanence and ever-widening influence of the University must rest upon this double-headed organization.”

For this world is not carried on by the forms of written constitutions ; it is carried on by good sense. The Board of Overseers makes an admirable medium between the Corporation and the public. If the Overseers give advice, with an intelligent president who knows mankind, that advice is very apt to be followed, and it is just as well that that advice should not be put in the form of an edict. I had the honor of serving on the board for fifteen years, more or less, and it is the only hoard on which I ever served which was not a nuisance. At this board, on the other hand, the debates are of the greatest interest, and the conclusions are often of very great importance. But sixty years ago all this was different. The college Faculty met once a week, and determined whether Jones should have an oration or Smith should be suspended. The Corporation also met once a fortnight, I think, and determined whether Casaubon should be appointed professor or Scaliger continue another year as tutor. If the truth were to be told, I do not think the president was much more than the clerk of the Corporation. The poor fellow had a deal of office work to do, and unless he were a man fond of detail he must have winced under it. I have told here the story how, a few years afterward, the first official duty of President Everett was to see that the carpet of Madam Pettigrew’s pew in the chapel was properly swept. The Corporation had not much money to spend, they spent it as well as they could, they put in the professors and tutors, — so many for the undergraduate department, so many more for the professional schools, — and then they let the thing go.

As to the Corporation, one speaks of it even to - day with bated breath. It chose, as it still chooses, its own members, who hold for life ; but the choice is subject to the approval of the Overseers. There was in old times a theory that there should be one representative of each “learned profession ” on the Corporation, but in my time there was no physician; Dr. Walker represented divinity. The five other members of the board, beside the president, were Judge Story, Nathaniel Bowditch, Mr. Francis C. Gray (succeeded by Mr. John A. Lowell), and Mr. Charles G. Loring. People who remember the Boston of fifty years ago will agree with me that it would be hard to find a board more distinguished. There was a little cynical criticism that the Salem element was very strong in it, but the Essex County element has always been so good in Massachusetts life that nobody seriously finds fault with it. These six gentlemen, with Josiah Quincy, the president, did what they chose with the college. Its affairs seldom got into the newspaper, and, generally speaking, I think people were disposed to let it run on its own wheels in its own way.

But in conversation, for five-and-twenty years after this time, there was more or less speculation as to why, if it were called a university, it should not be a university. A visible stimulus in such conversation was the Phi Beta Kappa oration of Dr. Hedge in the year 1850. Most of the Phi Beta orations had had a great deal of the same sort in them, but Hedge spoke with authority, because he had himself been at Göttingen, and so far knew what he was talking about. It is not the place of this paper to review the history of the changes, which seem marvelous, which have made the university of to-day. All that I am asked to do is to compare the methods of to-day with the methods of sixty years ago. A review of the history would have little interest to any one outside the college circle, and I have said almost all that I can say in the reminiscences which I have already given in this magazine.

After the freshman year, the undergraduate of to-day has very large latitude in his choice of studies. Sixty years ago, he might select the modern language he would study, and when he became a senior he might go on with Latin and Greek or not, as he chose ; but practically these were the only matters left open to his choice. It followed that every man, when he graduated, had a certain knowledge of the externals of science and criticism, which I think the graduates of to-day hardly claim. He had an outside knowledge, little more, in the half dozen ranges of inquiry which were then classified as separate sciences. On the other hand, it was simply impossible for a man to go as far as any wellintentioned undergraduate can go now, in any study. No matter how much a man might be interested in philology, what he might do in college was simply to translate such and such books, and that was the end of it; nobody meant to teach him philology, — of which, indeed, nobody excepting Mr. Felton knew much. If a man were interested in English literature, he could work it up, as I said Mr. Lowell did Beaumont and Fletcher; but it was nobody’s business to tell him whether Beaumont were a writer under Darius Hystaspes, or Fletcher one of the authors of the Vedas. In this remark I think I have stated what is substantially the contrast between that high school of 1835 and the university of today.

It must be remembered that the annual income of the college in 1842 was $225,561. Its annual income now, as recorded by the treasurer in his last report, is $1,201,908. In the same year, 1894—95, the treasurer received from what he calls “ receipts exclusive of income,” meaning new gifts and incidental or occasional receipts, $1,900,000. The total funds in 1842 were $680,649; in 1895 they were $8,381,586. Such figures alone are enough to show the worldwide difference between what was done then and what is attempted with so great success now. Yet if anybody is audacious enough to compare the all-round information, say, of Jared Sparks in matters of history with the accomplishments of gentlemen who have to deal with history to-day, why, let him make the comparison. Only let him remember that the business of the college of that day was to make all-round scholars, while the business of the college to-day is to make men skillful in their respective departments of science or of study.

This is certain, that the university of to-day gains immensely over the college of that time in its nationality. Dr. Beers says, in the book to which I have referred, that the college of that time was equipped mostly by men of eastern Massachusetts, and was for students from eastern Massachusetts. This is as true as most epigrams are. But it is quite sure that, of the professors of that time, almost all had grown up in this region of country. Longfellow came from as far away as Portland; Beck came from Germany ; the foreign-language gentlemen were all, I think, natives of European countries. But for the rest, they were Yankees, and had the instincts and prejudices of Yankees. Now it is an advantage which cannot be overestimated, to the undergraduate of to-day, that he falls in with gentlemen from Japan and other parts of Asia, from Europe, from Canada, from South America, from the shores of the Pacific Ocean, and probably from every State of the forty-five. He has among his professors such men as Shaler, Royce, Bôcher, Sumichrast, Lanman, Francke, — not to go farther than the first page of the catalogue, — men who really know that there is a nation called the United States, west and south of the Hudson River. The provincialism which was almost a necessary element, and an important element, in the Harvard College of 1830 and 1840 exists no longer. There was at that time, undoubtedly, a notion that it would be better if the professors could all be graduates of our own college. Longfellow was from Bowdoin, but as I look over one of the old catalogues I do not observe any other professor who was not a Harvard graduate, excepting the gentlemen from Europe. Now we are glad to welcome, from all climes and all schools of training, whoever can help us. There is no such thing as Prussian algebra or Carolinian optics or Californian divinity ; and the undergraduate of to-day may go to Cambridge as narrow and bigoted as most freshmen are, but after four years he will come out with a great deal of such nonsense taken out of him. The most important part of that nonsense will be his impression that he is a person of any great importance himself.

In the same years he will slowly lose the other impression, that the particular place in which he was born had any special importance in the theory of the good God for the constitution of the universe. If one get only this out of four years of college, he has gained what he gains in no other method of training for life with which I am acquainted.

Edward Everett Hale.