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Presented to The New Yoric Public Libiaiy
in his memory by his ikmily. 1936
HARVARD COLLEGE BY AN
OXONIAN
■ $
THE NEW YOrK
PUBLIC L :rary
ASTOR, LENOX AND
TILDEN FOUNDATrorKS
K L
HARVARD COLLEGE BY
AN OXONIAN
BY
GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, D.C.L.
Honorary Fellow of Pbmbrokb Collbgb, Oxford
" Thifi is a world elsewhere "
— CORIOLANUS
Weh) got*
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON : MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1906
All rights reserved
THK NtW 'iOiiK
rU^lC LliMAM
980986A
ASTOfi. LENOX AND
Copyright, 1894,
By MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped November, z894. Reprinted
December, 1894 ; August, 1906.
Kotftfooll ^tt%% :
J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith.
Boston, Mass., U.S.A.
CO
Oi
X
00 TO
LIBRARIAN OF HARVARD COLLEGE
AS A SUGHT TOKEN
^ OF
BIY RESPECT FOR HIS LEARNING
AND OF
BIY GRATITUDE FOR HIS KINDNESS
TO MY WIFE AND MYSELF
DURING OUR RESIDENCE IN CAMBRIDGE
MASSACHUSETTS
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGB
The Growth of Harvard. —The Infant College. — Early Gifts and
Bequests. — "A Constellation of Benefactors." — Grants of Public
Money. — The Revolutionary War. — Modern Benefactors. —
Founders of Families and Founders of University . . • i
CHAPTER II.
The Foundation of Harvard. — Cambridge in England and Cambridge
in New England. — " Fair Harvard." — Emmanuel College. — The
Washington Elm. — General Washington a Doctor of Laws. —
The University at Concord. — An Overbearing Treasurer. — Har-
vard and Slavery 23
CHAPTER III.
Religious Liberty. — The Divinity School. — The College Chapel. —
The Dudleian Lectures. — The English Liturgy . • . .42
CHAPTER IV.
Punishments and Fines. — "The Ancient Customs." — Fagging and
"Hazing." — Tutors and Undergraduates. — Rebellions • . 55
CHAPTER V.
Odd Characters. — Changes of Names of Places. — Commencement
Day. — Lafayette. — Russian Naval Officers. — Oxford Commem-
oration. — The Association of the Alumni. — The Classes. — The
After-dinner Speeches 77
• •
Vll
viii CONTENTS.
CHAPTER VI.
PAGB
Phi Beta Day. — Foundation of the Society. — Emerson's Oration in
1837. — Charles Sumner. — The Meeting and the Dinner . . 107
CHAPTER VII.
Gass Day. — Its Origin and Growth. — Orators, Poets, and Odists. —
The New England Summer. — The " Spreads." — The Exercises
at the Tree 120
CHAPTER VIII.
The Undergraduates. — Harvardians and Oxonians contrasted. — The
Athletic Craze. — A Baseball Match. — Games regulated by the
Governing Body of the University. — President Eliot's Report . 134
CHAPTER IX.
Caps and Gowns. — Harvard College and University. — The Dormi-
tories. — Room Rents. — Students' Life Seventy Years Ago. —
Memorial Hall 154
CHAPTER X.
A Visit to Three Dormitories. — Dining Qubs. — The Liquor Law. —
Baths. — Signs and " Shingles. " — Qubs. — Politics. — Christmas.
— A Student's Library 171
CHAPTER XI.
Harvard " Boys." — ** Harvard Indifference." — Harvard and Yale.
— Honest Poverty. — Oxford Servitors. — Poor Students. —
" Money Aids " 186
CONTENTS. ix
CHAPTER XII.
PAGB
From a College to a University. — George Ticknor. — Influence of
Germany. — Oxford Colleges Forty Years Ago. — Provincialism. —
Foundation of New Schools at Harvard. — Duties of Professors . 209
CHAPTER XIII.
The Elective System. — American Schools. — The Study of Greek at
Oxford and Cambridge. — Examinations and Prizes. — The Grad-
uate School 227
CHAPTER XIV.
The Law School. — Nathan Dane. — Joseph Story. — Professor
Langdell. — The Law Library. — The Law Review . . .* 253
CHAPTER XV.
The Lawrence Scientific School. — Special Students .... 266
CHAPTER XVI.
Radcliffe College. — The Harvard Annex. . . • • . 273
CHAPTER XVII.
The Library. — Gifts from England. — The Fire of 1764. — Gore
Hall. — The Bequests of Prescott, Sumner, and Carlyle. — J. L.
Sibley. — Dr. Justm Winsor 285
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Government of Harvard. — The Charter. — The Overseers. —
The Corporation, Church, and State. — The Faculty.— The Pres-
ident. — The Professors. — Oxford and Harvard . . . •297
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER XIX.
PAGB
Graduate Schools in Oxford and Cambridge. — Respublica Liter a-
torum, — American Students in English Universities. — The Old
Home 317
ILLUSTRATIONS.
Charles William Eliot, President .... Frontispiece
First Harvard Hall, built in 1682 . , Vignette on title-page
Harvard College in 1726 Facing page 4
HoLDEN Chapel " " 12
Harvard College. The Second Centennial Cel-
ebration, 1836 .'...••. ** ** 26
The Wadsworth House " " 86
The Yard " " 122
The Hemenway Gymnasium ** "150
Memorial Hall '* " 169
The College Gate « « 200
Austin Hall *' " 254
The Museum of Comparative Zo(5LOGy ... «« « 266
The Library, Gore Hall ** " 289
Sever Hall ........ •* " 304
zi
CHAPTER I.
The Growth of Harvard. — The Infant College. — Early Gifts and Be-
quests. — ** A Constellation of Benefactors." — Grants of Public Money.
— The Revolutionary War. — Modern Benefactors. — Founders of
Families and Founders of University.
IN the summer and early autumn of last year, I spent in all
nearly two months in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the seat
of Harvard College, the first and the oldest of American
universities. A young graduate of the College, with whom I
had fallen into talk on my outward voyage, as we paced the
deck of the Cephalonia, had begged me not to keep Oxford
in my memory when I visited the American Cambridge.
Oxford's ancient towers, her chapels and cloisters, her halls,
her quadrangles and her lawns. High Street and Broad Street,
Magdalen Bridge, and the massive ivy-mantled city walls, all
made his heart sink within him when he thought of his own
beloved Alma Mater, Dear as she was to him, how could she
be dear to one in whose mind there always lived the image of
the most beautiful and the most venerable of all universities ?
" ' Oxford,' Southey once playfully said, ' is a place to make
an American unhappy.* " Some touch of this unhappiness
seemed to have fallen upon my companion as he then spoke to
me. There was no need for it. If Oxford has ever made a
single American unhappy. Harvard on many a summer day has
made at all events one Englishman happy.
In a fog on the Banks of Newfoundland I had caught a
B I
, >
2 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
heavy cold, and for nearly a fortnight after my arrival I kept
to the house. When at length I ventured out, I found the
" Yard " of Harvard as pleasant a place to stroll in as the
garden of St. John's and the walks of Magdalen. One thing
only was wanting — there was not a single bench to be found.
There was shade, and there was beauty, and the hurrying to
and fro of young and eager life ; but there was no place for a
weary man to sit and rest himself, as he watched the flickering
of the hght and shadow upon the grass, and the student's
strong and rapid step. In my journal ^ I recorded : —
" On a hot June day I strolled with great pleasure in the
Yard. The lawns were beautifully green, and the tall, graceful
trees cast everywhere a delightful shade. It was surprising
how green was the grass and how fresh, overshadowed though
it was by trees. There is no quadrangle in Oxford more de-
lightful on a hot summer day. Harvard surely is a College
that a man can love." The old red-brick halls which enclose
two sides of the Yard recalled to my mind not so much Oxford
as the Courts of the Temple. Much of the beauty of the scene
was due to the freshness of the foliage, for the New England
spring is late. I had spent the winter in Switzerland. When
I left Clarens on May 2, the lilacs had already faded. Ten
days later I found them in full bloom in the parks of Liver-
pool. On the twenty-second, the day on which I landed, they
were still in bud in Cambridge. In June, therefore, the trees
were in their first freshness. In the winter, when they were
stripped of their leaves, and when the lawns were hidden
beneath the snow, the Yard would not bear a comparison with
Oxford. I was fortunate in seeing it at its best; when the
1 In the few extracts which I give from my journal I have not strictly
followed the text; sometimes I have thrown two entries into one.
>■ V C k <- V. t.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 3
red-brick halls, half-revealed through the green leaves, half-
hidden, with a sky above them blue as the skies of Italy, have
a beauty of their own.
One pleasant sight I unfortunately missed. In the summer
evenings it has long been the habit for the Glee Club to sing
in the Yard, while the students lie about on the grass, or lean
out of the windows of their rooms listening. I went there
once or twice in the hope of hearing the songs, but I chose
the wrong time or the wrong day. The Yard was silent. This
pleasant custom, I fear, is not so well kept up as of old. 77ie
Crimson, the undergraduates* daily paper, laments its decay.
So long ago as Emerson's young days, singing was cultivated in
the College. He presented himself with some of the other
freshmen to the singing-master, who, " when his turn came, said
to him, ' Chord ! * ' What? * said Emerson. ' Chord ! Chord !
I tell you,' repeated the master. ' I don't know what you
mean,' said Emerson. ' Why, sing ! Sing a note ! ' So I made
some kind of a noise, and the singing-master said, * That will
do, sir. You need not come again.' " ^
The long vacation I spent in a pleasant village on Cape
Cod. When I returned to Cambridge at the end of Septem-
ber, it was almost with a feeling of anxiety that I went back
to a spot where I had happily sauntered away so many an idle
hour. I feared lest I should find that, under the fierce influ-
ence of the summer heats, most of its charms had passed
away. My mind was soon set at rest. "The Yard," I re-
corded, "looked very pretty and pleasant in the sunshine
of an autumn day. I wandered about it for mor^ than half
an hour with enjoyment, watching the bustle of the beginning
of term^ and the young life so full of activity and hope.
1 0. W. Holmes's R, W, Emerson, 1885, p. 361
4 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
How many Presidents of the United States — Presidents, at
least, in their confident ambition — were passing by me ! "
How vast was the change since those far-distant days when
" the fair and comely edifice " of freshly-cut timber in which
the infant University was lodged, on a narrow strip of land
"bordering a pleasant river," was "thought by some to be too
gorgeous for a wilderness, and yet too mean, in others* appre-
hensions, for a college ! " ^ Oxford, not many years earlier,
had seen rise amid the meadows outside her city walls, that
graceful pile in which the Gothic college and the ancient
Jacobean mansion are so happily blended. The fair monu-
ment which Nicholas Wadham raised to himself is durable,
for it is built in stone. No less durable is the monument
which John Harvard helped to raise, built though it was with
unseasoned wood. This home of learning was destined to
prove an abiding city; for its foundations rested, not on the
piety of any one man, but on the zeal and the a^ection of a
high-minded community. A man of great nobility of charac-
ter presided over the General Court of the Colony which
passed the first vote of money "towards a school or college."
It was Henry Vane — Milton* s "Vane, young in years, but in
sage counsels old." He links Harvard to Oxford, for it was
in Magdalen, most beautiful of colleges, that he had studied.
His statue might well stand beside the Puritan minister's,
under the shadow of the noble hall which commemorates the
brave men who, two hundred years later, fell in the defence
of that liberty for which Harvard crossed the sea, and for
which Vane gave his life.
1 New EnglantTs First Fruits and Johnson's Wonder Working Provi-
dence, 1 65 1, quoted in The Early College Buildings at Cambridge ^hy A. M.
Davis, 1892, p. 4.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 5
However " fair and comely " was the outside of the building,
inside there was poverty enough. In a country where the
midwinter cold ofttimes is so sharp that it freezes the inlets
of the sea, in few of the chambers and studies was there a
fireplace. The modern American likes to keep up the tem-
perature of his house to seventy degrees. In the lecture-
rooms at Harvard, the thermometer is not allowed to fall
below sixty-eight. It often stands above this oppressive heat.
The forefathers of these delicate New Englanders lived in a
building made of ill-seasoned wood, which would soon have
shrunk and let the north wind sweep through the crevices.
"The students must have collected in the hall within the
settle, where, by the light of the public candle, cowering over
the public fire, was to be found the only place where they
could, with any sort of comfort, pursue their studies during
the long winter evenings."^ A set of rules, under the name
of Liberties and Orders of Harvard College, had been drawn
up for their government. No scholar was to be admitted till
"he was able to read Tully, or such like classical author
extempore, and make and speak true Latin in verse and prose,
suo {ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigms
of nouns and verbs in the Greek tongue." ^ Such a knowledge
of Latin seems, at first sight, little likely to have been met
with in so young a settlement; but outside Oxford and Cam-
bridge, there was perhaps, at this time, no spot where among
an equal number of inhabitants, so many Englishmen were to
be found who had received a liberal education. So early as
1638 there were forty or fifty graduates of the old country
1 The Early Buildings at Cambridge, p. 23; The College in Early
Days, p. 8.
^ Quincy's Harvard, I. 515.
6 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
dwelling in the sparse villages of New England.^ These men
were not those failures of a university who, in the present
age, year after year cross the sea to our Colonies to become
failures once more. They were a chosen band, broken to toil
and hardships, and yet retaining a deep love of learning.
Their children should not grow up in ignorance. "'Learn-
ing,* to use their own fine expression, was not *to be buried
in the graves of the fathers.* " ^ In almost every parish there
was a minister " who usually prepared the young men for their
examinations. Latin was taught as a spoken language.
Often teacher and pupil would take walks together through
the fields and woods, and converse of all they saw in Latin." *
The rules by which the infant College was governed are too
long to quote at length. The following will serve as in-
stances : —
<' Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know
God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life.
"They shall honour as their parents magistrates, elders, tutors, and
aged persons by being silent in their presence (except they be called on
to answer), not gainsaying; showing all those laudable expressions of hon-
our and reverence in their presence that are in use, as bowing before them,
standing uncovered, or the like.
** None shall pragmatically intrude or intermeddle in other men's affairs.
"None shall, under any pretence whatsoever, frequent the company
and society of such men as lead an ungirt and dissolute life.
" The scholars shall never use their mother tongue, except that in public
exercises of oratory, or such like, they be called to make them in English.
" Every scholar shall be called by his surname only till he be invested
with his first degree, except he be a Fellow-Commoner or Knight's eldest
son, or of superior nobility." ^
1 Life of Joseph Story^ II. 256.
* Harvard Collegey 2^oth Anniversary^ p. 253.
■ History of Higher Education in Massachusetts^ by G. G. Bush, p. 24.
* Quincy's Harvard^ ^^V^^'
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 7
By this last rule it is not meant that the Christian name
shall not be used, but that no title of respect, such as Sir or
Master, shall be given. Johnson, in a note on Sir Oliver
Mar-text in As You Like It, says : " He that has taken his first
degree at the University is in the Academical style called
DominuSy and in common language was heretofore termed
5/>." ^ In the Harvard accounts, quoted in Mr. A. M. Davis's
Early College Buildings ^^ we find entered Sir Bulkeley, Sir
Brewster, and Sir Downing. Sir Downing was George Down-
ing, the "stingy fellow" and "perfidious rogue" of Pepys's
Diary ^
The lot of the two first presidents, Dunster and Chauncy,
was as hard as the lot of learned men has so often been in
all times and in all countries. The ills which assailed the
scholar's life assailed them. They were scarcely happier
than Lydiat or Galileo. Both were men of great learning.
Chauncy had been nominated, by the heads of Houses at the
English Cambridge, to the chair of Hebrew, and had filled
the chair of Greek.* They did their duty faithfully, and had
as their reward, " thankless labour, unrequited service, arrear-
ages unpaid, posthumous applause, a doggerel dirge, and a
Latin epitaph."* It was the res dura et regni novitas — the
hard times and all the difficulties of a young settlement —
which were mostly to blame. The first president had added
to his troubles by "falling into the briers of Antipaedobap-
tism. He had borne public testimony in the church at
1 Johnson's Shakespeare, ed. 1765, II. 66. ^ p^ 3.
» Ed. 1848, 1. 108, 333.
* Perhaps, however, he was only Greek Lecturer at Tripity College.
See the Dictionary of National Biography^
* Quincy*s Harvard, I. 14.
8 HARVARD COLLEGE, CHAP.
Cambridge against the administration of baptism to any
infant whatsoever." Privations he was more able to put up
with than heresy. In a petition to the Governor he said:
"Considering the poverty of the country, I am willing to
descend to the lowest step; desiring nothing more than to
supply me and mine with food and raiment."^ The second
president also had his own briers of baptism into which he
fell. Contrary to the prevailing faith among the settlers that
"a sprinkling was sufficient," he maintained, says an early
writer, " that the infant should be washed all over, — an opin-
ion not tolerable in this cold region, and impracticable at
certain seasons of the year."^ He had as hard a lot as his
predecessor.
Nineteen years after the College had been founded, it pos-
sessed, as was stated in a memorial, " in real revenue about
twelve pounds per annum (which is a small pittance to be
shared among four Fellows), besides fifteen pounds per annum
which, by the donors* appointment, is for scholarships. "•
Nevertheless, the sum of money voted by the General Court
for the foundation of the College, "was equal to a year's rate
of the whole Colony." * From the first, gifts and benefits had
not been wanting, but it was "willing poverty" rather than
wealth which gave. Of wealthy men there were few, if any,
to be found. John Harvard, that "godly man," that "lover
of learning," a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge,
and "sometime minister of God's word at Charlestown,"
bequeathed to the College half his property and his library.
The sum received was not quite four hundred pounds. His
books give us some insight into the character of a man of
1 Quincy's Harvard, I. 1 8, 20. * Ih, I. 47.
« lb. I. 23. * 3, I. 8.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE, 9
whom, unhappily, scarcely anything is known. He had
brought with him across the sea more than two hundred and
sixty volumes, among them not only Chrysostom and Calvin,
Duns Scotus, and Luther, but Homer and Plutarch, Terence
and Horace, with Stephanus's notes. Chapman's Homer ^
Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learnings and Camden's
Remains. The magistrates raised among themselves two
hundred pounds to be spent on books. Other gifts came in.
The Rev. W. Allen sent two cows. Cotton cloth worth nine
shillings was given by Richard Dana, the ancestor of another
Richard Dana, who, nearly two hundred years later, when a
student of Harvard, failing in health, went for two years
before the mast, and on his return gave the world a delightful
book. The Rev. Mr. Latham, of Lancaster County,^ England,
sent five pounds. Richard Saltonstall, a man of large means,
gave more than five hundred pounds. He belonged to one of
those New England families, happily not few in number, who,
generation after generation, have shown their love for Harvard.
Theophilus Gale, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, "a
learned and industrious divine, as appears by his Court of the
Gentiles and his Vanity of Pagan Philosophy y^ bequeathed his
library to the College. From Sir John Maynard, who outlived
all his brother-lawyers, and but for the coming of William of
Orange would have outlived the law also, came eight chests
of books. From the New England towns and villages, and even
from distant settlements, contributions flowed in. Little Scar-
borough, away to the north in Maine, sent two pounds nine
shillings and sixpence, while from the far-distant South, the
^ I have seen on a tombstone in the graveyard of Barnstable, Massa-
chusetts, a man described as being born " in the County of Lancashire,
England.*' The meaning of the word shire is apparently lost in America.
10 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
people of Eleutheria in the Bahamas, "out of their poverty,"
sent one hundred and twenty-four pounds. Smaller gifts came
in, such as a pewter flagon worth ten shillings, a bell, a fruit-
dish, a sugar-spoon, a silver-tipt jug, one great salt, and one
small trencher-salt.^ In the Information of the Present Neces-
sities of the College which was laid before the General Court
in 1655, mention is made of "some parcels of land," owned
by the College, " none of which can with any reason or to any
benefit be sold." A happy thing it was that these "parcels "
were retained, for some of them have risen enormously i^
value. The house and plot of ground in Boston which one
Henry Webb bequeathed to the College in 1660, ten years
ago, was set down in the accounts as worth one hundred and
sixty-five thousand dollars [;;^33,73o].^ Let "the gentle
reader" who buys his book at Messrs. Little, Brown &
Co.*s shop give a thought to the old Puritan, who two and a
half centuries ago lived on this very spot, and dying left " the
rent to be forever for the maintenance of some poor scholars,
or otherwise for the best good of the College."
With all these gifts, the College long remained poor. How
small were its means, even so late as 1695, is shown by a vote
of the Corporation " that six leather chairs be forthwith pro-
vided for the use of the library, and six more before the com-
mencement, in case the treasury will allow of it."* Forks
appear for the first time in the accounts, in 1707. So late
as the middle of last century, "each scholar carried to the
dining-table his own knife and fork, and when he had dined,
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ I. 10, 12, 166, 506-513.
^ lb, I. 23; ^^i^ff^/^^^r/lf, 1883-4, Appendix, p. 19; The Exhibitions
at Harvard College^ by A. M. Davis, p. 5.
* Higher EducatioUt etc., p. 49.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. - 11
wiped them on the tablecloth."^ A short time before Adam
Smith became an exhibitioner of Balliol College, the knives
and forks were chained to the table.* In the inns in France,
even many years later than this, a knife was not supplied,
only a fork. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, in 1742, noticed, as a
sign of increasing refinement in Scotland, that at the tavern
in Haddington, where the Presbytery dined, knives and forks
were provided.* There was so little money in the Colony
that the Harvard students often settled their accounts in kind.
" Bills were paid with rye, Indian [com], wheat, malt, apples,
butter; with cows, oxen, sheep, lambs, steers; with beef, pork,
and bacon; with sugar and salt; with wool and sacking. Pay-
ments in meat would appear, at one time, to have become dis-
proportionately large"; for in 1667 the overseers "ordered
that the Steward shall not be injoyned to accept of above
one quarter part flesh-meat of any person." *
Better days were drawing near. Harvard had warm friends
on both sides of the Atlantic, and on both sides wealth was
rapidly increasing. From the old home gifts and bequests
came to the College, which, likely enough, would have gone
to Oxford or Cambridge had either university been opened to
the Nonconformists. The miserable test of the Thirty-nine
Articles deprived our ancient seats of learning of good men
and good money. " Among the English Dissenters, Harvard
College had at all times been the object of munificent patro-
nage." "The constant stream of gifts which flowed from Eng-
land" did not cease even with the War of the Revolution.*
1 Early College Buildings^ pp. 13, 20.
^ Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, II. 307.
■ A. Carlyle's Autobiography y p. 64. * Early College Buildings, p. 12.
* Quincy*s Harvard, II. 115; Higher Education, etc., p. 52.
12 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
In the names given to Holden Chapel and Holworthy and
HoUis Halls, are commemorated English benefactors who
never set foot on American soil. Sir Matthew Holworthy,
a London merchant, bequeathed to the College the largest
sum which it received in the seventeenth century. Of men
bearing the name of HoUis, there was "a constellation of
benefactors," to use the words of President Quincy. So long
ago as 1690, Robert Thomer, the uncle of the first of the seven
who form this constellation, left property to the College. The
last, who died in 1804, bequeathed one hundred pounds to
be laid out in Greek and Latin classics. Four of these men
bore the Christian name of Thomas. The first Thomas
founded Professorships of Divinity and of Mathematics and
Natural Philosophy. "Scarcely a ship sailed from London
during the last ten years of his life without bearing some
evidence of his affection and liberality." On sending the
first of his numerous presents of books to the Library, he wrote :
"After forty years* diligent application to mercantile busi-
ness, my God, whom I serve, has mercifully succeeded my
endeavours, and with my increase inclined my heart to a
proportional distribution. I have credited the promise, *He
that giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord, * and have found
it verified in this life." His grandson's donations, though
not nearly so large, scarcely fell short of two thousand pounds
sterling.^ He is Thomas Hollis, "the strenuous Whig," de-
scribed by Boswell, " who used to send over Europe presents
of democratical books, with their boards stamped with daggers
and caps of liberty." Many of these volumes came to Har-
vard " splendidly bound, and the covers stamped with a char-
acteristic emblem or device. Some are marked by a liberty
1 Quincy's Harvard, I. 183, 186, 232, 430; II. 147, 411.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 13
cap, or an owl holding in its talons a pen, with the motto,
'By deeds of peace *; others by the effigy of Liberty, holding
in her right hand her cap, and in her left a spear." The
learned Mrs. Carter said "he was a bad man. He used to
talk uncharitably." To which Johnson replied : "Poh! poh!
madam; who is the worse for being talked of uncharitably?
Besides, he was a dull, poor creature as ever lived; and I
believe he would not have done harm to a man whom he knew
to be of very opposite principles to his own. I remember
once at the Society of Arts, when an advertisement was to be
drawn up, he pointed me out as the man who could do it best.
This, you will observe, was kindness to me. I, however,
slipt away, and escaped it." When Mrs. Carter went on to
say: "I doubt he was an Atheist," Johnson rejoined, "I don*t
know that. He might, perhaps, have become one if he had
had time to ripen (smiling). He might have exuberated
into an Atheist." ^ Horace Walpole described him as a "most
excellent man, a most immaculate Whig, but as simple a poor
soul as ever existed, except his editor." * Dr. Franklin wrote
much more highly of him. Speaking of what he had done,
he writes: "It is prodigious the quantity of good that may
be done by one man, if he will make a business of iV^ *
Though, at its foundation. Harvard received a grant of
public money, nevertheless, to the Commonwealth, during the
two centuries and a half of its existence, it has owed but little.
It has slowly been raised up to its great height, first by the
generous zeal for learning in outsiders, and next by the love
and liberality of its own children. By the State it was far
1 Boswell, Life ofjohnsotty Qarendon Press edition, IV. 97.
2 Walpole's Utters, VII. 346.
» Franklin's Memoirs^ ed. 1818, III. 135.
14 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
more encumbered by the unsoundness which afflicted the cur-
rency during the whole of the eighteenth century, than relieved
by the aids which were conferred. Twenty years before the
vast disturbance to public credit that was caused by the Revo-
lutionary War, so early as 1755, the treasurer of the Col-
lege, on valuing its property, " put down all the capital sums
at only one-fifth part of the nominal sums originally given,
in consequence of the funds having sunk by the depreciation
of the paper currency." ^ By the end of the war the deprecia-
tion had become far greater. Fifteen thousand six hundred
pounds, not in nominal but in real value, which before the
outbreak of hostilities had been invested in the public funds,
if sold out eleven years later, would have produced no more
than seven hundred and fifty-eight pounds.^ Silver and gold
had disappeared from common use; "in paper money, a quill
cost a dollar and a half, and a dinner over fifty dollars." ■ In
1780 the Professor of Divinity was paid in paper money, the
magnificent sum of nine thousand one hundred and ninety-two
pounds, for one year's salary. Let not our Regius Professor
of Divinity at Oxford mournfully reflect that in a petty col-
lege in a small colony, in the comparative poverty of last
century, a rebel's heterodoxy received as its reward nearly
five times as much as his own orthodoxy at the present day in
the wealthiest university in the world. In gold, silver, and
copper, the poor man would have been paid only eighty-seven
pounds ten shillings and eight-pence;* more than enough,
no doubt, for a Dissenter and a rebel, but scarcely enough for
the needs, however modest, of human life. Part of the heavy
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 237. ^ lb. II. 250.
■ Higher Education^ by G. G. Bush, p. 67.
* Quincy's Harvard^ II. 538.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 15
loss which fell on Harvard was made up by severe economy,
and by the management of an honest and able treasurer.
Through the worst times the Corporation, mainly trusting
to his advice, "held with unshaken firmness the certificates
of public debt which they had been compelled to receive,
and vested in them with great judgment whatever sums were
brought into their treasury. On the funding of the National
Debt, the College derived the full benefit of their wisdom
and of their confidence in the ultimate returning of the
nation to a sense of justice."^
The Legislature of Massachusetts twice wronged the com-
munity at large by granting a lottery to Harvard. With the
aid of the money thus mischievously raised two new halls were
built.^ For ten years, beginning with 1814, the College re-
ceived an annual contribution from the State of ten thousand
dollars (^£2044), a large part of which, by the terms of the
vote, was spent in defraying the fees of poor students.* Since
1824, no public aid of any kind has been granted. Happily,
the stream of private bounty soon began to flow more liberally
than ever. Even before 1780, about three times as much had
come to the College by gifts and bequests as had been contri-
buted by the State.* The whole of the State's contributions
has been frequently exceeded many fold by the gift of a
single citizen in a single year. "European universities,"
writes Professor Goodwin, "boast of the imperial and national
governments which support them, and support them with noble
liberality; but the bounty of emperors and princes, and even
of republics, is precarious, and may fail with political changes.
Harvard has a more than imperial treasury in the love and
1 Quincy's Harvard^ II. 254. ^ lb. II. 273, 292.
■ lb, II. 331, 356. * Higher EducaHon, etc., p. 66.
16 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
respect of her sons, and in the confidence of the community." *
Rarely has the stream of wise beneficence flowed with a wider
and more even flood. In 1840, the "productive estate, real
and personal," of the College was valued at six hundred and
forty-six thousand dollars (jQi^2yio^y "the result of private
munificence, or of the wise management of the Corporation." *
In 1891-92 the income from the estate amounted to four hun-
dred and forty- three thousand dollars (;£90,59i), more than
two-thirds of the value that the estate itself had borne half a
century earlier; while the gifts and bequests in that year were
no less than five hundred and sixteen thousand dollars
(;^io5,5i9). In the three years ending in 1884, the Uni-
versity received in bequests and gifts, one million and ninety-
six thousand dollars (;^224,i28). Seven years later we are
told that " the gifts to the University continue in an ever-
flowing stream, and amount to about five hundred thousand
dollars [;£^i02,249] annually." In 1891-92 the gifts to the
University exceeded by sixty thousand dollars (;£i2,269) the
payments of its three thousand students.* "The financial
year, 1892-93," reports the President to the Board of Over-
seers, " was satisfactory as regards the increase of the funds,
and balances by gifts and bequests, the total increase of the
year being five hundred and fifty-two thousand dollars
[;^i 12,881]."* Benefactors of Harvard, it seems, are not
likely to suffer from "a satiety of commendation." I know
of nothing equal to this "satisfactory," since the days of
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 41.
^ Quincy's Harvard, II. 402.
• Harvard University , by F. Bolles, pp. 98, 100; Annual Reports^
1883-S4, p. 45; Higher Education in Massachusetts, by G. G. Bush,
p. 224.
* Annual Reports, 1892-93, p. 47.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 17
Harry Hotspur and his wife. "'Oh, my sweet Harry/ says
she, *how many hast thou killed to-day?* 'Give my roan
horse a drench,* says he; and answers, 'some fourteen,* an
hour after; *a trifle, a trifle.* ** The extraordinary moderation
of the President's words only shows how splendid for many a
year must have been the benefactions. Among the contribu-
tions none is more touching than the bequest of an aged
negress, a widow. In the evil days of old, she and her hus-
band had escaped from slavery. He became the coloured
messenger of John Albion Andrew, that great Governor of
Massachusetts, who once said: "I know not what record of
sin awaits me in the other world, but this I know, — that I
was never mean enough to despise any man because he was
poor, because he was ignorant, or because he was black.**
With the bequest, which is valued at more than four thousand
dollars C£8i7), a scholarship is to be founded for the benefit
of poor and deserving coloured students.^ That they need
not fear humiliating treatment from their comrades was
strikingly shown by an incident which occurred during my
visit to Cambridge. A negro undergraduate, going to have
his hair cut, found that the hairdresser drew the line at a
white man just as in Nicholas Nickieby it had been drawn at
a baker. It so happened that the student was a great foot-
ball player. His brother-athletes took up his cause, and let
the hairdresser know that if he persisted in his intolerance,
he would lose the custom of the College. The man quickly
yielded. The Legislature of Massachusetts at once passed a
statute by which throughout the Commonwealth barbers were
henceforth required to be no respecters of persons, and to
shave without distinction of colour.
^ Harvard Graduated Magazine^ March, 1894, p. 442.
/
18 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
In England rich men found families; in America they
found universities, or they enlarge them. The family often
falls away to shame; the university remains forever a noble
and unsullied memorial. On its founder no stain is ever cast
by the misconduct of his descendants. It is only the noble-
man's title which, raising each succeeding generation above
the world, and making it conspicuous for disgrace, can cast
reproach backwards upon the fair fame of him who first held
it. How many great lawyers, how many great soldiers and
sailors, how many great traders and bankers, by the rank which
was given them as an honour, have become shamed through
the folly and misconduct of those who inherited it ! Had it
not been for the title, the very existence of these unworthy
descendants would be unknown; the chain which bound them
to their illustrious forefather would be unseen. Not every
foolish peer is " the tenth transmitter of some foolish face."
It is surprising how soon folly can appear among the descend-
ants of men of the most vigorous and the most subtle minds.
Happy it is for America that, free as her citizens are by the
very institutions of the country, from the almost overpowering
temptation to found a family, they are diverted into a widely
different path in the natural search after distinction ! There
are, indeed, among them, men so base that they turn their
back on their country where their wealth has been made and
is still accumulating, and, doing nothing for its good, lead a
luxurious life in Europe amidst all the refinements of an
ancient civilization. Others, unworthy of republican equality,
become hangers-on of the English aristocracy. "The wealth
of the New World," writes Dr. Wendell Holmes, "burrows
its way among the privileged classes of the Old World." ^
* R. W. Emerson, by O. W. Holmes, 1885, p. 180.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 19
"The gallantry and military spirit of the old English nobility "
is no longer content with "going into the city to look for a
fortune." It goes all the way to New York; unless, as some-
times happens, the fortune crosses the sea to look for it.
There are other Americans who, like the wretch Jay Gould,
heap up riches for riches* sake; who living give nothing and
dying leave nothing to any great and noble object. They
pass away without showing that for one single moment they
had been touched by a generous thought. "They die, and
make no sign."
It is, for the most part, by men who have been educated
at Harvard, or by those who wish to commemorate them, that
the gifts and bequests are made. Early last year, for instance,
a widow " executed an agreement with the President and Fel-
lows to build a Dormitory for the College at a cost of about
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars (;£30,673), to be
called Perkins Hall." It is raised as a memorial to three
graduates of her husband's family, the eldest of whom matri-
culated in 171 7 and the youngest in 1819.^ In 1764, under
the will of Thomas Hancock, the Hancock Professorship of
Hebrew and other Oriental languages had been founded.
The endowment was but small. One hundred and twenty-
eight years later, a remote descendant of the founder aug-
mented it "by a residuary legacy which has thus far yielded
seventy-two thousand dollars (;£i4,722).^ About the same
time the College received fifty thousand dollars (;^io,224)
under the will of George Bemis, towards the foundation of a
Chair of International Law.* In the same year, from the
estate of another graduate, George Draper, there came a
* Annual Reports^ 1892-93, p. 45. ^ lb, p. 3a
' Reports^ 1891-92, p. 26.
•
20 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
bequest of forty-seven thousand dollars (jQi)6io).^ These
are but instances of the never-failing stream of benefactions
by which the love of Harvard men is shown for Harvard. It
may be the case, and no doubt sometimes is the case, that it
is mainly by the desire of distinction that the gift is prompted.
Happy is the country where it is by the University and not by
the Crown that the wealthy trader is honoured, and where the
title which is coveted and won is not that of Knight or Baro-
net, but of Founder !
So constant and so bountiful are the contributions which
Harvard receives, that on them she counts for most of the
enlargements which are needed by the rapidly increasing
number of her students, and by the fresh requirements of
science and learning. The fees, therefore, that are paid
for tuition are laid out in providing not accommodation, but
instruction. New subjects are included in each year's course,
and additional professorships are established. In the brief
space of a young man's life. Harvard "has been removed out
of the strait into a broad place where there is no straitness."
We of the ancient universities may well look with wonder,
and even with a certain touch of sadness, on these great
doings. Why does not the same stream of bounty flow on
Oxford and Cambridge ? Why, when they make known their
needs, — and their needs often are great, — does not a gene-
rous benefactor at once arise. Balliol College, as a memorial
to its famous Master, is attempting, this very year, by public
subscription, to enlarge its foundation so that it may do even
greater things than it has already done. The sum which it
has received is not one-tenth part of what this American Uni-
versity receives almost every year; and yet less than half a
century ago the students at Harvard were not twice as nume-
1 Harvard Graduates^ Magazine ^ January, 1893, p. 252.
I. HARVARD COLLEGE. 21
rous as those of Balliol at the present time. In Cambridge,
by the great fall in rents, the salary of the Downing Professor
of Medicine has dwindled to two hundred pounds a year.
The post lately became vacant by the resignation of the Pro-
fessor. "It will be somewhat difficult," wrote the Times ^^
" to obtain a suitable successor owing to the fact that the pro-
fessorship is most insufficiently endowed." All the fame
that Cambridge has gained by her great School of Medicine
apparently does nothing for her. In the American Cam-
bridge, such an insufficiency in so important a professorship
could scarcely exist; it certainly would not last long. Ox-
ford ^ is wronged by the men who, even after all the reforms
which have been made, are overpaid for the work they do.
Much of the work done in the University is but ill-requited.
Many a College tutor measures out his labour not by what he
receives, but by a noble zeal for learning and for the welfare
of his pupils. Some of them, I think, would do more good
if they laboured less. The mischief from over-teaching is
not much less than the mischief from under-teaching. The
over-taught student, when his guide is from his side, gropes
helplessly along the road of learning. Be that as it may, the
work that is done in the University is generous in its total
amount when measured by its reward. Those who are over-
paid are few in number compared with the whole body, but
they are conspicuous by their position. To them must be
added the holders of prize fellowships, — men who for the
most part do nothing, and are expected to do nothing, either
for learning or even for teaching. In many departments
there is need of greater and of new endowments. These
will flow in but slowly, if they flow in at all, so long as it is
1 January 31, 1894.
^ I say nothing of Cambridge, of which I know but little.
22 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. I.
known in the country that large sums are still wasted, as wasted
they most certainly are. No one can reproach Harvard with
an ill use of her funds; no one, I believe, can point to
a single man who does not at least do a fair day's work for a
fair day's pay. "The College salaries," reported the Presi-
dent, ten years ago, "have remained stationary for fifteen
years, and all that while the College has been demanding of
its teachers more and more learning, labour, enthusiasm, and
personal influence." ^ Harvard has no prize appointments to
give away. She is above all favouritism. She lends no ear
to the claims of religious orthodoxy or of party politics. She
seeks the ablest teacher she can find, and she pays him not
extravagantly, but not illiberally. Whenever a need for help
arises, she appeals with confidence to her children, because
she can show that she makes a wise use of all that is intrusted
to her. Great as are her endowments, greater still are her
needs, for she is ever advancing, ever taking in fresh branches
of knowledge, ever drawing to herself fresh students. In the
annual report made by the President to the Board of Over-
seers, the whole state of the University — its work, its receipts,
its expenses, its hopes, its fears, its requirements — is all
clearly set forth before the whole community. As they read
it and think of the lowly past, " they look backward with
exultation and thanksgiving and forward with confidence and
high resolve."* It is this exultation and thanksgiving, this
confidence and high resolve, which form one of the chief
sources whence spring the great benefactions which are pour-
ing in upon the old College from her proud and grateful
children.
1 Annual Reports^ 1883-84, p. 45.
^ From the address of President Eliot at the Commemoration in 1886.
Harvard University^ 2joth Anniversary ^ p. 263.
CHAPTER II.
The Foundation of Harvard. — Cambridge in England and Cambridge
in New England. — "Fair Harvard." — Emmanuel College. — The
Washington Elm. — General Washington a Doctor of Laws. — The
University at Concord. — An Overbearing Treasurer. — Harvard and
Slavery.
THE pleasantness of Harvard I have already described.
It is a spot that a student can love. It is indeed
"Fair Harvard." Happily it has, moreover, that other great
quality without which a university seems maimed and imper-
fect, — a quality which no munificence can confer. It is
venerable. Measured by the age of the earliest foundations
of Oxford and Cambridge, it is almost in its youth. Never-
theless, when it was founded, Milton was still " inglorious," and
Cromwell a quiet country gentleman. Two years before our
Queen was crowned at Westminster it kept its two hundredth
anniversary. In the speeches made on that great day it
proudly carried back its past to that far-distant time when its
parent, the great English university, was founded on the banks
of the Cam. It was by a small knot of Cambridge men, men
who may have known " young Lycidas," that the foundations of
the American Cambridge were laid in the midst of dangers and
hardships. John Harvard was a Master of Arts of Emmanuel
College. Story, who at the time of the celebration of the two
hundredth anniversary of the College in 1836, by his lectures on
law, was making Harvard known to the Old World, gave as
23
24 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
his toast at the banquet: "Our Ancient Mother, the Uni-
versity of Cambridge in Old England — Sahe magna parens,
— Magna virum^ " The very spot," he said, " where we
are assembled is consecrated by a thousand endearing associa-
tions of the past. The very name of Cambridge compels us
to cast our eyes across the Atlantic, and brings up a glowing
gratitude for our unspeakable obligations to the parent uni-
versity whose name we proudly bear, and have borne for two
centuries." ^
These Harvard men were not content with doing honour to
the English Cambridge. They were more than members of a
university; they were citizens of a great Confederation of
States. They were New Englanders — New Englanders not
forgetful of the Old England from which they were sprung.
" Gratitude to the noble country of our fathers " was next
given as a toast by Dr. John Warren, the nephew of General
Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill. " Let us imagine ourselves,"
he said, " to have sprung from any other nation of Europe,
and how different, probably, would have been our condition.
To England we owe the vigorous freedom of thought which,
there taking its origin, was transplanted by our ancestors to a
virgin soil, and has grown with a luxuriance beyond example.
A common parentage, a common language, a community of
feeling, have given us all the privileges of English sentiment,
learning, and ingenuity. ... In our parent, England, we
have the happiness to see the great supporter and defender of
liberal institutions throughout the world. ... I do not
hesitate to say that there is a greatness in the conduct of
England during the convulsions of Europe [the Napoleonic
wars] which has no parallel in the story of admired Greece or
1 Quincy's Harvard^ II. 675.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 25
Rome. The efforts of these nations were inspirited by a love
of conquest, a love of power, a desire of revenge. England
was influenced by a higher principle — a determined and
unconquerable opposition to despotism." ^
This speech was made but one and twenty years after the
close of a war which had been provoked by our overbearing
violence on the seas, and which was disgraced by an act of bar-
barity worthy of a horde of Cossacks. The rising town of
Washington, the capital of the United States, had been burnt to
the ground by Englishmen. "Few more shameful acts are
recorded in our history; and it was the more shameful in
that it was done under strict orders from the government
at home."* Story's memory went back to the War of Inde-
pendence. In the small seaport town in which his childhood
was passed, peace, when at last it came, found nine hundred
widows whose husbands had fallen fighting on sea or land, all
victims to the mad folly of our government.' Had some
Englishman been present at this celebration, when he heard
such speeches as these, he might well have started from his
seat and exclaimed : —
"Some write their wrongs in marble; you, more just,
Stoop down serene and write them in the dust''
Not all the speakers were a Story and a Warren. The
American Eagle was to flap her wings and make her screams
heard, even in an ancient seat of learning. Edward Everett
was there, the president of the day, the perfection and model
of all that is bad in the oratory of the United SUtes. The
following passage shows what was esteemed eloquence in
^ Quincjr's Harvard^ II. 679.
* J. R. Green's Short History of the English People, p. 808.
• Life of Joseph Story , I. 31.
26 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
a country where Daniel Webster, still in the fulness of his
power, was showing how sublime is the force of simplicity.
" Yes, in the very dawn of independence, while the lions of
land yet lay slumbering in the long shadows of the throne,
an eaglet, bred in the delicate air of freedom which fanned
the academic groves, had, from his ' coign of vantage * on
yonder tower, drunk the first rosy sparkle of the sun of liberty
into his calm, undazzled eye, and whetted his talons for the
conflict." ^ It was not in this mould that Lincoln formed that
rugged eloquence which was heard at Gettysburg over the
graves of the soldiers who fell in the great war. Whoever was
his master in speech, most certainly it was not a rhetorician.
It was for the Centennial Celebration of 1836 that Fair
Harvard was written — that song which, as the year comes
round, is sung at every commencement by the great gathering
of Harvard men. It begins, —
** Fair Harvard I thy sons to thy Jubilee throng."
and ends, —
** Be the herald of Light and the bearer of Love,
Till the stock of the Puritans die."
The best verse is the following : —
"To thy bowers we were led in the bloom of our youth.
From the home of our free-roving years,
When our fathers had warned, and our mothers had prayed.
And our sisters had blest through their tears.
Thou then wert our parent, — the nurse of our souls, —
We were moulded to manhood by thee,
Till, freighted with treasure-thoughts, friendships, and hopes,
Thou didst launch us on Destiny's sea."
The speeches on this great day must have been brief — brief
for the speakers of the Old World, pretematurally brief for the
1 Quincy's Harvard, II. 658.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 27
orators of the New. It was not till the thirty-second toast that
the ladies were reached. There were forty toasts in all. " The
hour of eight o'clock having now arrived, Josiah Quincy, Junior,
moved, * That this Assembly of the Alumni be adjourned to
meet at this place on the 8th of September, 1936.* " ^ In spite
of the forty toasts it was not, so far as I can make out, eight
o'clock in the morning when the Assembly broke up, but only
eight o'clock in the evening. The moderation of each speaker
which allowed forty toasts to be gone through in five or six
hours at most is in striking contrast with the speech delivered
at Oxford not twenty years later by the Vice-Chancellor.
There, too, it was a great day ; for the orator and scholar,
the Earl of Derby, was welcomed as the new Chancellor of the
University, the successor of the great Duke« Some of the best
speakers of England were guests at the banquet, and a fine flow
of varied eloquence was looked for. There was a flow, but
most of it came from one source. The Vice-Chancellor, a man
insignificant except for his piety, spoke for two hours and more
at a stretch. By the time he sat down the audience was ex-
hausted, the orators were dejected, and the reporters, so I am
told, were drunk.
At Harvard the length of the adjournment was halved by
the next generation, who met in November, 1886. Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes, who in 1836, at the dinner, had sung a
song which he had written for the great day, half a century
later was the chosen poet of this second commemoration.
Lowell, as an undergraduate, had witnessed the earlier gather-
ing: he was now the Orator. Our English Cambridge was
represented by the Master of St. John's, and Emmanuel College
— John Harvard's College — by Dr. Creighton, Senior Fellow
1 Quincy*s Harvard, II. 706.
28 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
and Professor of Ecclesiastical History.^ Lowell ended his
oration by welcoming the guests, above all, the guests from
the foreign seats of learning. In the name of the Alumni
" I give," he said, " a special greeting to the gentleman who
brings the message of John Harvard's College, Emmanuel.
The welcome we give him could not be warmer than that
which we offer to his colleagues ; but we cannot help feeling
that in pressing his hand our own instinctively draws a little
more tightly, as with a sense of nearer kindred." This
passage, we are told, was more loudly applauded than almost
any other part of his speech.* That "blood is thicker than
water " was felt not only by the American commodore, when he
opened fire on the Chinese forts in support of our hard-pressed
gun-boats, but by these New Englanders who had gathered
together to celebrate the foundation of their University by their
English forefathers.
Two years earlier than this Commemoration when Emmanuel
College had celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of its
foundation, " two distinguished alumni of Harvard," said Dr.
Creighton, " Professor Lowell and Professor Norton, no less by
the dignity of their presence than by the eloquence of their
speech, had almost succeeded in converting our festival into a
celebration of Harvard College in its ancestral soil of England."
" The connection of Emmanuel College with Harvard Univer-
sity," he continued, " is an episode of unique picturesqueness
in academic annals, and sets Emmanuel College in a con-
spicuous place in the intellectual history of mankind." '
1 Now Bishop of Peterborough, formerly fellow and tutor of Merton
College, Oxford.
* Harvard University^ 2^oth Anniversary^ pp. 37, 236.
» lb. pp. 277, 303.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 29
While Harvard thus keeps up her hold on the past, she at
times somewhat needlessly breaks with old customs. When
Lowell was appointed Minister to Spain, he wrote to a friend :
" You must remember that I am ' H. E.* [His Excellency]
now myself, and can show a letter with that superscription. I
dare say I shall enjoy it after I get there, but at present it is
altogether a bore to be honourabled at every turn. The world
is a droll affair. And yet, between ourselves, dear Grace, I
should be pleased if my father could see me in capitals on the
Triennial Catalogue. You remember Johnson's pathetic letter
to Chesterfield. How often I think of it as I grow older ! " *
This Catalogue — " such is the rage of innovation " — is no
longer triennial but quinquennial, and the capitals are no longer
preserved ; nay, it has suffered still more unworthy treatment,
for it is now printed in the vulgar tongue. " Since Harvard
has grown to a University," writes the editor of Lowell's Letters,
" the Catalogue has been deprived alike of the dignity of its
traditional Latin, and of those capitals in which the sons of
hers who had attained to public official distinction, such as
that of Member of Congress, or Governor of a State, or Judge
of a United States Court, were elevated above their fellow-
students. To have one's name in capitals in the Catalogue
was a reward worth achieving." Nevertheless, there must have
been a certain incongruity in a Catalogue in which Caleb Gush-
ing was printed large, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, William H.
Prescott, Wendell Phillips, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were
printed small.
"^Letters of J. R, Lowell, 11. 210. "The notice which you have been
pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind ; but it
has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am soli-
tary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want \V* — Bot-
well's Life ofyohnson, I. 262.
30 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Harvard, like Oxford, has been the seat of a camp, and has
seen learning yield to the rough needs of war. It was on the
Common, not a furlong from the College, beneath the graceful
branches of an American elm, that, as an inscription shows,
" Washington first took command of the American army, July
3, 1775." The Common was not the pleasant spot that it now
is, with its green lawn, its groves, and its trim paths. It was
" an unenclosed dust plain," across which the drovers, on their
way to Boston market, used to take their herds of cattle. The
two English cannon stamped G. R., which stand in the middle
as trophies of war, had not yet been captured. They were
helping to hold Boston against its own citizens. Not fifty years
had gone by since the College, in a loyal address, had assured
another G. R. that " they had shed tears over the grave of the
great King his Father."^ In July, 1875, ^^ centenary of this
famous day was celebrated. " We have still standing," wrote
Lowell, " the elm under which Washington took command of
the American (till then provincial) army, and under which
also Whitefield had preached some thirty years before." * The
tree, though broken, still retains much of its gracefulness.
Among all the spots, famous in the noble history of man's
struggle for freedom, it is by no means the least worthy of
veneration. As I stood by it and read the inscription, there
came into my mind the words of the old English Tory, the
stem enemy of American Independence — " that man is little
to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the
plain of Marathon." This, indeed, was " ground dignified by
wisdom, bravery, and virtue." Washington, for many months,
had his headquarters in a fine mansion hard by, which is now
generally known, not by his name, but by Longfellow's. Here
1 Quincy's Harvard^ I. 383. ^Letters of J, R. Lowell^ II. 159.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE, 31
the poet had his quiet home for the greater part of his life.
Washington's memorials are so many that he can afford to
yield one to literature. Cedant arma togae.
Few of the Harvard students had witnessed the great scene
in the world's drama which had been played beneath the elm.
Two months earlier the Committee of Safety had dispersed
them to their homes. It was at Harvard that many years
earlier Samuel Adams, the cousin of two Presidents of the
United States, had maintained in a thesis read before the
College the lawfulness of rebellion. In 1768, seven years
before the war broke out, the Graduating Class had unani-
mously voted "to take their degrees in the manufactures of
the country," and had appeared at Commencement in untaxed
home-manufactured garments.^ The following year, the Gov-
ernor of the Commonwealth had attempted to overawe the
House of Representatives by a display of military force. Can-
non was pointed at the door of the State House in which they
met. They refused to continue their sittings. The Governor,
who had received his orders from England, said that he had
no authority to take away the troops. He did, however, all
that a reasonable man could do. Not being able to remove
the cannon from the Legislature, he removed the Legislature
from the cannon. He adjourned the House to Harvard Col-
lege, where it met in the Chapel. One of the Fellows has
described in a letter written at the time, how " this removal
hinders the scholars in their studies. The young gentlemen
are already taken up with politics. They have caught the
spirit of the times. Their declamations and forensic disputes
breathe the spirit of liberty. This has always been encouraged,
but they have sometimes been wrought up to such a spirit of
^ Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 163.
32 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
enthusiasm, that it has been difficult for their Tutors to keep
them within close bounds; but their Tutors are fearful of
giving too great a check to a disposition which may hereafter
fill the country with patriots." It was no doubt the memory
of "this spirit of liberty" which led Governor Hancock to
speak of Harvard as " in some sense the parent and nurse of
the late happy Revolution in this Commonwealth." All the
Massachusetts men who signed the Declaration of Indepen-
dence were her children. There were, however, a few Tories
among the undergraduates " who were in the practice of bring-
ing ' Indian tea ' into Commons, and drinking it to show their
loyalty. The Governors of the Seminary advised them not to
do it in future, ' as it was a source of grief and uneasiness to
many of the students, and as the use of it is disagreeable to the
people of the country in general.* " ^
The "enthusiasm " which the Tutors were unwilling to check
in these youthful patriots broke out in a rebellion within the
College. While outside the war was raging, the three upper
Classes assembled in the Hall, and voted to send a memorial
to the Corporation, in which they charged their President with
" impiety, heterodoxy, unfitness for the office of preacher of
the Christian religion, and still more for that of President."
" There was," writes Quincy, " not a shadow of foundation for
any of these charges, except the last." A Committee of twelve
" were appointed to wait upon the President, and invite him to
resign his office." The poor man, who was ignorant of his
unpopularity, was so deeply touched that he resolved at once to
retire. It was on Saturday that the deputation had waited on
him; on the following Monday, after morning prayers, he
detained the students, and told them that he should resign.
1 Quincy's Harvard, II. 148, 163, 164, 244.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 33
" His family, he said, would be thrown destitute on the
world, and he intimated that resolutions of a favourable
character might be of service to him. This conduct subdued
their rebellious spirits." They met again, and "with like
unanimity passed directly opposite resolutions, excepting only
his unfitness for the office of President." ^ The ferment was
slow in subsiding. Channing, who entered Harvard about
fifteen years later, describes " a state of great insubordination,
and the almost total absence of the respect due to individuals
[the teachers] of so much worth. The French Revolution
had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding
of men everywhere. The authority of the past was gone." *
When, in 1775, hostilities began between the mother
country and the Colonies, the seat of war in the opening years
was too near for the peaceful life of a university, and moreover
the College buildings were needed for barracks. At the end of
the vacation the students assembled at Concord, fifteen miles
or so from Cambridge. There lodgings were provided for a
hundred and twenty-five. Part of the library also was removed
and arranged on shelves in a private house.' The Concord
" turnpike " * — since dignified by the name of Avenue — crossed
the Common. It was at Concord that the first shots had been
fired and the first blood shed. In June of the following year
the students once more assembled in Harvard. The English
army had abandoned Boston, and there was no longer an
enemy in their gates. Their buildings had suffered from the
military occupation. From the roof of the hall lead had been
stripped, no doubt to be turned into bullets. Before long, Cam-
^ Quincy's Harvard, II. 179.
« Life of W. E. Channing, I. 59. « lb, II. 166.
* In America turnpike is commonly used for turnpike-road,
D
34 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
bridge was again to be crowded, not this time with armed sol-
diers, but with prisoners of war, the remnant of Burgoyne's army.
In LowelFs day there were still to be seen in Massachusetts
Hall the hooks from which had swung the hammocks of the
red-coats.^ Late last century hooks for a very different pur-
pose were fixed up in an Oxford College. One of the Fellows
of University College whom I was visiting many years ago told
me that he had that day received a letter from an aged clergy-
man, a former member of the College, asking him to see
whether in the ceiling of a certain room a couple of hooks
were still there. From the hooks his hunting-breeches used
to be suspended, into which he let himself down from a pair
of steps. They were, according to the fashion, too tight to
draw on in the ordinary way.
The blockade of the coast by the English fleet, cutting off the
supply of luxuries from abroad, compelled the Corporation to
pass the following resolutions on August ii, 1777 : —
" Whereas by law 9th of chap. vi. it is provided, * that there shall always
be chocolate, tea, coffee, and milk for breakfast, with bread and biscuit ^ and
butter,' and whereas the foreign articles above mentioned are now not to
be procured without great difficulty and at a very exorbitant price; Voted^
That the Steward shall provide at the common charge only bread or biscuit
and milk for breakfast; and if any of the scholars choose tea, coffee, or
chocolate they shall procure those articles for themselves; and likewise the
sugar and butter to be used with them; and if any scholars choose to have
their milk boiled, or thickened with flour, if it may be had, or with meal,
the Steward, having reasonable notice, shall provide it.'' >
On the day year on which Washington had taken command
of the American army, the degree of Doctor of Laws was con-
1 Literary Essays, by J. R. Lowell, 1890, I. 56.
^ Biscuit, according to the American use of the word, is hot rolls.
• Quincy's Harvard, II. 541.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 35
ferred on him by Harvard. He was the first man to be thus
distinguished by the University. It was indeed a noble begin-
ning of the long line of honours. His diploma described him
as: —
** Vir illustrissimus, Georgius Washington, Armiger, Exercitus Colonia-
rtim in America Foederatarum Imperator praeclarus . . . qui, postulante
Patria sedem in Virginia amoenissimam et res proprias perlubenter reliquit,
ut . . . Nov-Angliam ab armis Britannorum iniquis et crudelibus liberaret,
et Colonias cseteras tueretur, et qui . . . ab urbe Bostonia . . . naves et
copias hostium in fugam praecipitem et probrosam deturebavit,^ adeo ut
cives, plurimis duritiis et saevitiis oppressi, tandem salvi laetentur, vilke
vicinae quiescant atque sedibus suis Academia nostra restituatur.
''Sciatis igitur quod nos . . . Dominum supradictum, summo honore
dignum, Georgium Washington, Doctorem Utriusque Juris, tum Naturae et
Gentium, tum Civilis, statuimus et creavimus." ^
A year earlier, a few days before the fight at Concord, Oxford
had conferred a like degree on Samuel Johnson, on the recom-
mendation of its Chancellor, the Prime Minister, Lord North,
in return, there can be little doubt, for Taxation no Tyranny ;
an Answer to the Resolutions and Addresses of the American
Congress, It was thus that "the Whigs of America, Whigs
fierce for liberty and disdainful of dominion, who multiply with
the fecundity of their own rattlesnakes,"* replied to the honour
conferred by the Tory statesman and the Tory university on
the Tory pamphleteer.
Even before the Revolution was brought to an end the
patriots of Harvard found that, not only in a monarchy but
also in a democracy, injustice and insolence may have to be
borne and borne patiently. George III. was down, but Gov-
ernor Hancock was up. In an evil day for the University that
^ In this headlong and shameful flight the two cannons that now stand
on Cambridge Common had been thrown into the harbour.
* Quincy's Harvard, II. 506. • Boswell*s Life of Johnson, II. 314.
36 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
favourite of the people had been appointed Treasurer. " He
embarrassed it during a period of nearly twenty years." He
would neither discharge the duties of his office nor resign his
post. The Corporation, after patiently waiting for two or three
years, appointed his successor. To conciliate the great man
they passed a vote, that a committee should "wait on the
Hon. John Hancock, Esq., with the most respectful compli-
ments of the Corporation, and request that he should permit
his portrait to be forthwith conveyed to the College, and placed
in the Philosophy Chamber, by that of his late honourable
uncle." He neither sent his portrait nor settled his accounts.
He had been " exposed to those severe trials of human char-
acter, — great wealth suddenly acquired and unbounded and
long-continued popularity." So powerful was his position that
the Corporation did not dare to bring him before a court of
law. They could scarcely have been worse off had they had to
deal with George HI. himself. It was not till full eleven years
after their first demand that he condescended to state the
amount of the balance still owing by him to the College. On
being pressed for payment he would do nothing more than
give a bond and security. It was in vain that the distress
of the Professors was laid before him. Their salaries were
unpaid, but neither interest nor principal could be got out of
the great man. He died in 1793, leaving ample means, but
the debt still owing. It was not till eight or nine years later
that his heirs discharged it. With some reason does President
Quincy remark at the end of this strange story : " In republics
popularity is the form of power most apt to corrupt' its pos-
sessor, and to tempt him, for party ends or personal interest, to
trample on right, or set principle at defiance."^
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 182, 203-209, 523.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 37
However much Harvard distinguished herself in the long
struggle for the independence of the Colonies, unhappily she
did not always range herself on the side of liberty. All
through the opening scenes of the great struggle between
freedom and slavery she was the champion of the slave-holder.
When on one side stood the President and Congress, the
Legislatures of almost all the States, the judicature, the Civil
Service, the Churches, the mobs, the wealthy, the cowardly, all
the " safe " men, all the " moderate " men, and on the other
side William Lloyd Garrison and his little band, " harsh as
truth and uncompromising as justice," she chose the part of
shame. To serve the Union, stained and darkened though it
was by the Fugitive Slave Law, she was ready to sacrifice
justice, mercy, and honour. She showed that even in a re-
public a university is too apt to side with the powers that be
against the right that ought to be. Not even Oxford and Cam-
bridge have ever disgraced themselves more than the New
England University by taking the part of the strong and the
privileged against the weak and the helpless. What Loyal
Address to the Crown was more shameful than the toast given
at the Centennial Celebration in 1836 : " Massachusetts and
South Carolina; they stood by one another nobly in the
darkest days of peril and adversity ; may long years of mutual
prosperity find them undivided." ^ Their mutual prosperity
was the prosperity of slave-owners and slave-traders, of
planters who grew cotton by slave-labour, and of merchants
who dealt in it, and manufacturers who spun it and wove it.
This prosperity was threatened by a few " fanatical and factious
Abolitionists," as Daniel Webster called them;* threatened
far more by the still small voice of conscience, which, under
1 Quincy's Harvard^ II. 683. ^ Life of Daniel Webster, II. 516.
38 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
the upbraidings of these men, was beginning to make itself
heard in ten thousand bosoms. To silence this voice cant
was called in at the Banquet, as, in like circumstances, it is
called in at all times and in all places. After this toast to the
maintenance of Southern slavery, its maintenance by "the
grand old Bay State," had been drunk, these Harvard men
next drank to " civil and religious liberty here and every-
where." " How is it," old Samuel Johnson roughly asked,
" How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among
the drivers of negroes? " Even Lowell, even the author of the
Biglow Papers, had caught this strong, this rank contagion of
the gown. Two years after this celebration it fell to his lot to
write the poem for class day. " I made fun of the Abolition-
ists in my Class Poem," so he wrote nearly fifty years later.^
Nine months before this Harvard undergraduate, in the
presence of the President, the professors, the students and
their friends, made fun of these men, one of them, Elijah
Lovejoy, a minister of religion, had been murdered by a cruel
mob of citizens — all friends, no doubt, of civil and religious
liberty, there and everywhere — murdered because, in defiance
of mob-law, he advocated in a small newspaper the freedom of
the slave. Four months beforie this Harvard undergraduate
made fun of these men, a new Hall built by the Abolitionists
in the City of Brotherly Love, " dedicated to Free Discus-
sion, Virtue, Liberty, and Independence," had been burnt to
the ground by another mob. Three months before this Har-
vard undergraduate made fun of these men, in the city of
Boston hard by, another anti-slavery building would have been
wrecked by a third mob, had it not been for the Mayor, who
for once — a rare example in those bad days — was ready by
^Letters of J, R, Lowell, II. 338.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 39
military force to protect peaceful citizens meeting in lawful
assembly.^ "They make a game of my calamities/' some
deeply wronged Abolitionist might have exclaimed, had any
one of them been present on this Class Day. Lowell's noble
nature was soon to shake itself free from " Harvard indiffer-
ence." Before the year came to a close he wrote : " The
Abolitionists are the only ones with whom I sympathize of the
present extant parties." Eight years later he described these
same Abolitionists as " a body of heroic men and women,
whom not to love and admire would prove me unworthy of
either of those sentiments, and whose superiors in all that con-
stitutes true manhood and womanhood I believe never ex-
isted."*
It was not in undergraduate days at Harvard that in Wendell
Phillips was first stirred that passionate eloquence which did
so much to rouse the land to a sense of its guilt. He had
passed through the College and the Law School, and was still
indifferent to the good cause.* It was perhaps indignation at
what his Alma Mater had not done for him that moved him to
exclaim, after the long struggle which ended in Lincoln's first
election : " The agitation was a yeomanly service to liberty.
It educated the people. One such canvass makes amends for
the cowardice of our scholars, and consoles us under the inflic-
tion of Harvard College." * In 1848 Sumner was passing from
town to town in Massachusetts, speaking in favour of the Free-
Soil Party. Nowhere but in Cambridge was the meeting dis-
turbed. There the students " interrupted him with hisses and
'^Life of W. Z. Garrison^ II. 184, 213, 218.
^ Letters of y, R. Lowell^ I. 37, 123.
' Life of Charles Sumner ^ III. 69.
* Wendell Phillips's Speeches^ etc., ed. 1863, p. 306.
40 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
coarse exclamations. He singled out the leader of the distur-
bance and said, ' The young man who hisses will regret it ere
his hairs turn gray.* " Perhaps he recalled it with deep sorrow
on some lonely day's march with the Northern army, or in all
the misery of a Southern prison. Longfellow was one of the
audience. In his journal he recorded : ^ " Sumner spoke admi-
rably well. But the shouts and the hisses and the vulgar inter-
ruptions grated on my ears. I was glad to get away." * Fif-
teen months after Sumner was hissed in this New England
University another New Englander, Daniel Webster, made that
infamous speech of March 7, 1850, which forever covered with
shame the name of the greatest American orator. " He is,"
wrote Lowell, " the most meanly and foolishly treacherous man
I ever heard of." * In the idle hope of saving the Union and
making himself President, the old man was ready in almost
everything to yield to the Slave States. Slavery was to be
extended and its foundations were to be laid more firmly
than ever. The cowardice of scholars was once more seen.
He was supported by Ticknor, Everett, Sparks, Felton,
Motley, and Parkman. Even Dana, who at the risk of his
life defended a runaway slave in the Boston Law Courts, was
ready to grant the South a Fugitive Slave Law — "a bona
fide one, but one consistent with laws, decency, safety to the
free, and the self-respect of the North."* Among Harvard
men of letters Emerson, Sumner, and Lowell stood together,
and I fear alone, on the right side. The Professors in the Law
School read lectures in defence of the Fugitive Slave Law.
"^Life of Charles Sumner ^ IIL 173.
^ Life of H. IV. Longfellow^ IL 127.
« Letters of J, R, Lowell, I. 208.
^ Life of Charles Sumner, III. 205, 208, n, 4 ; Life of R, H, Dana, 1. 126.
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 41
The students who heard them, untouched by the generous
feelings of youth, were no better than their teachers. More
than a hundred attended the classes. Of these only six were
on the side of freedom ; " the rest were nearly all bitter against
the Free-Soil Party." ^ On May 14, 1851, Longfellow recorded
in \}L\& Journal : " Went to hear Emerson on the Fugitive Slave
Law at the Cambridge City Hall. ... It is rather painful to
see Emerson in the arena of politics hissed and hooted at by
young law students."* After the ruffian Brooks's cruel assault
on Sumner in the Senate, when all that was not base in America
was fired with indignation, it was Amherst College that at once
conferred an honorary degree on the much-suffering man. His
own Alma Mater let three years pass by before she honoured
him. No degree was ever conferred on William Lloyd Garri-
son either at Harvard or anywhere else.' Universities, with
their strong spirit of conservatism, are always slow to honour
the men who raise the unwilling world to a higher level of
morality. If anything could wash away this stain from Harvard,
it was the blood of her sons so freely shed on many a battle-
field of the great war. But in spite of their generous devotion
the stain remains. In the long struggle for freedom it was not
till it entered upon its last and greatest act that the oldest and
the first of American universities was found in the van.
^ Life of Charles Sumner ^ III. 207, 246, «. 2.
^Life of H, W, Longfelhvt, II. 194.
'In 1865 he was made an honorary member of the Harvard Phi
Beta Kappa.
CHAPTER III.
Religious Liberty.— The Divinity School.— The College Chapel.— The
Dudleian Lectures. — The English Liturgy.
IF, to civil liberty, Harvard at one time showed herself in-
different, in religious liberty she has taken the lead of all
the older universities of the English-speaking race. Happily,
even in her first charter, she was free from the predominance
of any single church. Had the College been founded in Rhode
Island, where Roger Williams and his followers gave the world
the first example of a government founded on the principles
of complete religious liberty, such freedom would not have
been astonishing. In Plymouth, from the Pilgrim Fathers,
the Separatists of England, the founders of the Independent
Churches, some measure of tolerance might have been looked
for. But in Boston, among the stem Puritans, where State
and Church were one, where none but members of the Church
were freemen of the State, who would not have expected to
find President^ Fellows, and students all bound fast by a rigid
test? This freedom, it has been conjectured, was due
rather to a careless feeling of security than to intention.
The constitution of the Commonwealth itself might be trusted
"to bind their souls with secular chains." If such was the
security of the founders of Harvard College, they forgot that
the charter of a colony was liable to change. Theirs was
annulled by the tyranny of Charles II. in those evil days
42
CHAP. m. HARVARD COLLEGE. 43
towards the end of his reign^ when Jeffreys, in his progress
through English towns, was " making all the charters, like the
walls of Jericho, fall down before him." In the new charter,
granted in 1692 by William and Mary, property, not church-
membership, was made the qualification for a vote.^ The
door, if not thrown open for the entrance of free thought, was,
at all events, unbarred. For many a long day there was to
be little of freedom as it was understood by Roger Williams
of the seventeenth century, and by us of the latter years of
the nineteenth. Nevertheless, so great was the alarm given
to the orthodox that Yale College was founded in the hope
that from it might flow a never-failing spring of untainted
Calvinism.* From the servitude that was then imposed, that
university has no more shaken herself wholly free than has
Oxford from the servitude of Anglicanism. Both have done
much, but both have still much to do. Even at the present
day. Harvard is regarded by Yale as the London University
used to be regarded by the orthodox of Oxford and Cam-
bridge. It is "the Godless university," Harvard retorts on
Yale that it is the home of superstition and Phariseeism. A
writer in iht Harvard Crimson^ says: "Yale friends naturally
accuse Harvard students of being irreligious; while Harvard
advocates call the Yale religious life hypocrisy."
From the time when the new charter was granted to the
Colony, Harvard, in matters of theology, has kept pace with
the people, its thoughts widening as their thoughts widened.
The President and Fellows would often, indeed, have moved
faster, but they were restrained by the Board of Overseers,
1 Quincy*8 Harvard^ 1. 55; The Beginning of New England^ by John
Fiske, 1893, pp. 264, 275.
.* Quincy*8 Harvard^ I. 197. * June 23, 1893.
44 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
on which the Congregational ministers of Cambridge and the
five nearest towns sat by right. In 1820, when the constitu-
tion of Massachusetts was revised, even the overseers were
ahead of the people in liberal thought. They proposed to
admit ministers of all denominations of Christians to these
clerical seats, but in a popular vote this proposition was re-
jected.^ Fourteen years later, in 1834, an act was passed by
the Legislature of Massachusetts, which enabled the two gov-
erning bodies of the University to effect this reform. One or
other of these bodies was now behind the people, perhaps
both; for it was not till 1843 that they availed themselves of
their powers.* By the Act of 185 1, all clerical restrictions
were removed, not a single seat on the Board being any longer
confined to the ministry.*
As in Massachusetts, Calvinism had gradually softened into
Unitarianism, so Harvard had gradually become, if not a
Unitarian College, a College of Unitarians. Judge Story's
father, who was born in 1 743, was not sent to Harvard, writes
his son, "lest he should there imbibe those heretical tenets,
which, in the form of Arminianism, were then supposed to
haunt those venerable shades." The judge, who went to the
College, shook himself free from his Calvinism, and was sev-
eral times President of the American Unitarian Association.^
It was by Unitarians that the Divinity School was founded
in 18 16. In its constitution, "the following article was a
fundamental one : ' It being understood that every encourage-
ment be given to the serious, impartial, and unbiassed inves-
tigation of Christian truth, and that no assent to the peculiari-
ties of any denomination of Christians be required either of
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ IL 332. * Harvard Catalogue, p. 24.
^3. * Life of Joseph Story, I. 2, 57.
m. HARVARD COLLEGE. 45
the students, or professors, or instructors. ' " ^ The School was,
however, " regarded as distinctively Unitarian, and so caused
uneasiness to the government of the University on account of
its denominational position. As the College began to take
its position as an unsectarian institution, it seemed a hin-
drance in its course that a Unitarian Divinity School should
be attached to it. It was felt that, in the public estimate,
the School would give a denominational aspect to the whole
University."^ An attempt was accordingly made to separate
it from the College. "An enabling act was passed by the
Legislature in 1858, but the project of separation was never
carried further. It was conceded that it would be false to all
our traditions, if, in a College named for * a Puritan minister,
fostered by a Puritan clergy, and bearing on its corporate seal
the motto Chrisio et Ecclesice, religion should be the only
subject deliberately excluded."* In 1878 the movement set
the other way, and a large sum of money was raised for the
further endowment of the School. "The Harvard Divinity
School," said Professor Eliot on this occasion, "is not dis-
tinctively Unitarian either by its constitution or by the inten-
tion of its founders. The government of the University can-
not undertake to appoint none but Unitarian teachers, or to
grant any peculiar favours to Unitarian students." So far
was it from doing so, that in 1887, of the six professors in
the theological Faculty, two were Baptists and one an Ortho-
dox Congregationalist, while of the eleven members compos-
ing the visiting committee, not half were Unitarians.® Never-
1 Quincy's Harvard, II. 546.
* Professor C. C. Everett quoted in Higher Education in Massachusetts,
by G. G. Bush, p. 144.
* An American says ** named y&r" where we say " named after ^^
* Higher Education, etc., p. 141. * lb. p. 144.
46 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
theless; in spite of this mixture of creeds, in spite of the fact
that three of the professors orthodoxly, if not practically,
believed that the other three were doomed to "the everlasting
bonfire," the President could say in his Annual Report : "There
is no more harmonious Faculty in the University, and none
more completely devoted to the unbiassed search for truth." ^
Verily, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the days seem already
to have come when " the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and
the leopard shall lie down with the kid."
However much the College was once given over to Unitari-
anism, the President and Fellows fifty-six years ago showed
that they entertained something of a superstitious feeling in
the use of their Chapel. Longfellow, one of the most reli-
gious of men, writing to his father about his work at Harvard
as a professor, said : " I am now upon Dante — unwritten lec-
tures; but I have petitioned the Corporation for the use of
the Chapel next summer for a course of written /^^MV lectures.
By public, I mean free to any and every one who chooses to
attend, whether in college or out of college." He no doubt
asked for the Chapel as the only available place. Six weeks
later he recorded in hi^ Journal: "The President told me that
the Corporation would not allow me the use of the Chapel for
public lectures in the summer. They do not approve my
plan. So it ends. "^
Professor Goodwin, looking forward to the position that
Harvard is likely to hold before many years have gone by,
says : " She will be fully equipped for the best work in every de-
partment, in Theology, in Law, in Medicine, and in the Arts
and Sciences. I think we may be sure that she will always
^ Higher Education, etc., p. 145.
^Life ofH W, Longfellow, 1886, 1. 275, 282.
ni. HARVARD COLLEGE. 47
represent the foremost progress of science, and will always
welcome the boldest speculation on every subject. No party
nor sect will control her teaching, to cause either the pro-
mulgation of unscientific dogmas or the suppression of scien-
tific truth. I need hardly say that no exception will be made
in this respect for philosophy, political science, or even theol-
ogy. Public opinion is fast settling this matter beyond the
reach of controversy. Parties and sects will, of course, preach
their own doctrines and creeds then in their own schools, as
they do now; but the true university can recognize only the
free and unbiassed search for truth for the truth's sake. Hap-
pily we have no antiquated statutes or traditions to sweep
away to prepare us for the coming age. Our ancient motto
Veritas stands always over our own gates, and we interpret it
by the principle of freedom. 'Prove all things; hold fast to
that which is good. * " ^ The Professor seems somewhat con-
veniently to forget the other ancient motto, Chris to etEcclesia.
In the Sunday and week-day services of the College Chapel
the same impartiality is shown as in the Divinity School. Five
preachers of eminence, from among the ministers of all de-
nominations, are chosen every year " to arrange and conduct
the religious services of the University. Each conducts daily
morning prayers for about three weeks in the first half-year
and about three weeks in the second half-year, and each
preaches on four Sunday evenings."^ Dr. Herford, an Eng-
lish Unitarian divine, was for some years one of the five.
The preachers for the present year are a bishop of the Metho-
dist Episcopal Church, a Congregationalist, two Episcopa-
lians, and a Unitarian.
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College , p. 40.
* Catalogue^ p. 478.
y
48 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
Among those of past years was Bishop Phillips Brooks,
whose early death I found everywhere mourned in Massachu-
settSy and in whose memory a meeting was last year held in
the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey. On the Sunday
evenings when none of the five officiates, the pulpit is filled
by a Select Preacher, to use the Oxford designation. Among
these, in 1892, were Bishop Vincent, the Right Rev, H. C.
Potter, and Professor Drummond of Glasgow. In the spring
of the present year, a Roman Catholic priest — a former stu-
dent of Harvard — officiated for the first time. The prayers
which he recited were collects translated from the Latin, and
the lesson which he read was, as he remarked, from the mass
for the day. His sermon was a philosophical argument for
faith in the Supernatural. Of the Supernatural he gave no
definition. A fortnight later, the pulpit was filled by Pro-
fessor Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Societies — a
teacher who would hardly call himself a theist. For those
students who care to attend the services of the sects to which
they belong, seats are provided in the Cambridge churches,
at the expense of the College.
Of the great libecality of the University in religious matters
the following curious instance was given me. A son of Joseph
Dudley, who was Governor of the Colony in the first years of
the eighteenth century, founded a lectureship in divinity.
Four lectures were to be delivered every year on certain sub-
jects strictly laid down in the trust-deed, one being, "the
idolatry, errors, and superstitions of the Romish Church."
As the value of money fell, the lecturer's payment became so
small that for many years the course was discontinued while
the fund accumulated. The College at one time thought of
getting an act passed by which it should be applied to some
in. HARVARD COLLEGE, 49
other purpose. They were deterred by the reflection that
such a measure might be a check to endowments and bequests
in a country where the general sentiment as to the sanctity of
the wishes of founders and testators is usually strong. The
trustees^ it was found, were willing to interpret the provisions
of the trust somewhat laxly. By spreading the course of four
lectures over as many years, they were able to offer an annual
pajonent sufficient to secure on each occasion a preacher who
would not disgrace the University. Their first appointment
was the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, who, to comply
with the testator's direction, took for his subject the errors of
Romanism, treating them historically. The third lecture,
also in compliance with the terms of the foundation, was " for
the confirmation, illustration, and improvement of the great
articles of the Christian religion, properly so called." It
was delivered by the Right Rev. Bishop John J. Keane, rector
of the Roman Catholic University of America.^
Till recent years the attendance at the College Chapel was
compulsory. Under this system, there was even greater irre-
verence than was to be seen in an Oxford Chapel in the days
when we had to "keep" so many chapels a week, and when
"chapelling" was used as a form of punishment. In my
College, and I believe in most others, an undergraduate was
expected to attend chapel eight times a week — "to keep
eight chapels," as we called it. If in his Freshman's year he
was regular, he might in his later terms become laxer in his
attendance, especially if his general conduct was good. The
penalty for too great laxness was "chapelling." He who
was " chapelled " had to attend morning and evening service
during a period fixed by the Dean. These services were the
1 Quincy's Harvard, II. 139; Catalogue, 1891-92, p. no.
s
50 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
full services of the Church; prayers for the Queen, Royal
Family, and High Court of Parliament included. At Harvard
last century, attendance and good behaviour were enforced by
the following fines : —
Absence from prayers two pence
Tardiness at prayers one penny
Absence from public worship nine pence
Tardiness at public worship three pence
Ill-behaviour at public worship not exceeding nine pence
Neglect to repeat the sermon nine pence ^
In my time, at Oriel College, then under the rule of that
model of formality and preciseness. Provost Hawkins, the
undergraduates, as I was informed by one of the scholars,
were each required to " repeat " the University sermon, or at
all events to send in to their tutor a report of it. Many of
them used to meet after dinner on the Sunday evening, and
there, over their cigars and whisky and water, write out the
sermon by the aid of one or two who had been present at
St. Mary's. Perhaps some of the "repeating" at Harvard
was done on the same system.
Stories are told of the pranks played of old by the students.
Sometimes in the candles which lighted the pulpit, holes were
bored and gunpowder was inserted so as to cause an explosion
during the sermon. One day a cracker was fastened to the
Bible. The Bible itself was thrice stolen. Once it was
sent, stripped of its binding, to the librarian of Yale College,
with a dog- Latin inscription on the fly-leaf, in which it was
stated: "Coveres servamus in usum chessboardi pro Helter
Skelter Club." The tongue of the Chapel bell was removed;
"the seats allotted to the Freshmen were painted green;
1 Quincy's Harvardy II. 499.
in. HARVARD COLLEGE. 51
Stripes like those on a barber's pole were painted on the
porch of the Chapel." In fact, the Harvard boys behaved
just as ill as Christ Church men. The irreverence was no
doubt mainly due to the length and frequency of the services.
As if they were not trying enough in themselves, theological
dissertations by divinity students were frequently read aloud
after evening prayers. In a single year the undergraduates
suffered under thirty- two such inflictions.^ It sometimes
happened that the minister who conducted the service by his
eccentricity provoked mirth. I was told of one old President
who, when his mind was failing, one morning astonished the
congregation by praying that " their intemperance might be
turned into temperance, and their industry into dustry."
In Yale far greater decorum seems to have been maintained.
Professor Thacher, in his Life of Benjamin Silliman, writing
of the years 1831 to 1835, tells how "the students', at the close
of the services in the Chapel, always waited respectfully for
the Professors to pass between their ranks and leave the house
first. Professor Silliman took the lead, receiving the bows
of the Seniors and Freshmen successively with all the stateli-
ness and easy grace of a man born to head a procession." ^
A happy chance, wisely turned to account, gave the first
blow in Harvard to compulsory attendance at religious ser-
vices. In 1872-73, the Chapel was closed for alterations,
and morning prayer was discontinued for some months.
President Eliot in his report for that year said : —
** The Faculty thus tried, quite involuntarily, an interesting experiment
in College discipline. It has been a common opinion that morning prayers
were not only right and helpful in themselves, but also necessary to College
1 An Historical Sketch, etc., by W. R. Thayer, p. 45.
* Vol. II. p. 341.
52 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
discipline, partly as a morning roll-call and partly as a means of enforcing
continuous residence. It was therefore interesting to observe that the
omission of morning prayers for nearly five months, at the time of year
when the days are shortest and coldest, had no ill effects whatever on G>1-
lege order or discipline. There was no increased irregularity of attendance
at morning exercises, no unusual number of absences, and, in fact, no visi-
ble effect upon the other exercises of the G>llege, or upon the quiet and
order of the place. The Professors and other teachers living beyond the
sound of the prayer-bell would not have known from any effect produced
upon their work with the students that morning prayers had been inter-
mitted." 1
The President and Fellows, using their common sense,
passed a vote that attendance at Chapel should henceforth be
voluntary. The overseers, not using theirs, exercised their
right of veto. Some relaxation was however made; what is
called the thin edge of the wedge by all enemies of liberty
and progress was inserted, and, at last, in 1886, every student
was left free to worship God when and where he pleased, or
not to worship him at all. The result has been all that might
have reasonably been expected, and all that could have been
desired. "The average attendance at morning prayers is
upwards of two hundred. The service is a reverent and de-
lightful one." " Students no longer come rushing into Chapel
attired only in a mackintosh and rubber boots [goloshes], nor
do they finish their breakfast in the pews instead of reading
the responses."^ The service begins with the reading of a
psalm by the minister and students, in alternate verses, not
unhappily from the beautiful version in our Book of Common
Prayer, and is followed by an anthem sung by the choir.
" Sometimes a solo or duet is sung instead. After this comes
the reading of the Bible, with comments by the preacher and a
1 An Historical Sketch, etc., p. 46.
^Hi^er Education, etc., p. 148; Harvard's Better Self, by W. R.
Bigelow, p. 4.
k
m. HARVARD COLLEGE, 53
prayer. It is the preacher's share in the exercises that is most
unique and most attractive. To listen every morning for two
weeks to the eloquent words of Dr. Phillips Brooks, full of the
'beauty of holiness ' ; for another two weeks to search out the
distinctive features of the Old Testament books, as they are
explained by Dr. Lyman Abbott; to hear a glowing eulogy of
Moses from the lips of Dr. Ekiward Everett Hale, and to fol-
low him as he points out the greatness of the Bible heroes
from morning to morning; — these are high privileges, and
they are attractions." ^
In Harvard there is that ignorant dread of sameness in
the services of religion which in England, in recent years,
has led to the multiplication of hymns and hymn-books. The
great masters of our language who gave us the Book of Com-
mon Prayer had a better understanding of the human heart.
They had no fear lest perfect compositions, the ninety-
fifth psalm, the Te Deum, the four daily collects should
pall by repetition. Cranmer, whose ear for the melody of
prose has surely never been surpassed, did not vary the
close of matins and vespers. Who could grow weary of
that exquisite cadence in which the most beautiful of all
liturgies dies, as it were, away — " granting us in this world
knowledge of Thy truth, and in the world to come life ever-
lasting." However much we suffered in our childhood from
the services piled one on the other — Ossa on Pelion and
Pelion on leafy Olympus — and from the long and tedious
sermons, who ever grew weary of Bishop Ken's morning hymn,
with which, in so many churches in the old days, each Sun-
day's service always began, and of his evening hymn which
brought the afternoon service to a close ? On a winter day,
'^ Harvard *s Better Selfy by W. R. Bigelow, p. 2.
54 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. hi.
when the darkness which had fallen on the congregation
seemed only the deeper and the more solemn from the two
candles which lighted the preacher in the pulpit, how much
was the heart touched by the words so beautiful in their sim-
plicity, which Sunday after Sunday, and year after year, had
been sung by eight generations of men ! In all religious ser-
vices, everything that is new is out of place. It is only the old
familiar words, the words which we first heard we know not
when, that deeply move us. We no more wish for fresh forms
of prayer than at the close of each winter we wish for a fresh
form of spring. To hear over and over again a beautiful
liturgy and the finest passages in- the glorious English of our
Bible, is in itself the best of all trainings in the use of our
noble language. At no time in our history has there been
greater need of that constant repetition, that replication of
the noblest sounds, which imperceptibly but surely trains the
ear to melody. At no time has there been so much varied
reading, reading far too often of careless, extravagant,
affected, and mongrel English. When books were rare, and
newspapers rarer still, a few great authors were read again and
again. On great writers our fathers' style became modelled.
" Glowing eulogies of Moses " can surely be left to the Rev.
Dr. Harwoods of the world, the man who in his Liberal Trans-
lation of the New Testament^ by expanding Jesus wept into
Jesus f the Saviour of the world, burst into a flood of tears ^
provoked Johnson's indignant outcry of Puppy/ Outside of
the universities there are Rev. Dr. Harwoods enough in the
present day — certainly in England and, I have little doubt,
in America. Moses needs no eulogy beyond the English ver-
sion of his books. In the first chapter of Genesis, in the
story of Joseph, and in the thunders of Sinai, his praises are
written for all time.
^
CHAPTER IV.
Ponishinents and Fines. — "The Ancient Customs." — Fagging and
" Hazing.'' — Tutors and Undergraduates. — Rebellions.
IN Harvard an undergraduate who has any touch about him
of the antiquary or historian finds much to interest him in
the usages of the past. He finds a minuteness of discipline
which is scarcely excelled by that contained in the book
which the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford handed to me and to
each of my companions when we matriculated, with the follow-
ing address : Scitote vos in matriculam hujus Universitaiis
hodie relatos esse sub hac conditioner nempe ut omnia statuta
hoc libro comprehensa pro virili observetis. If we ever examined
these statutes, it was certainly not for the sake of keeping them,
but of mocking them. At Harvard, where the age of the stu-
dents was younger, corporal punishment was kept up for nearly
a hundred years longer than in the English universities. I
doubt whether at Oxford any was inflicted later than the reign
of Charles II. About 1680 " the poor children ** — the servitors
that is to say, or foundationers of Queen's College — were sen-
tenced to be whipped. It does not seem, however, that the
punishment was actually executed.^ In the New England
University it was gradually discontinued, and by about the
middle of last century came to an end. Its place had been
taken by an elaborate system of fines. In them scales, as it
^ffist, Comm, MSS Fleming MSS, pp. 166, 168.
55
56 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
were, are given by which we can ascertain the comparative
weight of sins in New England in the first half of the eighteenth
century. Omitting the fines for regulating conduct at Chapel,
which I have already quoted, and some others, it stands as
follows : —
d
" Absence from Professor's public lecture 4
Profanation of Lord's Day, not exceeding 3.0
Undergraduates tarrying out of town without leave, not exceeding /^r
diem 1,3
Going out of College without proper garb, not exceeding 6
Frequenting taverns, not exceeding 1.6
Profane cursing, not exceeding 2.6
Graduates playing cards, not exceeding 5.0
Undergraduates playing cards, not exceeding 2.6
Selling and exchanging without leave, not exceeding 1.6
Lying, not exceeding 1.6
Drunkenness, not exceeding 1.6
Going upon the top of the College 1 .6
Tumultuous noises 1.6
Tumultuous noises, second offence 3.0
Refusing to give evidence 3.0
Rudeness at meals i.o
Keeping guns, and going on skating i.o
Fighting, or hurting persons, not exceeding 1.6" ^
It is interesting to see that for a graduate to play at cards
was three times and a third as wicked as for an undergraduate
to lie, and that to go skating was two-thirds as immoral as get-
ting drunk. I was told that thirty years or so ago " tumultuous
noises " were raised not only in the Yard but even in the classes,
while rough horse-play often went on. For some while past
all this has been looked on as '' bad form,'' and is no longer
practised. " Nothing," says a writer in the Crimson^ " could
show a greater contrast than tiie comparative stillness of the
1 Quincy's Harvard^ II. 499.
i
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 57
Yale Campus ^ and the Harvard Yard. In front of the Harvard
buildings no one yells ' Fire,' or blows a horn ; men do not
shout for a friend imder his room. A Harvard man would not
be able to understand the Yale fondness for pure noise."
The three shillings fine for " refusing to give e\'idence " per-
haps dates back to the rule of the second President, the divine
stubborn in the faith of adult baptism by immersion, who, when
consulted about the lawfulness of inflicting torture, replied :
" But now if ye question be mente of inflicting bodyly torments
to extracte a confession from a mallefactor, I conceive yt in
maters of higest consequence, such as doe conceme ye saftie
or mine of stats or countries, magistrats may proceede so farr
in bodily torments as racks, bote -irons, &c., to extracte a con-
fession, especially when presumptions are strounge ; but other-
wise by no means. God sometimes bids a sinner till his
wickedness is filled up." '
" The Ancient Customs of Harvard College established by
the Government of it " bore hard on the Freshmen, who were
little better than the fags of an English Public School.
" No Freshmen," we read, " shall wear his hat in the College
Yard, unless it rains, hails, or snows, provided he be on foot
and have not both his hands full.
" No Freshman shall speak to a Senior with his hat on.
"All Freshmen . . . shall be obliged to go on any errand for
any of his Seniors, graduates or undergraduates, at any time,
except in studying hours, or after nine o'clock in the evening.
" A Senior Sophister has authority to take a Freshman from
^The precincts of a university, known as the Yard in Harvard, are in
most American tmiversities called the Campus.
2 Governor Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (Mass. Hist.
Soc. 4th S. III. 396).
58 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
a Sophomore, a Middle Bachelor from a Junior Sophister, a
Master from a Senior, and any Governor of the College from a
Master.
" When any person knocks at a Freshman's door except in
studying time, he shall immediately open the door, without
inquiring who is there.
" The Freshmen shall furnish batts, balls and foot-balls for
the use of the students, to be kept at the Buttery.
" The Sophomores shall publish these customs to the Fresh-
men in the Chapel, whenever ordered by any in the Govern-
ment of the College, at which time the Freshmen are required
to keep their places in their seats, and attend with decency to
the reading." ^
The unfortunate Freshman with a Senior Sophister calling to
him from one quarter, a Sophomore from a second, a Middle
Bachelor from a third, a Junior Sophister from a fourth, a Mas-
ter from a fifth, a Governor of the College from a sixth, must
have been far more distracjted even than Francis in Shake-
speare's Henry IF,, of whom the stage-direction says : " The
drawer stands amazed, not knowing which way to go."
Others beside the Freshmen were made to show respect for
their superiors by going bareheaded in their presence. " No
undergraduate shall wear his hat in the College Yard, when any
of the Governors of the College are there ; and no Bachelor
shall wear his hat when the President is there."
A Fellow of St. John's College, describing Oxford at about
the same period, says ; " The principal thing required is ex-
ternal respect from the Juniors, however ignorant or unworthy
a Senior Fellow may be, yet the slightest disrespect is treated
as the greatest crime of which an academic can be guilty." *
1 Quincy*s Harvard, II. 539. 2 Boswell*s Life of Johnson^ III. 1 3, ». 3.
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 59
For these regulations aboat hats the republican spirit of Har-
vard, quickened, if not called forth by the Revolution, became
too strong. About the beginning of the present centur>' formal
permission was given to the students to wear their hats in
the Yard, no matter who might be present^ As regards the
custom of going bareheaded, a singular change has taken place
in Oxford. In myimdeigraduate days every one wore his col-
lege cap in the quadrangle, even though he had not on his
gown. About twenty years ago men began to go about bare-
headed inside their college gate, even though their gowns were
on their shoulders. Gradually the liberties^ if I may use the old
term, of each college were curiously extended. One day I
noticed an undergraduate in his gown walking bareheaded in the
Broad Street. I was told that, beyond all doubt, he was a Bal-
liol man ; as Balliol men assume that all the street in front of
their College belongs to Balliol, in spite of the impertinence of
the citizens who claim and maintain a right of way. In like
manner a Queen's College man walks bareheaded across the
High Street to the Schools.'
The rule at Harvard which required a Freshman at once to
open his door on hearing a knock deprived youth of one of its
highest satisfactions. How great was our pride when, for the
first time in our lives, we felt that in our case an Englishman's
house was his castle ; when we closed our inner and our outer
door and knew that, whoever might knock, law and custom
alike justified us in remaining silent and secluded.' It is with
regret I learn that this good old custom in some colleges has
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 278.
2 The building in which the examinations are held.
•The outer door is solidly made, and opening outward, and having no
handle, cannot be forced without the greatest violence. To close it was,
and I suppose is still called in college slang, " to sport one's oak."
60 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
passed away, and that in them no undergraduate, of whatever
standing he may be, presumes to close his outer door. Bores
and idlers have gained the day. All their tediousness they can
now bestow on their neighbours.
In 1760 the Corporation passed a law which would have
greatly limited fagging ; but it was vetoed by the overseers.^
Judge Story says that this bad custom was dying out when he
entered Harvard in 1794. "I believe," he adds, "my own
Class was the first that was not compelled, at the command of
the Senior Class, to perform the drudgery of the most humble
services." "My father," writes the Judge's son, "was very
active in this reform. He invited his own fag to his room,
treated him with cordiality, and made him his friend." ^ Fag-
ging subsided into what is known in American colleges as
hazing — horse-play, more or less brutal, to which Freshmen are
subjected. "President Quincy,"^ writes Professor Peabody,
" laboured persistently to establish it as a rule that the students
of Harvard College should be held amenable to the civil
authority for crimes against the law of the land, even though
committed within academic precincts. The habits of the
students were rude, and outrages, involving not only large
destruction of property, but peril of life — as, for instance, the
blowing up of public rooms in inhabited buildings — were
occurring every year. Mr. Quincy was sustained by the Gov-
erning Boards, but encountered an untold amount of hostility
and obloquy from the students, their friends, and the outside
public. He persevered, and gradually won over the best pub-
lic opinion to his view. The principle is still admitted, and I
cannot but think that it ought to be practically recognized with
1 Quincy*s Harvard, II. 134. ^ jr^ of Joseph Story, I. 49.
' President of Harvard from 1829 to 1845.
^
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 61
regard to all forms of miscondact that are panishable outside
of the college walls. \Miile the detestable practice of hazing
was rife, crimes that were worthy of the penitentiary were of
frequent occurrence, resulting in some cases in driving a perse-
cuted Freshman from college ; in many instances, in serious and
lasting injury ; and once, at least, in fatal illness. The usual
college penalty punished the parents alone. The suspended *
student was escorted in triumph on his departure and his return,
and was the hero of his class for the residue of his college life.
I remember an instance in which a timid Freshman had his
room forcibly entered at midnight, his valuables stolen, and a
bucket of cold water poured upon him as he lay trembling in
his bed. Had the perpetrators of that crime been certain that,
in case of detection, they would be indicted for burglary, and
punished by a year or two of imprisonment, they would no
more readily have broken into a Freshman's room than into a
jeweller's shop." '
If this was the treatment that awaited the Freshman, the
tears of fathers, mothers, and sisters, in the midst of which he
left home, as described in Fair Harvard, are not surprising.
It was, with good reason, Launce over again — " my mother
weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling,
our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great
perplexity."
It would not be amiss if in our own universities the worst
forms of outrage were made amenable to the civil authority.
The drunken boating-men, who, only two summers ago, broke
into one of the Oxford colleges, and in a wild riot laid property
waste, would have been more fitly punished by a jail than by
a money penalty. The heavy fine that was inflicted on the
1 Rusticated. ^ Harvard Reminiscences^ p. 31.
62 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
ringleader was raised by a subscription among the undergradu-
ates of the very College which he had outraged. He, not to
be wanting in magnanimity, presented its Boating Club with a
silver bowl. What but a prison should have been the fate of
the Christ Church men, who, some years earlier, broke into the
Library, and brought from it an ancient statue which they cast
into a bonfire ? In another large College, of late years men
have more than once shown themselves the fellows of the
ruffians who not long ago carried terror into the West End of
London. Ruffianism, wherever found, whether in the courts
of a college or in the streets of a town, should meet with the
same stem treatment. Indulged, or feebly treated, it may, in
our ancient universities, lead to some terrible disaster — to loss
of life or destruction by fire of some noble and venerable
building.
In Oxford, as in Harvard, " the suspended student " — the
rusticated undergraduate — is sometimes escorted in triumph
on his departure. A few years ago a ridiculous scene was wit-
nessed in Broad Street — a long procession of thirty or forty
cabs, following, at a foot-pace, some great but luckless hero,
who, for a season, was exiled from his University.
" Hazing " — to use the American term — in its less brutal
form is not unknown at the present day in Oxford. In every
college this rude horse-play may break out from time to time,
and in some few within the last forty years it has, for short
periods, been carried to a shameful height. Those, however,
who have suffered from it are few indeed compared with the
whole mass of undergraduates. In my own College I can re-
call but one solitary instance of persecution. The victim was
singularly unfit for a university. Even in a Quakers' College
he would have been made a butt. Though " hazing " is still rife
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 63
in many American miiversities, it has died out in Harvard.
With " window-smashing and disturbing a lecture-room, it is,"
writes Professor G. H. Palmer, " a thing of the past." * It was
in the autumn of 1878 that the last man was hazed.
During my stay in Cambridge there was a slight revival of
a custom which seemed to have almost passed away. On the
first Monday of the academic year, known as *' Bloody Mon-
day " in many American colleges, it has been the habit for the
Sophomores — the second year's men — to " rush " the Fresh-
men. Between these two classes there exists, why I know not,
*' an instinctive antagonism." At Oxford there is nothing that
exactly corresponds to the American Sophomore, " a being who
at best has his peculiarities," and is full of " a sense of self-suf-
ficiency." ' Our second year's men are in no way a peculiar
people. The peculiarities and self-sufficiency would be more
commonly found in the Freshmen, at all events in their second
or third term. So great at Harvard used to be the antagonism
between the two classes that to the timid Freshman this first
Monday was a night of " terrors and torments." ' The more
daring met their enemies openly in the Yard. Each set formed
in ranks, nine rows deep, with arms locked. On the signal
being given, they met together in a rush. In the scuffle bloody
noses were sometimes given, clothes torn, and hats carried off
as lawfiil booty. The Freshmen were let to know that there
was no surer way of gaining admittance into some of the more
exclusive clubs than by a display of prowess on this great night.
A pair of black eyes, heroically earned, would have made their
proud possessor welcomed with acclamation. As the Harvard
1 The New Education^ by G. H. Palmer, Boston, 1887, p. 28.
2 The New Education^ p. 88.
* An Historical Sketchy etc., by W. R. Thayer, p. 50.
64 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Yard is not enclosed by a wall, rough fellows from outside,
when once the tumult began, could easily take part in it. Last
year, after a long interval of peace, these hostile lines were
once more formed, though neither was the combat waged with
the high spirit of old, nor were more than a small number out
of the two classes engaged. I was told by a student that a
knot of outsiders had been seen waiting, who no doubt at once
joined in. He added that a force of twenty poHcemen had
been present, who had " batoned " the undergraduates. The
twenty, I learnt, had grown by rumour out of five. These five
had been kept out of sight, but when neither Sophomores nor
Freshmen would disperse on the repeated summons of the
Proctor who had the charge of order that night, they were
called out and were ordered to make some arrests. Two stu-
dents were taken to the Police Station, followed by a great
crowd. The prisoners, as so often happens in such a case,
proved to be very quiet youths and were soon set free. The
police had perhaps shown some of that wisdom which Dog-
berry enjoins, and had only seized those who would stand when
they were bidden.
The regulations about dress last century, though somewhat
minute, were far less troublesome and absurd than those which
were enforced at Oxford. There was none of that elaborate
dressing of the hair which, in each college, kept the junior
members in a constraint almost as ignoble as if they had been
set in the stocks. They had to pass under the College barber's
hands at least two hours before the early dinner — the Seniors
coming last. When once they had been pomatomed and pow-
dered exercise was impossible. " A man might be a drunkard,
a debauchee, and yet long escape the Proctor's animadver-
sion : but no virtue could protect you if you walked on Christ
^
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 65
Church meadow or on the High Street with a band tied too low,
or with no band at aU; with a pig-tail, or with a green or scarlet
coat"^ In 1786, five years after this description of Oxford
life was written, the €k>veming Boards of Harvard prescribed
a uniform. What the colour and form should be was minutely
set forth. Classes were to be distinguished by fix)gs on the
cujSs and buttonholes. Silk was prohibited and home manu-
factures were recommended.* Full forty years later these rules
were to some extent enforced. " In 1824 undergraduates were
required to wear a uniform consisting entirely of black cloth
and a black or white cravat. The coat had an ornament
worked on the cuff of the sleeve in black silk braid which
was called a * crow's foot' A Sophomore wore one of these
badges, a Junior two, and a Senior three."* In 1829 the
waistcoat had to be of " black-mixed or black ; or, when of
cotton or linen fabric, of white." Sumner, who, in spite of
admonition, persisted in wearing one of buff-colour, " was sum-
moned several times to appear before the Parietal Board * for
disobedience ; but to no purpose. Wearied with the contro-
versy the Board at length yielded. There is a memorandum
on his College bill for the first term of his junior year — 'Ad-
monition for illegal dress.' " * It was perhaps in commemora-
tion of his triumph over authority that, seventeen years later,
when he delivered his famous oration before the Harvard
Phi Beta Society, he appeared in a buff waistcoat.
1 Boswell's Life of Johnson^ III. 13, n. 4.
2 Quincy's Harvard^ II. 277.
* Life ofB. R. Curtis, 1879, I. 23.
* "The Proctors, and the officers of instruction who reside in the Uni-
versity building, or in buildings to which the superintendence of the Uni-
versity extends, constitute the Parietal Board." — Catalogue , p. 32,
* Life of Charles Sumner, I. 52.
y
66 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
In Harvard down to the present time there has been little
of that pleasant friendly intercourse between tutor and under-
graduate which so commonly exists at Oxford. Much as our
two great universities suffer as places of learning and even of
instruction from the college system, for most of the purposes
of social life they are admirably adapted. The imraarried
Fellows living in College, commonly on the same staircases as
the undergraduates, are not the strangers to them that the
Professors are in Harvard. Even the married Fellows and
tutors often retain a set of rooms where they can receive their
guests. They have the use also of the Common Room for all
purposes of hospitality. The College kitchen is at their service
as well as the College cook and the ancient College plate.
The Oxford breakfast-parties used to be proverbial for their
pleasantness, though in these busier days they are giving way
to luncheons. At such gatherings in a Fellow's rooms I have
in late years often met with great pleasure half a dozen under-
graduates, and in their bright looks recalled *' the happy morn-
ing of life and of May," when all the world lay at our feet.
The friendliness of the relations between tutor and imder-
graduate has greatly increased of late years. In my time we
scarcely came across our tutors save in the Lecture Room.
On Degree Days, however, the Dean gave a formal breakfast
to all who were taking their degree, and to a few undergradu-
ates besides. The meal was abundant and good. For that
brief hour our host dropped the don as far as he could, and
assumed somewhat of the air of a man of the world. He
addressed us with friendly familiarity. "Jones, may I send
you some of this chicken? Smith, will you help yourself to
some brawn? Oxford, you know, is famous for its brawn."
If there were any present who were taking the Master's degree,
^
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE, 67
the party broke up in time for them to read aloud the Thirty-
nine Articles of the Church in the presence of the Dean, and
to signify their assent and consent to them. Unless this were
done the degree could not be conferred. I remember how a
friend of mine, now a learned Canon, arrived so late at the
breakfast that there was scarcely time for him to read the
Articles, and none to swallow a single mouthful. The good-
natured Dean bade him begin to read as hard as he could and
go on till his breath failed him, when he himself would take up
the wondrous tale, to be relieved in his turn. In this way,
riding and tying as it were, they scampered through the whole
Thirty-nine Articles just in time. When two hours after break-
fast we returned to the same room and to the same table,
though alas ! very differently spread, for it was covered with
books, the change was chilling. "Mr. Smith, you were not
at my lecture yesterday." "Mr. Jones, I hardly think your
rendering of that passage would satisfy the examiners." The
Master of the College now and then invited a few favoured
youths to breakfast or dinner. I remember how the great
man, as some sparkling perry was poured out, impressively
told us that her Majesty's judges, whom as Vice-Chancellor he
had lately entertained, preferred it to champagne. He was a
Canon of Gloucester as well as Master of Pembroke, and in
the great orchard country had learnt the excellence of perry.
The very best, such as we were drinking, cost him but two
shillings a bottle, whereas for his champagne he paid ten. I
sincerely hope, out of regard to the character of a man who
from a Canon became a Dean, and from a Dean a Bishop, that
he did not exaggerate his wine-merchant*s prices. He cer-
tainly told us that the judges' preference of his perry saved
him eight shillings a bottle.
68 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Far more formal were the dimiers given in those days by the
Provost of Oriel. It was not till the morning of the solemn
day that he issued his invitations. All were expected to attend,
whatever may have been their engagements. His invitations
were of the nature of the Queen's — they were veiled com-
mands. The Junior Fellow, who received no longer notice
than the undergraduates, took the bottom of the table. When
the cloth was cleared away and the dessert set out, the Provost
solemnly addressed him. "Mr. Robinson, may I have the
pleasure of taking a glass of wine with you, and Mr. Brown
[turning to the undergraduate on his right] will you join?"
After a pause he challenged in like manner the guest on his
left, joining with him the second on his right In this manner
he slowly and solemnly travelled down both sides of the table.
In the drawing-room no undergraduate might sit down in his
awful presence. One evening a young sprig of the nobility
was daring enough to take a chair. The Provost at once came
up as if to engage him in conversation, whereupon the youth
rose. A man-servant, who had been well-trained in his duty,
straightway removed the chair.
This kind of formality is a thing of the past in Oxford.
Some few traces of it may still linger, but for the most part
between old and young there is familiarity and friendliness.
In one of the Colleges, on a Sunday evening, I have now and
then attended a large Literary Society, held sometimes in a
tutor's rooms, sometimes in an undergraduate's, where over
tea, coffee, and tobacco all meet on friendly terms with no
inequality but such as naturally comes from greater age and
greater knowledge. How unlike this free and familiar life is
to the restrained and distant relations which, too commonly
though not always, exist at Harvard between teachers and
^
IV. . HARVARD COLLEGE. 69
Students is shown by a passage in an article in the Harvard
Monthly} Last September, at the beginning of the academic
year, the President and the Professors for the first time gave a
kind of reception to the Freshmen.
"The manner in which the Class of '97^ was received this
year [writes the editor] showed very plainly the existence of
a new policy in the conduct of the University. Heretofore a
Freshman entered college with almost no idea of his responsi-
bilities, or, indeed, of his advantages. He did not come into
contact with the Faculty, unless, perhaps, it was in consultation
with the Dean on some matters of entrance examinations. He
had no knowledge of those who directed the academic life of
his surroundings. The Faculty was something to be avoided
as disagreeable and, in most ways, useless. He knew nothing
of the eminent scholars from whom he might derive benefit,
since his instructors were simply his taskmasters, who, after all,
could do but little if his daily tale of bricks was found incom-
plete. Thus he was shut off" from one side of undergraduate
life. Perhaps it was years before he saw his one-sidedness ;
possibly he went on during his entire college career with an
idea that courses were bad because they emanated from a
Faculty which he had never known except as his stem, and
hence disagreeable, censors. All this has of late undergone a
radical change. The schoolboy who became a member of
Harvard College last month had the privilege of meeting his
governors on grounds of social freedom which have been here-
tofore unknown. His duties and opportunities were clearly
set before him by representative men, scholars, and athletes;
1 October, 1893, P* 37*
^ The Freshmen of 1893 ^^^ known as the class of 1897, because it is
in that year that they will graduate.
70 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
he was formally welcomed by the President, and started upon
his college career with the feeling that the Faculty of Arts and
Sciences was composed of most delightful men, neither so stem
nor so stupid as he had expected. Authority must be seen to
be respected. An emperor that absents himself from his peo-
ple's sight will find but little loyalty among his subjects when
he may be pleased to show himself. In former years the
Faculty have held more or less aloof fi'om a visible participa-
tion in college interests, and the respect for their authority
has declined in proportion as they have so acted. Fortunately,
however, we seem to have just witnessed the beginning of a
new policy, which will doubtless tend to weld more closely
together the various parts of our University." I am told that
there is a good deal of exaggeration in this account, and that
not a few of the Professors are on terms of friendly social inter-
course with many of their pupils.
Professor Peabody, writing of Harvard as he first knew it sixty
years ago, says : " Though no student dared to go to a tutor's
room by daylight, it was no uncommon thing for one to come
furtively in the evening to ask his teacher's aid in some diffi-
cult problem or demonstration. The students certainly con-
sidered the Faculty as their natural enemies. There existed
between the two parties very little of kindly intercourse, and
that little generally secret. It was regarded as a high crime
by his class for a student to enter a recitation-room [lecture-
room] before the ringing of the bell, or to remain to ask a
question of the instructor ; even one who was uniformly first in
the class-room would have had his way to Coventry made easy.
The Professors performed police duty as occasion seemed to
demand."^ For a youth to be intimate with the tutors in
"^Harvard Reminiscences ^ pp. 183, 200.
nr. HARVARD COLLEGE. 71
Judge Story's time " would have exposed him to the imputa-
tion of being what in technical language was called a ' fisher-
man' — a rank and noxious character in college annals."^
That in those days this ill-will existed is not surprising, for the
discipline of Harvard, in one respect, was more like that of a
French boarding-school than of a university. "The 'grouping '
of students used to be a penal offence, two having been a suffi-
cient number to constitute a group; while in at least one
instance an extra-zealous Proctor reported a solitary student
as evidently waiting to be joined by another, and thus offering
himself as a nucleus for a group." ^ Even in Vienna, under
the rule of the Hapsburgs, a group cannot be formed, I believe,
imless there are five people gathered together. Four may stop
in the street and talk about the weather, without much risk of
being meddled with. Professor Peabody describes how in
1832 he and another tutor "had the chief charge of the police
in the College Yard. The rooms of the tutors and proctors
were at that time fully furnished by the College, and dark-
lanterns were among the essential items of furniture. Bonfires
had been of frequent occurrence in the Yard. The fires were
made of wood from the students* own wood-piles. [The bon-
fires in an Oxford quadrangle are too often made of chairs
and tables not brought from the rooms of those who make the
fire.] The chief object of these fires was to bring out the
posse of parietal officers in chase of the moving groups, that
scattered when they approached, and dodged the dark-lan-
tern when the slide was removed. We determined to direct
our attention to the fire, and not to the students. We pulled
the ignited sticks apart ; and when the fire was thus arrested
we conveyed the fuel to our own rooms. After two or three
"^ Life of Joseph Story ^ I. 50. ^ Harvard Reminiscences^ p. 207.
72 HARVARD COLLEGE, CHAP.
experiments, the students grew tired of furnishing kindling-
wood to their teachers; and the wonted blaze and outcry
ceased for the rest of the year."^
To bridge the distance which even in late years has existed
between teachers and pupils, between old and young, one re-
ception at the beginning of the academic year can do but
little. It is a sign, however, of a better day. I wish some
generous and wealthy benefactor would rise, some hospitable
man who knows how much a pleasant meal removes awe and
gives us " suppler souls," who would provide Harvard with a
Hall for the Professors, Assistant-Professors, Tutors, and In-
structors, a noble kitchen, a good cellar, a stock of old wine,
and half a dozen Common Rooms. Perhaps, large though
the staff is, one Common Room would suffice at first, till the
art of using it had been acquired. Two or three of the most
promising young men might be sent over to Oxford for a year
to study social life. They would see how even the married
Professors and tutors share in it, dining at least once a week in
College. No man thinks himself too old to dine in hall. The
generous hospitality of the place brings the men of the differ-
ent colleges together. The stranger too shares in it, and sees
a side of academic life which is found only in England. He
dines in a noble hall, adorned by the portraits of former
students who, in one way or another, had gained distinction in
the world ; from the dais on which he sits he looks down upon
the rows of tables filled with men all in the freshness of youth ;
as all stand up for the Latin grace he notices the picturesque
gowns, which by their shape mark the different ranks of those
who wear them. After dinner he is taken to a Common Room
dark with oaken wainscot — the room perhaps where James
'^Harvard Reminiscences^ p. 170.
^
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 73
the Second's arlHtzaiy court was held, and where Addison, per-
hapSy first learnt to like that wine which shortened his da\-s»
and enabled him, at the early age of forty-seven, to show his
step-son '' how a Christian can die." If it was in Addison's
College that our stranger dines, he may have noticed a lad
perched on a stool in a comer, close behind the President's
chair. It is a litde chorister, ready to chant grace if he is
called on ; in any case to be rewarded with a slice of pudding.
In my College the signal for grace used to be given by three
blows struck with one small piece of board on another — three
blows, no doubt, in honour of the Trinity. The custom has
been allowed to die out. " I have alwa)*s noticed," wrote the
antiquary Heame, on hearing pan-cake bell on Shrove Tues-
day ring at eleven o'clock instead of at half-past ten, " that
when laudable old customs are changed learning decays."
Happily, in the present case, this observation has not been
verified. Everywhere in Oxford the stranger finds something
that is curious — something unlike all that he has ever seen
before. Such customs cannot be transplanted, they must
grow. No university can exclaim " Go to ; I will be venera-
ble." Let Harvard once get two or three Common Rooms
built, and hospitable customs will begin slowly to form. In
these rooms the teachers of the University will be able, not
only to entertain their friends and the chance-comer, but also
to meet their pupils " sine ulla solemnitate " in friendly gather-
ings. In Oxford the Common Room is often borrowed by one
of the Fellows for a private party. How pleasant are the
breakfasts and lunches that are given ! At one of them I had
the honour to meet the widow and the son of President Gar-
field. It is nearly sixty years since Longfellow recorded in
\^s Journal: " Exhibition. Everett presides with dignity, but
74 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
cannot always lay hold of his collegiate cap in the right place.
Did not dine with the College ; I have not for a long time,
and shall not till they have a proper dining-room and service."^
The strictness of the discipline, added to the indifferent
quality of the " Commons," often led to rebellions. The rest-
less spirit of the age no doubt favoured insubordination ; for of
the more famous of these outbreaks the earliest took place in
1768, a few years before the Revolution. When once the
fashion was established, it was likely to be kept up in time of
general tranquillity. It went on at least as late as 184 1. In
1768, "the tutors' windows were broken with brickbats
and their lives endangered." Three students were expelled.
But so weak were both the Corporation and the overseers that
within a few months their punishment was remitted, mainly, if
not entirely, because " many who have been great friends and
benefactors to the Society have condescended to intercede in
their behalf." The aged President Holyoke, as his last official
act, entered on the records of both Boards his protest against
this unworthy conduct*
At the Harvard rebellion of 1 768 " the scholars met in a
body under and about a great tree to which they gave the name
of the Tree of Liberty." ^ I do not know whether an earlier
instance can be found of those Trees of Liberty which, in little
more than twenty years, were to become notorious in France.
This Harvard tree some years after was either blown down or
cut down. Another Liberty Tree was soon chosen ; it is still
standing and plays a great part every Class Day. It has long
ceased to be revolutionary and is recognized by authority.
^Life ofH. W. LongfeUtm, II. 37.
* Quincy's Harvard^ II. 116.
^An Historical Sketchy etc., by W. R. Thayer, p. 51.
IV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 75
Professor £. T. Channing, whose admirable lectnres in Eng-
lish kept his pupils generallr free from the extravagances of
the Exlwaid Everett School, *' was not [we are told] graduated
in course, as he was involved in the famous rebellion of 1S07,
one of the few in which the students seem, on the whole, not
to have been in the wrong." On this Professor Peabody re-
marks: ''I object to this statement as not broad enough.
I am inclined to think that in College Rebellions the students
were always in the right as to principle, though injudicious in
their modes of actualizing principle. There was not one of
those rebellions in which the leaders were not among the fore-
most in their respective classes, in character no less than in
scholarship. There were traditional maxims and methods of
college jurisprudence to which the professional mind had be-
come hardened, which to unsophisticated youth justly seemed
at variance with natural right ; and there was no form of collec-
tive protest that they could make which was not deemed rebel-
lion in such a sense that they were compelled either to recant
or to leave college under censure. College rebellions have be-
come impossible because the rights of the students are now
fiilly recognized, their sense of honour held sacred, their protests
and complaints considered carefully and kindly." ^
Channing, if as a rebel he was not allowed to graduate, as
a man of letters had an honorary degree conferred on him
twelve years later. In the cases of other men the College
showed its leniency or its penitence. In 1823, thirty-seven
students, who had protested against an act of tyrannical disci-
pline, were refused their degree. Many years later the ordinary
degree was given them.
There, was one rebellion which Professor Peabody must have
"^ Harvard Reminiscences, p. 84.
A
76 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. iv.
witnessed in which the students do not seem to have been in
the right, even as to principle. Longfellow wrote on July 5,
1841 : "You have probably seen by the papers that we have
had a rebellion in College. It lasted, however, only two days.
All is again quiet and orderiy. There was never a more silly
and boyish outbreak, nor one with less cause. Two students
have been expelled, and six dismissed from College." ^
1 Life of II. W, LongfelloWf I. 379. " Dismission closes a student's con-
nection with the University, without necessarily precluding his return."
— Harvard Catalogue^ p. 32.
CHAPTER V
Odd Chaxactets. — Changes : f Xass :f F-acss. — Co=ie5>ceins=t Dar. —
La£iyette. — Rasian Naxal C»5cers. — C'xfiri C:=i=<iii: radon. —
The Assodation of the Ai^rsiL— Tte GasMS^ — The Aiter-<iinner
Speeches.
STORIES are handed down, in Harvard, of presidents and
professors much as they are in Oxford. I have been told
that the late Master of Balliol sometimes unconsciously amused
a party of undergraduates whom he was entertaining at break-
fast by telling anecdotes of the Master of his early days, which
among his young guests were current about himself. An old
Fellow of a college, after he had sat musing for a while, said
to a friend: "WTien you and I were young, there were so
many odd characters about the University. How is it that
there are none now?" "We are the odd characters," his
friend replied. I hope that Har\'ard of the present day can
boast of its odd characters. It is only a brand-new university,
just turned fresh out of the hands of a millionaire, that should
have none. That there were some of old in the American
Cambridge is shown by Professor Peabody in his lively
Reminiscences. There was Professor Popkin who "was not
without a nickname which he accepted as a matter of course
from the students; but hearing it on one occasion from a
young man of dapper, jaunty, unacademic aspect, he said to a
friend who was standing with him, 'What right has that man
to call me Old Pop ? He was never a member of Harvard
77
78 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
College/"^ Longfellow, going one day to the Episcopal
Church in Cambridge, the church which Washington at-
tended, saw there, "Popkin, standing hoary-headed, red-
faced, with a narrow-caped, blue greatcoat, looking very
much like a beadle, and dragging along his heavy vocables
considerably in the rear of the rest of the congregation."^
Lowell describes his "great silver spectacles of the heroic
period, such as scarce twelve noses of these degenerate days
could bear."' "Imagine," writes Professor Goodwin, "the
venerable Dr. Popkin stepping calmly out of his door on the
West Cambridge road, and waving his historic umbrella to
stop an electric car as it goes whizzing by." * There was also
Professor Hedge who had written a work on Logic, and, ac-
cording to popular report, was in the habit of saying to his
class : " It took me fourteen years, with the assistance of the
adult members of my family, to write this book; and I am
sure that you cannot do better than to employ the precise
words of the learned author." *
President Kirkland, "a jolly little man," as Longfellow
describes him,® seems to have been a wit. In his day the
dogma of "the perseverance of the saints" was hotly dis-
cussed, the dogma, that is to say, that a man who has once
been brought to a state of grace can never fall from it.
" When a country deacon called on the President for advice
about a quarrel that had sprung up in his church concerning
^ Harvard Reminiscencesy p. 45. This same story, I am told, is now
current of another member of the professorial, or more correctly, the
tutorial staff. His nickname was Piggy.
^Life ofH, W, Longfellow, IL 132.
* Literary Essays, by J. R. Lowell, 1890, 1. 91.
* The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 6.
* Harvard Reminiscences, p. 38. • Life o/H, fV, Longfellow, I. 71.
V. HARFARD COLLEGE. 79
this dogma, he replied: 'Here in Boston we have no diffi-
culty on diat score; what troubles us here is the perseverance
of the sinners.' " ^ Lowell, in his Cambrii^e Thirty Years
^g^9^ gives a pleasant account of the kindly old fellow. '' This
life was good enough for him, and the next not too good.
The gentlemanlike pervaded even his prayers. His were not
the manners of a man of the world, nor of a man of the other
world either ; but both met in him to balance each other in a
beautiful equilibrium. Praying, he leaned forward upon the
pulpit-cushion, as for conversation, and seemed to feel him-
self (without irreverence) on terms of friendly, but courteous
familiarity with heaven." He knew well how to deal with
undergraduates. "Hearing that Porter's flip (which was ex-
emplary) had too great an attraction for the collegians, he
resolved to investigate the matter himself. Accordingly,
entering the old inn one day, he called for a mug of it, and
having drunk it, said, *And so, Mr. Porter, the young gentle-
men come to drink your flip, do they? * * Yes, sir, — some-
times.* 'Ah, well, I should think they would. Good day,
Mr. Porter,' and departed saying nothing more; for he always
wisely allowed for the existence of a certain amount of human
nature in ingenuous youth. At another time the * Harvard
Washington [Corps] ' asked leave to go into Boston to a col-
lation which had been offered them. * Certainly, young gen-
tlemen,' said the President, * but have you engaged any one
to bring home your muskets? ' — the College being responsi-
ble for these weapons, which belonged to the State."
Prescott, writing to his father about his matriculation ex-
amination, lets us see what a kindly man Kirkland was.
^ Harvard Reminiscences, p. 71.
a Literary Essays^ by J. R. Lowell, 1890, I. 83.
d
80 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
" When we were first ushered into the presence of the Presi-
dent and Professors, they looked like so many judges of the
Inquisition. We were ordered down into the parlour, almost
frightened out of our wits, to be examined by each separately;
but we soon found them quite a pleasant sort of chaps. The
President sent us down a good dish of pears, and treated us
very much like gentlemen. Professor Ware examined us in
Grotius de veritate. We found him very good-natured, for I
happened to ask him a question in theology, which made him
laugh so that he was obliged to cover his face with his hands." ^
The good dish of pears must have been a pleasant break to a
long day. Professor Peabody, who entered Harvard twelve
years later, says that the entrance examination " began at six
in the morning, and, with a half -hour's intermission for din-
ner, lasted till sunset. Each of thirteen College officers took
a section, and passed it over to the next, and so on, until it
had gone the entire round." ^
Kirkland*s memory is preserved in Cambridge by one of
those changes which are always to be regretted. " I am come
to anchor in Professors' Row,"* wrote Lowell. It is in* vain
that the literary pilgrim looks for Professors* Row. This
pleasant road has long been known as Kirkland Street. It is
not a street according to our use of the word. In America,
country roads, though every house along them stands alone in
its own grounds, are known as streets. To call them roads,
as is now sometimes done, is looked upon as an affected
imitation of the English. If any change has to be made
avenue is the word. Even Longfellow wanted to give a new
name to the pleasant road in which he lived. In his Journal
1 Life of W. H. Prescottf p. 13. ^ Harvard Reminiscences ^ p. 93.
* Letters of y, R, Lowell^ I. 300.
V. HAKFAUD COLLEGE. SI
he records: "Wrote a petition to have the name of oar street
changed from Brattle to Vassall." ^ The fine old mansion in
which the poet passed the greater part of his life had been
built by a stubborn Tory, Colonel John Vassall, who, when the
Revolution broke out, went to England, and erased from his
coat-of-arms the motto. Semper pro Republica sape pro rege^
Had the change been made more would have been lost than
gained, for the old name of the street awakens ancient memo-
ries. "All old Cambridge people," writes Dr. Holmes,
"know the Brattle House, with its gambrel roof, its tall trees,
its perennial spring, its legendary fame of good fare and hos-
pitable board in the days of the kindly old bon vivanty Major
Brattle. In this house, Motley lived during a part of his
College course."' Still more ancient memories hang round
the name. There was a Thomas Brattle who graduated at
Harvard in 1676, and by his will left "half a crown to every
student belonging to the College who should attend his
funeral." He did not share in the Puritans* hatred of instru-
mental music in churches; for he bequeathed his organ to the
church in Brattle Street, " if it should procure a sober person
that can play skilfully thereon with a loud noise." If the gift
on this condition were refused, then it was to go to the
Church of England in Boston, and if it were again refused,
it was to be offered to Harvard.* "We change our names,"
wrote Lowell, "as readily as thieves, to the great detriment
of all historical association." ^
Of President Quin<;:y, who laboured so hard to uphold the
discipline of the College, Professor Peabody writes: "He
1 Life ofH, W, Longfillow, II. 94. ^Ib. I. 259.
« y. L. Motleyy by O. W. Holmes, p. 13. * Quincy's Harvard^ I. 41 1.
^Literary Essay Sf 1890, 1. 54.
G
i
82 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
seldom remembered a face, and when a student — even one
sent for but a few minutes before — entered his study, he was
encountered by the question, 'What's your name? * So much
was this his habit, that if it so happened in a rare instance
that he did recognize a countenance, he was more likely than
not to say, 'Well, Brown, what's your name?*"^ Early in
1 86 1, the old gentleman who, yielding to age, had resigned
his office sixteen years earlier, in defiance of the severity of
a New England spring, and of the eighty-nine winters which
he had borne, was a guest of the famous Saturday Club of
Boston — the Club of Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Agassiz,
Lowell, Motley, Sumner, Dana, and Holmes, the Club of
which Lowell wrote from London, at the very time that he
was the American Minister to England : " I have never seen
society, on the whole, so good as I used to meet at our Satur-
day Club."^ Of this dinner in 1861 Longfellow recorded in
\ih Journal: "At the Club old President Quincy was our guest,
and was very pleasant and wise."* He lived three years
longer. When he died Sumner, who in his undergraduate
days had been under him at Harvard, wrote of him : " Few
lives have been so completely filled and rounded as his, always
industrious, faithful, true, and noble."*
That New England was settled by men trained in a univer-
sity, and not by a set of eager, pushing adventurers, is shown
both by the early foundation of Harvard College, and also by
the solemnity with which from the beginning Commencement
was kept. Only thirteen years after Boston was settled, and
twenty-two years after the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers at
Plymouth, the long series of these annual celebrations began
1 Harvard Reminiscences, p. 33. * Letters of y. R, Lowell, II. 307.
• Life ofH W. Longfellow, II. 361. * Life of Charles Sumner, IV. 202.
T. HARVARD COLLEGE. 83
in the American Cambridge, which, broken only by war and
pestilence, still runs on, and is likely to run on " till the
stock of the Puritans die."
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ovum.
Before the close of the seventeenth century the day was kept
in all the country round as the great holiday of the Puritan
Commonwealth. What was sourly refused to Christmas was
willingly granted to Commencement. Every one streamed
out of Boston across the Charles River or up it in boats. The
Governor, escorted by his body-guard, came in state. On
the Common in front of the College, a fair was held. The
festivities of the day before long turned to license. Feasts
were given by the graduating students in rooms, where " dis-
tilled lyquours" were drunk. The use of strong drink was
sometimes forbidden by the Governing Bodies, though for-
bidden in vain. Sometimes it was tolerated. One easy-
going Board, who, perhaps through the unwonted strength of
their heads, had made the great discovery " that punch, as it
is now usually made, is no intoxicating liquor," allowed the
students "to entertain one another and strangers with it, "pro-
vided it was done "in a sober manner." In the use of
"plumb-cake" the excesses were so great that so early as
1693 the Corporation passed a vote that, "having been in-
formed that the custom taken up in the College, not used in
any other universities, for the commencers [members of the
graduating class] to have plumb-cakey is dishonourable to the
College, not grateful to wise men, and chargeable to the pa-
rents of the commencers, [the Corporation] do therefore put
an end to that custom, and do hereby order that no com-
mencer, or other scholar, shall have any such cakes in their
i
84 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
studies or chambers; and that if any scholar shall offend
therein, the cakes shall be taken from him, and he shall more-
over pay to the College twenty shillings for each such
offence."
By 1722 a second ordinance was needed; for, so far from
"the plumb-cake" having been given up, to it had been
added "roasted, boyled, baked meats and pyes." Some art-
ful youths "went about to evade the Act by plain cake." A
third ordinance was passed five years later, which refused any
who should henceforth so transgress their degree.^
The disorders both inside and outside the College grew to
such a head, that an attempt was made to put a check on
them by keeping secret the day on which Commencement
should be held. The general outcry was, however, too strong
for the Corporation to resist, and the old arrangement was
soon resumed. Even the very pulpits must have sounded
against them, for, according to Lowell, " the one great holi-
day of the clergy of Massachusetts was Commencement, which
they punctually attended."^ "In 1749 three gentlemen who
had sons about to be graduated, offered to give the College a
thousand pounds* provided *a trial was made of Commence-
ments this year in a more private manner.' " The Corpora-
tion, mindful of the lack of funds, were for acquiescing,
but the Overseers would consent to no breach in the old
custom. *
1 Quincy's Harvard, I. 386 ; II. 95 ; An Historical Sketch, p. 54.
2 Harvard University, 2^oth Anniversary, 1887, p. 211.
' "The currency of account in New England, subsequent to 1652, was
termed lawful money. It was one-quarter less in value than English cur-
rency of account." Quincy's Harvard, II. 231. One thousand pounds
was therefore equal to seven hundred and fifty pounds of English money.
* lb, 1. 396 ; II. 92.
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 8S
During the War of the Revolntion, Commencement was not
kept; bat ^en the celebrations were resumed they became
more popular than ever. In Boston even the Custom House
and the banks were closed on the great day. Professor Pea-
body, describing the College as it was when he entered it
seventy years ago, says : " The entire Common, then an unen-
closed dust- plain, was completely covered on Commencement
Day, and the night preceding and following it, with drinking-
stands, dancing-booths, mountebank shows, and gambling-
tables; and I have never heard such a horrid din, tumult, and
jargon of oath, shout, scream, fiddle, quarrelling, and drunk-
enness as on those two nights. By such summary methods as
but few other men could have employed, Mr. Quincy, at the
outset of his presidency [1829], swept the Common clear;
and during his entire administration the public days of the
College were kept free from rowdyism."^ That Har\'ard "in
its birth and purpose was a religious institution," strangely
enough added to the disorder. "Pious citizens of Boston
used to send their slaves to Commencement for their religious
instruction and edification. But the negroes soon found that
they could spend their holidays more to their satisfaction, if
not more to the good of their souls, on the outside than in
the interior of the meeting-house. At length Commencement
came to be the great gala-day of the year for the coloured
people in and about Boston, who were, by no means, such
quiet and orderly citizens as their representatives now are,
while their comparative number was much greater." " It was
as if in Oxford, Commemoration and St. Giles Fair — one of
the last left us of the great English fairs — were held on the
same day.
1 Harvard Reminiscences^ p. 59. * Ib» p. 26.
86 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Close to the Common where this scene of riot was going
on, and facing the College gates, stands the First Parish
Church, parted by its graveyard alone from the Episcopa-
lian Church where Washington had his pew.
** Like sentinel and nun they keep
Their vigil on the green :
One seems to guard and one to weep
The dead that lie between."
In this old church, for a century and a half, the Commence-
ment exercises were held and the degrees were conferred.
From the College a procession was formed, which is thus de-
scribed as it was seen in 1725: "The Bachelors of Arts
walked first, two in a rank, and then the Masters, all bare-
headed; then followed Mr. Wadsworth alone as President;
next the Corporation and Tutors, two in a rank; then the
Honourable Lieutenant-Governor and Council, and next to
them the rest of the gentlemen."^ The President sat in the
old chair sung of by the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table : —
" One of the oddest of human things,
Turned all over with knobs and rings,
But heavy, and wide, and deep, and grand,
Fit for the worthies of the land."
The exercises were all in Latin. According to the ancient
fashion of universities, there was a " syllogistic disquisition.
When the disputations were going on the President had often
occasion to interpose and set the disputants right. This was
always done in Latin. "^ It was not till after the middle of
the eighteenth century that " the walls " of the church " were
disgraced " by being made to echo English.*
* Quincy's Harvard^ I. 377. ^ Higher Education^ etc., p. 36.
^ ** Dr. Johnson said that he would never consent to disgrace the walls
of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription." Boswell*s Life of
Johnson^ III. 85.
THE KE"' YOrK
PUBLIC 1, :^,'.RY
ASTOR, Li • : r
TILD LN" }'( '■
V. HARVARD COLLEGE, 87
In the year 1824 Harvard, in common with the rest of the
country, went wild with excitement over General Lafayette,
who had crossed the sea as "the Guest of the Nation." The
triumphant progress of "Grandison-Cromwell," the most
conspicuous and the most fatal failure of the French Revolu-
tion, astonishes an Englishman who knows nothing of the
services rendered nearly fifty years earlier by the gallant
young Frenchman to the struggling Colonies. When Edward
Everett, in his oration at the Phi Beta Kappa dinner at Har-
vard, writes one who was present, spoke of " the noble con-
duct of our guest in procuring a ship for his own transporta-
tion, at a time when all America was too poor to offer him a
passage to her shores, the scene was overpowering; every one
was in tears. "^ At every town, at every crossway, crowds
had been waiting to welcome Lafayette as he passed onwards
from New York to Boston. Men pressed forward to shake his
hand, and babies were held up for him to kiss, so that if they
lived to be old men and women, they might boast that this
demigod had touched them with his lips. " If Lafayette had
kissed me," said an enthusiastic lady, "depend upon it, I
would never have washed my face again as long as I lived ! " "
Webster, addressing him on Bunker Hill, exclaimed: "For-
tunate, fortunate man ! With what measure of devotion will
you not thank God for the circumstances of your extraordinary
life! You are connected with both hemispheres, and with
two generations. Heaven saw fit to ordain that the electric
spark of liberty should be conducted through you from the
New World to the Old."* It was perhaps the throng of
worshippers, the hand-shakings, and the baby-kissings, that
1 J. Quincy's Figures of the Past, p. 107.
* lb, p. 153. * Webster's fVorJks, I. 70.
88 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
on Commencement Day made the great man and his escort
reach the College nearly two hours behind time. At the en-
trance, as an eye-witness records,^ "he was welcomed by
President Kirkland in a neat and peculiarly appropriate ad-
dress." A neat address to welcome the hero of two worlds!
Nothing but a neat address ! Perhaps, however, to be merely
neat was the best thing "a jolly little man" could do who
knew that there was an Edward Everett with his never-
failing eaglet to follow. Josiah Quincy, to whom had been
assigned the honour of the Latin "Valedictory," — the speech
in which the newly-made Bachelor in the name of his com-
rades bids Alma Mater farewell, — has left an account of the
day. "The first part of my performance," he writes, "con-
sisted of mere phrases of rhetorical compliment, thrown out
at creation in general. But the inevitable allusion came at
last. I had drifted among the heroes of the Revolution, and
suddenly turned to the General with my In te quoqucy Lafay-
ette — and then what an uproar drowned the rest of the sen-
tence! The entire audience upon the floor had sprung to
their feet, the ladies in the gallery were standing also, and
were waving their handkerchiefs with impassioned ardour.
It was the last opportunity which the day was to offer to pay
homage to the guest of America, and, as if by one consent,
it was improved to the utmost." ^
Such scenes of triumph Lafayette had not witnessed since
that memorable Festival of the Federation on the Champ de
Mars, when, mounted on his white charger, " il semblait com-
mander k la France enti^re." A wit, pointing him out to a
1 The Rev. John Pierce, quoted in W. R. Thayer's Historical Sketch of
Harvard University^ p. 55.
* J. Quincy's Figures of the Past, pp. 55-57.
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 89
young man who was standing near him, exclaimed : " Voyez-
vous M. de La Fayette qui galope dans les si^cles a venir ! " ^
Through America in the nineteenth century he was having the
first of these gallops.
The excesses from the too free use of wine and punch at
the Commencement dinners began more than fifty years
ago to move the friends of temperance. The Rev. John
Pierce, one of those useful divines who keep a minute
diary, recorded in 1836: "Be it noted that this is the first
Commencement I ever attended in Cambridge in which I saw
not a single person drunk in the Hall or out of it." Perhaps
this most irregular regularity of conduct may be accounted for
by the next line in the Diary : " There were the fewest pres-
ent I ever remember." Two years later he makes the follow-
ing entry: "Notwithstanding the efforts of the friends of
temperance, wine was furnished at dinner."* But a more
sober day was dawning. In 1846 Professor Silliman of Yale,
who was one of the guests, recorded : " There was no wine —
only lemonade; the very first instance of the kind that has
occurred here."*
What a change had come over the University since those
early days when two undergraduates paid part of their term's
charges with a rundlet of sack, and a Bachelor of Arts was
"credited with jQi 8x. od. for 'sack that he brought into Col-
lege at Commencement, and was charged upon the rest of
the Commencement according to their proportion. * " * What
sound morality the old Puritans could draw even out of strong
1 Memoir es du General Baron ThiebauUy p. 261.
2 Quoted in W. R. Thayer's Historical Sketchy etc., p. 56.
* Life of Benjamin Silliman, II. 32.
* Ike Early College Buildings at Cambridge, by A. M. Davis, 1890, p. 12.
90 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
waters, is shown by the following passage in the Diary of
Samuel Sewall, who was Chief Justice of the Commonwealth
and an Overseer of Harvard College. "Sixth-day. Oct. i,
1697. Had first Butter, Honey, Curds and Cream. For
Diner, very good Rost Lamb, Turkey, Fowls, Aplepy.
After Diner sung the 121 Psalm. Note. A glass of spirits
my wife sent stood upon a Joint-Stool which Simon W. jog-
ging, it fell down and broke all to shivers. I said 'twas a
lively emblem of our Fragility and Mortality." ^ It was not,
we may feel sure, the first glass that had been brought in that
day. More than one must have gone to the making of so
pious a reflection.
It is not easy to conceive the still deeper shade of melan-
choly which stole over the great Webster's naturally sad face
— for he also was a guest at the Commencement dinner re-
corded by Professor Silliman — as he contemplated the lem-
onade bottle, and thought of the old Madeira in the cellar of
his pleasant home at Marshfield. " Dost thou think because
thou art virtuous," he might have cried out to the Rev. John
Pierce, "there shall be no more cakes and ale?" He was
no Dr. Johnson whose face about five o'clock one morning,
towards the end of a supper-party, "shone with meridian
splendour, though his drink had been only lemonade." A
lady at whose house I stayed told me that her father had been
a great admirer of Webster. One day he rode fifty miles to
hear him speak, but to his grief found that his hero was too
far gone in drink to be able to utter a word.
Since 1846 no liquor stronger than coffee has been provided.
The thousand graduates, who every year at this great gathering
dine together in Memorial Hall, must pledge one another in
1 Diary of Samuel Srwallt I. 460.
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 91
lemonade, iced water, or coffee. At the dinner last summer
I sat opposite a foreign professor on whom an honorary de-
gree had been conferred. I was struck by "the dejected
'haviour of his visage." It might have been due to the
speeches, but I would fain hope that it was only caused by
enforced temperance. I called to mind how, a year or two
earlier, a French Academician, on a visit to Oxford, had burst
into the house of one of my friends, and in a parched voice
had begged for a glass of wine. Some was given him. As
soon as he was sufficiently recovered to speak, he explained
that he had been dining with a great scholar but a rigid teeto-
taler. It was, he said, the first time within his memory that
he had taken his dinner without wine or beer, and he felt
well-nigh suffocated. At the Harvard Commencement, the
victory of the friends of temperance is not even yet complete.
As night draws on there are still occasionally some remnants
of drunkenness to be seen. To each class — to the graduates,
that is to say, of each year — a room is assigned in the Col-
lege buildings, where old friends can meet. It sometimes
happens that a wealthy toper, in defiance of the wishes and
even of the votes of the abstainers who often form a majority,
insists on providing a mighty bowl of punch. I was surprised
to learn that no greatly aggrieved teetotaler had ever been
known, in his righteous indignation, to throw into the mixture
a handful of salt. The Americans, however, are a patient
people. Harvard punch-bowls, nevertheless, have had their
day, and may now be stowed away in the Archaeological
Museum. The President and Fellows have this year voted,
that "hereafter no punches nor distilled liquors shall be
allowed in any College room on Class Day or Commencement
Day."
92 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
When I considered the academic temperance of the place,
the impossibility of getting wine or beer in the great Hall
of the University, I was astonished at the daring imagination
of the Professor of Latin, who, when a great German scholar
was celebrating last year the fiftieth anniversary of his doc-
torate, assured him in a telegram : —
" Harvardiani festo gratantes die
Salutem plenis tibi propinant poculis."
What do the Harvardiani know of full cups — the learned
Harvardiani I mean, not the dull topers who each Commence-
ment flock in from the country? But the Professor has the
poet's mind: —
** And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
For the great ceremony of Commencement, we assembled
in Massachusetts Hall, the oldest building in Harvard. I
was first taken by a friend to the gateway to watch the arrival
of His Excellency the Governor of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts. Alone among the Governors of the forty-two
States does he bear this title of Excellency. He drove up
in an open carriage drawn by four horses, himself in plain
clothes, but accompanied by a Staff, in their scarlet uniforms
more splendid even than the Deputy-Lieutenants of the city
of London. A troop of Lancers — citizens playing at sol-
diers — escorted him. His train was swelled by the chief
officers of two Russian men-of-war. It so happened that on
a point overlooking Boston Harbour the statue of Admiral
Farragut, the naval hero of the war between the North and
South, was next day to be unveiled. The Czar, once more
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 93
eager to exhibit his Platonic love of republics and liberty, had
sent his ships to add to the display. The Lancers halted
outside the gates, but the Staff accompanied the Governor as
he drove in. One of these gorgeous citizens, anxious for the
honour of Boston and Harvard, and unwilling that it should
be thought that all this state was a mere passing compliment
to the foreign naval officers, assured them that every year
there was the same pomp. As they entered the College
grounds there was indeed an unwonted sight for the subjects
of a despot, — a great crowd and not a single soldier or police-
man in sight. As, led by a brass band, we slowly marched
in a long procession through the Yard and across the public
road beyond to Memorial Hall, the throng of undergraduates
and strangers opened of itself to let us pass, lining both sides
of the way. At certain points, where there was any "coign
of vantage " they gathered together and cheered the popular
men as they went by. The Governor seemed a great favour-
ite. Just before me in the long line was the Rev. Dr. Everett
Hale. As we passed the thronged steps of University Hall,
a young man standing at the foot, and looking up to the
undergraduates massed above him, cried out "Hale!" and
beat time for the "Harvard yell," as they all shouted: Rah-
rah-rah; rah-rah-rah ; rah-rah-rahl — Hale^ or rather,
Ha-al, for they prolonged the note. Dr. Hale lifted his hat
in acknowledgment. Just beyond, an absurdly drunken fel-
low bestowed on me as deep and as formal a bow as his un-
steady legs allowed. He meant well no doubt, and it was a
flattering attention to a stranger; but I did not think it need-
ful to reply to the compliment. As we drew near Sanders
Theatre — the Harvard Sheldonian — we passed between the
graduating Bachelors who, in cap and gown, lined both sides
94 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
of the way. They fell in at the end of the procession. In
the theatre they occupied the area, and, far better off than the
Oxford Masters of Arts to whom the same place is assigned
, in the Sheldonian, they were provided with benches.
I was greatly struck by the difference between a Harvard
Commencement and an Oxford Commemoration. In both
prize compositions are recited, and in both honorary degrees
are conferred. But here the resemblance ceases. At Har-
vard the ordinary degrees are also given, the degrees for the
whole year. In Oxford, it is the distinguished strangers
alone who on the great day are honoured. Even an Oxonian
Bishop, who in that capacity is at once made a Doctor of
Divinity, is not thought good enough, or at all events great
enough, for Commemoration. In Oxford, far greater pomp is
aimed at, but owing to the unrestrained folly of the under-
graduates far less is achieved. Few ceremonies have been
contrived with greater art. To the triumphant notes of the
organ, the Vice-Chancellor, preceded by the Bedells with
their silver maces, followed by the Doctors in their scarlet or
crimson gowns and the two Proctors, enter the Theatre by
the great doors, which on this day alone are flung open. He
takes his seat in his chair of stSate, with the Proctors below
him and the Doctors on the amphitheatre around him. The
names of those who are to be honoured that day are one by
one put to the vote of the House, a nominal vote it is true.
" Placetne vobis Domini Doctores? placetne vobis, Magistri ? "
the Vice-Chancellor asks in each case, he and the Proctors as
the question is put raising their caps, which they alone wear
during the proceedings. The doors are a second time thrown
open, and the Bedells lead in a second procession, composed
of those who are to receive the honorary degrees, each wear-
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 95
ing the crimson gown of a Doctor of Laws. The Regius
Professor of Civil Law takes them one by one to the foot of
the steps which lead up to the Vice-Chancellor's chair, and
there, in a Latin speech, proclaims each new Doctor's merits.
Each is welcomed by the Vice-Chancellor with a grasp of the
hand, and then takes his seat among the other Doctors. At
my first Commemoration, the Chancellor presided, the Earl
of Derby, and on Alfred Tennyson, among others, an honorary
degree was conferred.
All the solemnity and all the pomp of this ancient and strik-
ing ceremony disappear beneath the dull buffoonery of the
undergraduates, and the incredible weakness of the Univer-
sity. The Regius Professor's voice is drowned by silly out-
cries, and illustrious strangers are honoured — if honour it
can be called — in the midst of an insulting din. " Have I
done anything to offend them? " a learned foreigner not long
ago anxiously asked, when the speech in which his high merits
were described was overwhelmed by the uproar. I have seen
few more piteous sights than one I witnessed many years ago,
when an aged Vice-Chancellor, repeatedly raising his cap to
the undergraduates in the gallery, with beseeching looks, for
his voice could not have been heard, pleaded for silence, but
pleaded in vain. His humble appeals were answered with
jeers and roars of laughter. Men who could thus insult vene-
rable old age should have been hooted out of a university.^
How different was the scene at Harvard ! There was no state,
but there was perfect decorum — a decorum not once marred
by the slightest impropriety, the slightest touch of rude-
ness during the whole of the proceedings. Each recipient of
1 The Commemoration of the present year was conducted with far
greater decorum than any I have witnessed.
A
96 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
an honorary degree rose from his seat as his name was read
out by the President, who in a few words in Latin sounded
his praises. They exchanged bows, and the newly-made
Doctor sat down. Applause followed in each case; the
louder, of course, the more a man was a popular favourite,
but in no case was it prolonged. A little more ceremony
would not have been out of place.
Of the three hundred and thirty-eight students who took the
degree of Bachelor of Arts, only a few of the most distin-
guished were called up to the dais* To them were handed
by the President bundles of parchment diplomas, which they
distributed among their comrades seated in the area. Whilst
this distribution was quietly going on, the other degrees in
Arts, Divinity, Law, Medicine, and Science were conferred,
the recipients coming up in batches. As each batch presented
itself, the President, in Latin addressing the Governing Body,
stated that the students had been examined and approved
by the Professors, and like the Vice-Chancellor at Oxford,
asked for their Placet for conferring the degree.
The six Bachelors who recited the prize-compositions were
perfect in their memory; there was not in any one of them
the slightest hesitation. They had been carefully trained in
elocution. They spoke slowly and clearly. Their action —
no doubt the result also of training — was too monotonous.
There was a movement of the hand so unvaried and mechani-
cal that it added nothing to the force of the words. Perfect
rest would have been equally effective. They did not, as at
Oxford, speak from pulpits. Each, as he stepped upon the
dais, made a low bow to the President, and then, turning
round, an equally low bow to the audience. He who spoke
the Latin oration introduced first the Governor of the Com-
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 97
monwealth, to whom he bowed, and next the President of the
University. On each successive Governor an honorary degree
had for so many years been conferred, that it came to be
regarded as an established custom. When, however, Massa-
chusetts disgraced herself by the election of the notorious Gen-
eral Butler, Harvard refused to be dragged through the mire.
That year the Governor was passed over.
Inside the Theatre as well as outside, there was something
in the way of surprise for the Russian officers. One of the
young orators was, beyond all manner of doubt, a Jew by race
— a Jew, moreover, from the east of Europe. Here he was
no outcast, but one of the chosen people, one of " the happy
few " on whom high honour was conferred. Another boldly
maintained, in defiance of truth, censors, and the Czar of all the
Russias, that "the eternal and inalienable rights of man are
asserted everywhere." A third attacked the Government of
his country. "Out of the present political corruption," he
said, "good men have given up the field." No such speech
as that, I thought to myself, is happily ever heard in Eng-
land. The young orator insisted on their duty to return to
the strife, and to make political life once more wholesome
and pure.
In Oxford, at the close of the ceremony, a lunch is given to
the newly-made Doctors and to the most important people in
the University, in the noble Library of All Souls* College.
With a far less splendid meal, the guests of the day are wel-
comed at Harvard. The dinner is not under the management
of the University, but of the Association of Alumni. Judge
Story, who was its founder, had been shocked by the petty
jealousies which so often kept men apart who had been bred
in the same college. He hoped to do something towards
H
/
98 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
bringing them nearer to one another by an association to
which every Harvard man should be freely admitted. In the
address which he delivered, in 1842, at the first gathering he
said: "We meet for peace and for union; to devote one day
in the year to academical intercourse and the amenities of
scholars."^ Every year, on Commencement Day, the Alumni
elect their President for the next year, whose chief duty it is
to preside at the annual dinner. This gathering of graduates
is far beyond anything known in an English university. It is
not to 'witness Commencement that most of them come, for
it is by the friends of the youthful Bachelors and by strangers
that the Theatre is mainly thronged. The former members
m
of the University flock to Harvard from all parts of the coun-
try, not only to meet their old comrades, in accordance with
a time-honoured custom, but also to vote at the election of the
Overseers. Of the eighteen thousand men who have gradu-
ated in the last two centuries and a half, more than one-half,
it is believed, are still living. Of these, from one in ten to
nearly one in seven vote each year.* As proxies are not
allowed, the attendance is very large.
An attempt has recently been made to extend the suffrage,
which at present is confined to graduates in Arts and the
holders of honorary degrees. "It was not so much," it is
said, " the naked right to vote that was sought, as recognition
at Commencement, and a right to partake of the hospitalities
of the College, and participate in the enthusiasm of the occa-
sion."* It seems strange that to all who have a Harvard
degree, this recognition should not be freely extended, and
1 Life of Joseph Story ^ II. 426.
2 Harvard University ^ by F. BoUes, p. 4; Harvard Graduated Maga-
zine, January, 1893, P* 269. • lb.
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 99
this right should not be willingly granted. The Medical
School, however, is so loosely connected with the old foun-
dation, that it can scarcely share in its spirit. Having its
seat three miles away in Boston, it has no part in the aca-
demical life and in the social feeling. In Oxford and Cam-
bridge there is, happily, no similar local separation of the
students. Whatever may be their studies, they are all, not
only in name but in reality, members of the same univer-
sity. They almost all belong to one or other of the colleges.
To complete their education our young physicians and sur-
geons must, no doubt, go up to London; for in the small
hospital of a country town the " many shapes of death " and
disease cannot be thoroughly studied. It is a pity that in the
American university all the preliminary scientific instruction,
all the instruction which can be given outside a hospital, is
not given at Harvard. It would confer a double benefit — a
benefit on those who study Medicine and on those who study
Arts; for the mingling of men and studies is the very essence
of the training of a university. The graduates of the Law
School, however, are not under the same disadvantage. To
them, for three long years, the Yard had been their pacing-
ground. They "ranged that enclosure old" no less than the
students in Arts. Nevertheless, I am told that on the hearts
of those who, before coming to Harvard, had passed through
some other university, their first Alma Mater generally retains
by far the stronger hold. It might be otherwise were they
not only allowed, but even urged, to share in " the enthusi-
asm of the occasion." Then as the year came round, they
would help to swell the throng which from North, South, and
West, from the Canadian borders, from the pleasant shores of
the far-distant Pacific, and from the wilds of " vast, illimita-
980986 ^
100 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
ble Texas " gathers in Fair Harvard, " the home of their free-
roving years."
When the writer whom I have quoted above talks of " the
right to partake in the hospitalities of the College," he must
use the term hospitalities somewhat loosely. It could scarcely
be expected that the Corporation should each year feed a
thousand self-invited guests. Each alumnus pays for his own
dinner. The charge, viewed in the abstract, seems moderate
enough — only a dollar. As two o'clock, the hour for the
repast, drew near, we were for the second time that day
formed in procession in the Yard. At the head came the
President of the Association and the guests, and next the
graduates according to their standing. They were summoned
in their Classes. Classes and the strong Class spirit which
springs from them, so familiar a feature of American univer-
sities, are unknown in Oxford and Cambridge. Even at
Harvard, firmly as this comradeship binds together the older
men, among the younger generations it is dying out. " There
is no Class spirit at Harvard," a young writer says sadly; "the
elective system destroyed that long ago."* Much of this
spirit was bad, and has deservedly perished. " The different
Classes," wrote Judge Story, speaking of his undergraduate
days, " were almost strangers to each other, and cold reserve
generally prevailed between them."^
Just as in the ancient English universities, when any mem-
ber of it is mentioned, the question is commonly put, " What
is his College?" so in an American university it is asked,
"What is his Class? " The course of instruction spreads over
four years, and the undergraduates are ranged in four divi-
sions, Freshmen, Sophomores, Junior Sophisters or Juniors,
1 The Crimson^ June 23, 1893. * ^(/^ of Joseph Story ^ I. 49.
▼. HARVARD COLLEGE. 101
and Senior Sophisters or Seniors. Each of these divisions,
furthermore, is known as the Class of such a year; not of the
year in which it begins its studies, but of that in which it is
to bring them to a close. For instance, at the beginning of
the academic year in September, 1893, there were in resi-
dence the Classes of 1894, 1895, 1896, 1897. The Seniors
form the Class of 1894, for it is in that year that they are to
graduate. The Juniors form the Class of 1895; the Sopho-
mores, of 1896; and the Freshmen, of 1897. In the old days,
the members of each Class, all following the same course of
instruction under the same tutors, being, moreover, compara-
tively few in number, by the end of their four years, if they had
not all become intimate, had, at all events, each acquired a
more or less accurate knowledge of the character of every one
of his companions. As, in all the anxious timidity of a
Freshman, they had on the same day entered College, so on
the same day, in all " the towering confidence " of a Bachelor
of Arts, had they bidden it farewell. Every year, as Com-
mencement has come round, have they revived the old inti-
macy and kept the old bond from loosening. Not only do they
meet in Harvard, but in Boston also they often have their
annual dinner. So, too, do many of the colleges of Oxford
and Cambridge have theirs in London. But in these meet-
ings of the American university, there is this touching differ-
ence. Each year the band grows smaller and smaller as
classmate after classmate passes away. There is no fresh
swarm of young men to fill up the gaps left by the veterans.
In the Harvard Graduates^ Magazine for January, 1893,
eight or nine pages are given to News from the Classes, The
Rev. Samuel May, one of the last survivors of that gallant
band of which William Lloyd Garrison was the leader, sends
#
102 HARVARD COLLEGE, CHAP.
in his report as Secretary of the Class of 1829. "There is
little," he writes, "that a Class of five men, all past the age
of eighty years, can have to report of doings. Yet, when that
five includes such names as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Sam-
uel Francis Smith, it will be admitted that it is not altogether,
even now, an idle class. The * national song,' written by
the latter, has just been sung in union by tens of millions of
voices and hearts at the national and patriotic commemora-
tion of the four-hundredth Columbus Anniversary." Dr. S. F.
Smith is the author also of America, which sixty-two years
ago he struck off in half an hour to the tune of God Save the
King, "I had no idea," he says, "that I was writing a
national hymn." On the eighty-third birthday of his old
classmate. Dr. Holmes, he wrote, as Mr. May tells us, to one
of the Boston newspapers: "We have but one Oliver Wen-
dell Holmes, who is known and loved everywhere in the
English-speaking world. . . . Sixty-three years out of col-
lege! The famous Class dinners, uninterrupted in annual
recurrence from 1828 to 1890, have been discontinued at a
public hostelry; but Dr. Holmes opens his hospitable doors
and spreads his table annually for those that remain. Three
in 1 89 1, three in 1892, met in memory of the past, in recog-
nition of the present, and in anticipation of the future." The
Secretary of the Class of 1832 reports that there were only
four now available for an anniversary. Of the four, one was
the Autocrat's brother, Mr. John Holmes, "the best and most
delightful of men," as Lowell many years ago described him.^
The strength of this Class feeling is now and then shown in a
union for some good purpose. Thus, the Class of 1856 raised
a subscription of six thousand dollars (;^i226), as a fund
1 Letters of J, R. L(fweii, II. 173.
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 103
for defraying the annual publication of Harvard Studies in
Classical Philology y while the Class of 1857 put up a window
of painted glass in Memorial Hall.^
When on Commencement Day in last June, the procession
began to form in the Yard, and the Marshal called out, " Class
1826," there was great cheering as a solitary old man stood
forth. How much that old man had seen! When he left
College, there still survived many a gray-headed veteran who
had fought in the Revolutionary War. The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table was just closing his Freshman's year. Motley,
Sumner, Wendell Phillips, Lowell, Dana, and Theodore Parker
were schoolboys. He was soon supported by a veteran of
1827. Of the next three years, there was not a single repre-
sentative. From 1 83 1 downwards there was no gap. In the
Hall the alumni sat down in their Classes, so that comrade
sat by comrade. The Rev. Mr. Pierce records of the dinner
of 1829: "I set the tune, St. Martin* s^ the seventeenth time
to the LXXVIII Psalm. I asked the President how much of
the Psalm we should sing. Judge Story replied, *Sing it all.*
We accordingly, contrary to custom, sang it through without
omitting a single stanza. It was remarked that the singing
was never better. But as the company are in five different
rooms, it will be desirable on future occasions to station a
person in each room to receive and communicate the time." ^
To go through the whole of the seventy-three verses of this
fine psalm, even though the singers were all in one great hall,
would be more than these modern days would patiently bear.
We were contented with singing only five. As I thought of
the old settlement of the Puritans, and of their noble resolu-
1 Harvard Graduates* Magazine, January, 1893, pp. 279, 322.
* Historical Sketchy etc., p. 56.
104 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
tion that whatever dangers and hardships they themselves had
to face, their children should not grow up in ignorance ; as I
called to mind that we were standing on the very spot where
they had founded their College, these verses sung by a thou-
sand voices of their descendants, removed from them by two
centuries and a half, seemed to me unspeakably touching : —
" Give ear, ye children ; to my law
Devout attention lend;
Let the instructions of my mouth
Deep in your hearts descend.
" My tongue, by inspiration taught.
Shall parables unfold;
Dark oracles, but understood.
And own*d for truths of old :
** Which we from sacred registers
Of ancient times have known;
And our forefathers' pious care
To us has handed down.
** Let children learn the mighty deeds
Which God performed of old;
Which, in our younger years, we saw,
And which our fathers told.
** Our lips shall teach them to our sons,
And they again to theirs;
That generations yet unborn
May teach them to their heirs.''
There is a quaint passage in old Samuel Sewall's Diary,
which might not unfitly be read aloud at every Commence-
ment in grateful commemoration of the founder of the
College. On January 26, 169^ he recorded: "I lodged at
Charlestown at Mrs. Shepards', who tells me Mr. Harvard
built that house. I lay in the chamber next the street. As I
lay awake past midnight, In my Meditation I was affected to
V. HARVARD COLLEGE. 105
consider how long agoe God had made provision for my com-
fortable Lodging that night, seeing that was Mr. Harvard's
house : And that led me to think of Heaven the House not
made with hands, which God for many Thousands of years has
been storing with the richest furniture, (saints that are from
time to time placed there), and that I had some hopes of
being entertained in that Magnificent Palace, every way fitted
and furnished. These thoughts were very refreshing to me." ^
When the dinner was finished the jugs of coffee were again
passed down the tables, and cigars and pipes were lighted. I
was surprised to see how few smokers there were, — not, I
think, one-fourth as many as there would have been in a simi-
lar company in England. The speeches that followed were
somewhat disappointing. As a stranger remarked to me:
"There was no scholarship in any one of them. They might
all have been made by men not educated in a university."
Had they been spoken by the representatives whom Oxford
generally sends to Parliament, they could not have shown
fewer signs of the scholar. There was no wit, and next to
no humour. Lowell has passed away, and Holmes was not
there. The President, however, spoke well. What he had
to say, he said briefly and clearly. His was a speech
which would have more than satisfied Carlyle. Had some
of the Professors been called on, doubtless an academic
flavour would have been given to the meeting. Mr. Robert
Lincoln, the son of the great President, when once he had
shaken himself free from his jokes, was vigorous enough. He
defended the Judge who three years earlier had tried the Chi-
cago anarchists from the charges lately brought against him by
a man high in authority in the State. The prolonged applause
with which Mr. Lincoln was welcomed bore testimony not
1 Diary of Samuel Sewall, I. 447.
106 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. v.
only to his own worth, but also to the deep feeling of reve-
rence with which his father's memory is cherished, a reverence,
I believe, scarcely less than that felt for Washington.
Mr. Lincoln was followed by a Roman Catholic Bishop, on
whom that morning had been conferred the degree of Doctor
of Laws. He took for the subject of his discourse the lecture
which Mr. Huxley had lately delivered before the University
of Oxford. For a full half-hour he overwhelmed him and us
with his rhetoric. He told an audience of university men
the whole story of the death of Socrates, as if not only Plato,
Xenophon, Grote, and Jowett were unknown to everybody
present, but even Goldsmith's History of Greece were a sealed
book. It was amazing to me how this rhetorical sermon,
delivered after dinner, — a teetotal dinner, it is true, — was
applauded by an audience of university men. I should not
forget, however, that when there are a thousand present, if
only one in every five claps his hands or beats the table, the
tumult is considerable. Americans, I thought, must have an
amazing appetite for hortatory rhetoric. Scarcely less amaz-
ing was it to hear in this "Godless University" a Roman
Catholic Bishop denounce as atheistical, a lecture delivered
in the very home and centre of all that is venerable in An-
glican orthodoxy. Oxford the culprit, the charge impiety,
the accuser a Roman Catholic Bishop, the Court a Unitarian
University, the verdict Guilty ! I called to mind how, some
thirty years ago, a far more eloquent Bishop, at the meeting
of the British Association at Oxford, had scoffed at Darwin
and his new teaching, and how, the moment he sat down amid
the laughter and the applause of his audience, Mr. Huxley
had started up and smitten him heavily. I wished that he
had been at Harvard to try another fall with another Bishop.
CHAPTER VI.
Phi Beta Day. — Foundation of the Society. — Emerson's Oration in 1837.
— Charles Sumner. — The Meeting and the Dinner.
ON the day after Commencement I attended the yearly
meeting of the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa.
This Society, to which there is nothing that answers in England,
took its rise towards the close of last century in William and
Mary College, Virginia. It aims at " the promotion of litera-
ture and friendly intercourse among scholars." The Harvard
Chapter was founded in 1 781, by virtue of an instrument called
a "Charter Party," dated December 4, 1779, formally executed
by the President, officers, and members of the original Society,
issued to Elisha Parmele, of the University of Cambridge, Mas-
sachusetts Bay, authorizing him to establish a Chapter there,
with all rights and powers. Parmele, no doubt, had been
initiated in Virginia. For many years the Phi Beta was every-
where a secret Society, with a formal initiation, of an oath of
secrecy, and certain mysteries, such as a peculiar way of shak-
ing hands and of knocking at the door. The knock was an
anapest — two light knocks followed by one hard. The name
in full, OtXoo-o<^ta Blov YLv^epvqr-qs (Philosophy, the guide of
life), was kept a secret ; the Society was known to the outside
world by the three initial letters. I do not know whether at
any time any connection was kept up between the Harvard
Chapter and the Mother Society. Charter Party ^ Johnson de-
fines as a paper relating to a contract, of which each party has
107
108 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
a copy. Whatever the contract was, if ever there was one, it
has long ceased to be enforced. The Harvard Phi Beta is
much more than a Chapter ; it is a Society in itself, with its
own independent constitution and government, and with scarcely
any connection with the other Chapters but in name. No new
Chapter, however, can be founded without the consent of a cer-
tain number of the older Chapters. When in the same State
a second is founded, the first has added to its name the first
letter of the Greek alphabet, and the second, the second, and
so on. Thus, the Harvard Chapter is the Phi Beta Kappa,
Alpha of Massachusetts. In all alike scholarship is made the
chief ground of admittance. The Society is everywhere re-
garded with jealousy by that large body of university men who
have not been able to win their way into it. It is a kind of
aristocracy in a democratic country. Within eight years of its
formation "a Committee of the Overseers reported to the
Board ' that there is an institution in the University with the
nature of which the Government is not acquainted, which tends
to make a discrimination among the students,' and submitted
* the propriety of inquiring into its nature and design.' " ^ The
Chairman of this Committee was that "famous rebel," John
Hancock. It seems strange that the man who had once been
the President of the Continental Congress which published the
Declaration of Independence should now be troubling his head
about a small secret society got up by a knot of students.
The Phi Beta was caught in the great wave of popular rage
against Free Masonry which swept over the land — a wave in
which were overwhelmed Henry Clay's hopes of arriving at the
Presidency of the United States. There was not a secret
society that was not attacked as opposed to the spirit of de-
1 Quincy*s Harvard, II. 398.
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 109
mocracy. In 1831 John Quincy Adams, the ex- President, and
Judge Story, after a long and angry discussion, induced their
" brethren " of the Harvard Phi Beta to throw open its secrets
to the world — to throw them open formally, that is to say, for
by this time there was nothing left to divulge. Everybody
knew what the name meant. Everybody could give the Phi
Beta shake of the hand and the Phi Beta knock at the door.
For about forty years the Harvard Phi Beta was a College
Society, holding frequent meetings in men's rooms, where
essays and poems were read. Each year it had one public
performance on the morning after Commencement — an anni-
versary always known as Phi Beta Day. As time went on the
terminal meetings became less and less frequent, till they
ceased altogether, while the annual meeting steadily grew in
importance. On this great day an oration is delivered and an
original poem is recited. At first the Orators and Poets were
chosen from among the young Bachelors of Arts. In 1788
John Quincy Adams, the year after he had taken his degree,
gave the oration. Gradually older men were selected, while
the choice was not confined to the " brethren.'* At the pres-
ent time, when on the " bead-roll " are " filed" the names of
men eminent by genius, scholarship, and literature, or by the
post which they have filled in the world, to be invited to
address the Society is a mark of high distinction. The Presi-
dent, that eminent Greek scholar. Professor Goodwin, in an
address which he delivered before it in 1891, speaking of
Harvard said : " The Phi Beta is the only society whose right
to examine the condition of our scholarship is unquestioned.
She is the only society here which represents College scholar-
ship pure and simple. All her children either have achieved
distinction for scholarship in College, or have shown in after
110 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
life that they might have achieved it if they had wanted to,
or if the College had let them distinguish themselves in their
own way. But although Phi Beta keeps in her own hands the
wholesome power of correcting the mistakes of the College
authorities, when they either overlook genius or allow it to
blush unseen, she still accepts without question the body
of recruits who are sent to her each year as * distinguished
scholars.* " ^ Every Phi Beta Day a certain number of hono-
rary members are elected. It is then that " the mistakes of
the College authorities " are corrected. In earlier years only
sixteen ordinary members were admitted, but with the growth
of the College the number has been raised to twenty-five.
The election is curiously contrived. In each year the electors
are eight in number, all Seniors, who in the previous year had
been themselves elected from the Juniors, not only to act as
electors next year, but to be members of the Society. They
had been chosen, not out of the whole body of Juniors, but
out of the twelve who stood highest on the list for scholarship.
From among the twenty-five who stand highest in their own
Class they now choose seventeen, who, added to themselves,
form the twenty-five new members. " No honour that Pres-
cott received at College," writes his biographer, " was valued
so much by him, or had been so much an object of his ambi-
tion, as his admission to the Society of the Phi Beta Kappa.
As the selection was made by the undergraduates themselves,
and as a single black-ball excluded the candidate, it was a real
distinction; and Prescott always liked to stand well with his
fellows, later in life, no less than in youth." ^ For Motley,
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. I.
^Life of Prescott, ed. 1864, p. 24. By the present rule, a candidate
must obtain a three-fourths vote.
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE, 111
who had entered Harvard when he was but thirteen, and who
" did not aim at or attain a high College rank, the rules were
stretched so as to include him." ^ The Society was indeed
quick to detect the genius of his bright and promising youth.
The correction generally comes many years later. A year
earlier Charles Sumner had been passed over. Though he
was a good classical scholar and of wide reading, his neglect
of mathematics had kept him down in his Class. Seven years
later he was chosen an honorary member. ^ Had such a
society existed in the English Cambridge, Wordsworth and
Charles Darwin would most certainly have been refused admit-
tance as distinguished scholars. How soon the poet's genius
would have been discovered it is not easy to say; probably
not till many years after he had written his great Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality, The naturaUst would have won
the honour by his Voyage of the Beagle, In like manner an
Oxford Phi Beta would have had " to correct the mistakes of
the University authorities " by the admission of Mr. Ruskin
and Mr. William Morris. Landor, Shelley, Sir Edward Bume-
Jones, and Mr. Swinburne would also have had to be admitted ;
but as they all left without taking a degree, in their cases it
cannot be said that, so far as examinations went, any mistake
was committed.
George Ticknor describes a dinner in 1823 at which the chief
guest was Chancellor Kent, " superannuated by the Constitution
of the State of New York, because he is above sixty years old,
and yet, de facto, in the very flush and vigour of his extraordinary
faculties." Judge Story and Daniel Webster were present.
" Story gave as a toast, * The State of New York, where the
1 y, L, MotUyt by O. W. Holmes, 1889, ?• ^S*
* Life of Charles Sumner , I. 55.
112 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
law of the land has been so ably administered that it has become
the land of the law/ to which the Chancellor instantly replied,
* The State of Massachusetts, the land of Story as well as of
song * y and so it was kept up for three or four hours, not a soul
leaving the table. It was the finest literary festival I ever wit-
nessed." ^
In 1834 Emerson was the Poet, and in 1837 the Orator.
" This grand oration," writes Dr. Holmes, " was our intellectual
Declaration of Independence. No listener ever forgot that
address, and among all the noble utterances of the speaker it
may be questioned if one ever contained more truth in language
more like that of immediate inspiration." ^ " His oration,"
said Lowell, " was an event without any former parallel in our
literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the memory
for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. What crowded and
breathless aisles, what windows clustering with eager heads,
what enthusiasm of approach, what grim silence of foregone
dissent ! It was our Yankee version of a lecture by Abelard,
our Harvard parallel to the last public appearance of Schelling."
Lowell was an undergraduate when he witnessed this scene, and
" not yet among the ' Transcendentalists.* " A year later his
Class Day Poem shows " that he was untouched by the new
intellectual spirit, of which Emerson's was the clearest voice." '
" Lighten their darkness and ours too," some must have ex-
claimed, if the other voices were all less clear than Emerson's.
Perhaps among the audience was the great advocate, Jeremiah
Mason, who gave Webster his first lesson in the art of
"^Lifs of George Ticknor^ I. 340.
^R. W. Emersofiy by O. W. Holmes, 1885, P* ^'S*
^Literary Essays, by J. R. Lowell, 1890, I. 366; Letters of y, R,
Lowettf I. 31.
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 113
talking to a jury. Longfellow records how a few months after
the famous Phi Beta Oration some one " asked Mason whether
he could understand Mr. Emerson. His answer was, * No, I
can't ; but my daughter can.* " ^ Longfellow himself a little
later said of Emerson : " He is one of the finest lecturers I
ever heard, with magnificent passages of true prose-poetry.
But it is all dreamery ^ after all. " ^ If Prescott heard the Address,
it is likely that he was one of those who listened in " grim silence
of foregone dissent." In November, 1838, he wrote : "I have
read as much of Carlyle's French Revolution as I could stand.
His views certainly, as far as I can estimate them, are trite
enough. And in short, the whole thing in my humble opinion,
both as \.o forme and Xofond, is perfectly contemptible."^ He
who despised Carlyle was little likely to esteem Emerson. An
eminent American scholar, writing to me of Emerson's Oration
and of his Address before the Divinity College in the following
year, says : " Nothing shows the progress of thought in the
last sixty years more than the undoubted fact that these two
Addresses were laughed at and even vituperated by men who
still live to be ashamed of themselves."
In 1846 the Orator was Charles Sumner. In a blue dress-
coat with gilt buttons, buff" waistcoat, white trousers and gaiters
— "a new Demosthenes, or Cicero, even Hke a Grecian god as
he stood on the platform " — so he seemed to a young lady in
the audience — for two hours, without the aid of a single note,
he poured forth in defence of peace and liberty his stream of
learned but far too copious oratory. " A grand, elevated, elo-
quent oration from Sumner," Longfellow recorded in his Diary,
"He spoke it with great ease and elegance; and was from
1 Life ofH, W. Longfellow, I. 277. « lb. I. 301.
« Life of W, H. Prescott, p. 339.
X
114 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
beginning to end triumphant."^ Even Edward Everett was
carried away by the young speaker's enthusiasm. " He said,"
as Professor Felton wrote to Sumner, " that it was an amazingly
splendid affair. * I never heard it surpassed. I don't know
that I ever heard it equalled.' Now, Charley (Felton con-
tinued), you may well be proud of having drawn forth from
these stony lips such human tones of speech." The vener-
able ex-President of the United States, John Quincy Adams,
who attended the Society for the last time, — he was in
his eightieth year, — thinking how his part was nearly played in
the struggle for the freedom of the slave, said to the Orator : " I
look from Pisgah to the Promised Land ; you must enter upon
it." »
A curious fact is recorded of the poem which, under the title
of Reveilky was recited before the Society in the summer fol-
lowing the revolt of the Southern States. " It was reprinted in
the South during the war, with such changes as made it serve
the Confederate cause. It was afterwards reprinted in England
as evidence of the spirit which animated the Confederacy." ^
Ticknor, writing in 1863, and looking back fifty years, says :
" The ^ B K, it should be remembered, was at that period a
Society of much more dignity and consequence than it is now.
It had an annual public exhibition, largely attended by such
graduates as were its members, and indeed, by the more culti-
vated portion of the community generally." * He must surely
have had something of the old man's failing in the slight which
he thus cast on modem days, and something, moreover, of the
'^ Life of H, fV, Longfi/iow, II. SS-
2 Life of Charles Sumner, III. 15-20.
' Library of Harvard University: Bibliographical Contributions, No.
42, by W. H. Tillinghast, p. 7.
* Life of W, ff, Prescoit, p. 24.
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE, 115
old man's ignorance of what was going on almost under his
very nose. At all events, if the Society was for a brief period
under an eclipse, it soon shone forth in all its brightness. Be-
tween i860 and 1880 it numbered among its Presidents, Vice-
Presidents, Orators, and Poets, Emerson, Sumner, Dana, Lowell,
Holmes, G. W. Curtis, and Bret Harte. Lowell, who was Presi-
dent from 1863 to 187 1, describes how, in 1865, he had sat up
late the night before Phi Beta Day with a few friends who had
been with him at the Commencement dinner. "Per Bacco
and tobacco, how wisely silly we were ! I forgot for a few
blessed hours that I was a Professor, and felt as if I were some-
thing real. But Phi Beta came next day, and wastCt I tired ?
Presiding from 9 a.m. till 6.30 p.m. is no joke ! " ^ He had de-
tected a certam sameness in the inspiration of the Poets of the
Society. In a letter to Professor Child he says : " I have
noticed that Class and Phi Beta poems almost always begin
with an * as * — at any rate they used to in my time, before a
certain Boylston Professor took *em in hand.* E,g. —
As the last splendours of expiring day
Round Stoughton's chimneys cast a lingering ray,
So —
And sometimes there was a whole flight of ' as't% * leading
up to the landing of a final so, where one could take breath and
reflect on what he had gone through." *
In 1867 Emerson was for the second time appointed Orator.
" His oration," wrote Lowell, " was more disjointed than usual,
even with him. It began nowhere and ended everywhere, and
1 Loiters of J, R, Lowell^ I. 389.
^ Professor Child was at that time the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric
and Oratory at Harvard.
' Litters of J. R, Lowell, II. 237.
116 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
yet, as always with that divine man, it left you feeling that
something beautiful had passed that way — something more
beautiful than anything else, and like the rising and setting of
stars. Every possible criticism might have been made on it
but one — that it was not noble. There was a tone in it that
awakened all elevating associations. He boggled, he lost his
place, he had to put on his glasses, but it was as if a creature
from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was
our fault, not his. It was chaotic, but it was all such stuff as
stars are made of, and you couldn't help feeling that, if you
waited awhile, all that was nebulous would be whirled into
planets, and would assume the mathematical gravity of system.
All through it I felt something in me that cried, ' Ha, ha, to the
sound of the trumpets.' "
In 1 88 1 the Society celebrated the hundredth anniversary of
its foundation. Delegates were present from all parts of the
country, each representing a Chapter of the Phi Beta. The
Orator was Wendell PhiUips. It was his last great speech and
was worthy of the occasion. He took for his subject the
Cowardice of Educated Men.
Though the Phi Beta is not a part of the University, is in no-
wise under its government, and is not even mentioned in the
Catalogue^ nevertheless it is recognized by the College authori-
ties. It is in the University Theatre that the Oration is deliv-
ered and the Poems recited, and in Massachusetts Hall that the
dinner is held. In the Yard the procession is formed in which
the Orator and Poet are conducted to the Theatre. I did not
discover so much state as I had seen on Commencement Day.
Gowns were not worn and there was no Governor of the Com-
monwealth with his gorgeous Staff. Nevertheless there was a
long and imposing line, and what was wanting in show was, no
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 117
doubt, made up in intellect. The guests, instead of being in
front as on the day before, now brought up the rear. Last of
all came the President of the Society, with the Orator, General
Walker, who is renowned, not only as a soldier who did good ser-
vice in the war with the Southern States, but also as a Political
Economist. He is, moreover. President of the Boston School of
Technology. In front of them walked the Poet, Mr. Maurice
Thompson, accompanied by the Roman Catholic Bishop. The
last time, perhaps, that the Orator and Poet had met was face to
fece on some battle-field in the Civil War, for Mr. Thompson, too,
had played his part in it in the army of the South. In the The-
atre, the President of the University, who had walked with the
guests, took his place in the area among the ordinary members.
The roomy dais was occupied by the President and Chaplain
of the Society, the Orator and the Poet. They looked some-
what forlorn in the midst of so large and vacant a space. They
should have had, by way of support, all the past Orators, Poets,
and Chaplains who could be got together. Doubtless there
were not a few of them in the audience. The Chaplain, who
ought to have opened the proceedings with a prayer, through
the forgetfulness of the President, was not called upon. How-
ever, the prayer was not lost, for the venerable man gave it us
by way of grace at the dinner, and a very good prayer it was —
at least for these modem days, when the art of praying seems
well-nigh forgotten. As a grace it did not do quite so well.
The oration was an able and soldierly defence of athleticism.
There were some high in authority at Harvard who thought
that in a university, where athleticism seems running mad, such
a defence was altogether out of place. They maintained, more-
over, that the subject was ill-suited for a learned society. The
Poet had taken for his theme Lincoln's grave. In his verses
/
118 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
he let his hearers know that he had fought for the South. He
was, he said, a Georgian, and when Georgia had called him he
had not hesitated to obey. Nevertheless, avowed and impeni-
tent rebel that he was, he carried his audience of Northerners
with him by his reverence for Lincoln. He sat down in the
midst of loud applause, which seemed to me his due ; though
it was by no means easy to judge of the real merits of a poem
that was recited in so strange a scene. My thoughts would
wander to
" Old, unhappy far-off things
And battles long ago,"
as I contrasted his frail body with the General's strong and
commanding form, and thought of all that the two men had
done and undergone. In the audience was many a man who
had fought in the Northern armies ; the Theatre in which we
were sitting had been built as a memorial to the Harvard men
who had fallen in the great war ; and here, in this very spot, in
the very home of all that is now strongest in Northern senti-
ment and conviction, was this Southern rebel speaking tenderly
and reverently of the great President, and touching these New
Englanders to the heart.
In more than one way did this Southerner show his magna-
nimity. He had this great audience of Northerners at his
mercy — a poet's mercy ; and nevertheless he was brief. His
recitation did not last fifteen minutes. I was told of a recent
occasion when the bard had six times paused in his inspiration
to drink iced water, and only paused every time the clock
sounded the hour or the quarters.
We sat down to dinner at least two hundred in number;
all the members ranged according to their seniority. At the
high table were the President of the Society, the Orator, the
VI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 119
Poet, and the guests. The President of the University sat
among his old comrades, the men of his Class. The kindly
Roman Catholic Bishop, having despatched Mr. Huxley the
day before, being the second time called on for a speech, took
nearly half an hour to kill him again. Perhaps, however, his
discourse should rather be looked upon as a funeral sermon,
such as in the good old days an Inquisitor might have preached
over the ashes of a heretic whom he had first sent to the stake.
I thought regretfully of the after-dinner speech which Bishop
Blougram would have made, if indeed that Right Reverend
Prelate would have been capable of speaking inspired by noth-
ing stronger than iced water and coffee.
In the speech which I was called on to make I brought for-
ward the claims of my own University to a share in the great
honour of founding Harvard. It was, I admitted, to Cam-
bridge that all my hearers looked up as their ancient Alma
Maier. To Oxford, however, scarcely less gratitude was due.
To her might be justly applied the lines which the poet used of
the great English statesman : —
" Nor mourn we less his perished worth
"Who bade the conqueror go forth."
Oxford had educated Laud, and Laud had driven the Puri-
tans across the seas. When all the orators had had their say
the whole company rose, and linking hands so as to form a vast
chain, sang Auld Lang Syne, Thus an interesting day and a
pleasant gathering were brought to a close.
tf
CHAPTER VII.
Class Day. — Its Origin and Growth. — Orators, Poets, and Odists. —
The New England Summer. — The '* Spreads." — The Exercises at the
Tree.
OF the three great days of Commencement week I had
seen two. 1 had seen the University in all its state
conferring honours and degrees, and I had seen the gathering
of a Society composed of the most distinguished graduates.
One day, and by no means the least curious and interesting of
the three, I had missed seeing through the inclemency of the
weather. The festivities of Commencement week begin with
the Seniors* Class Day — a day as unlike anything we have in
England as Phi Beta itself. On it the undergraduates, or
rather the Seniors, reign supreme. The Yard, the Theatre,
Memorial Hall, I might almost say the College itself, are all
under their rule. It is the first but the great day of the Feast,
" the greatest day," according to 77i^ Crimson, " in a Harvard
student*s career." "The old-time glory of Commencement,"
we are told, " has departed." To a stranger, however, a good
deal of it seems left. Class Day, which gathers as great a
crowd of the young and happy as even Eights* Week or
Commemoration at Oxford, has taken more than two centuries
to attain its present importance. Almost from the first it was
the custom for the Seniors each year to choose one of their
number who, in the name of all, should take leave of the
1 20
CHAP. VII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 121
College in a Valedictory Oration in the Latin language. Who
but the philosophic student would believe that out of this
humble beginning could have sprung all the gay costumes, the
feastings, the dancing, the music, the illuminations, and the
wildest of struggles ? In somewhat early days the Valedictory
was accompanied by a large consumption of strong liquors.
In 1 760 each Senior brought his bottle of wine to the meeting.
Josiah Quincy, describing a dinner some seventy years ago,
says : " Caleb Cushing came in, and gave for a toast, * The
bands of friendship, which always tighten when they are wet.*
When we had all drunk our skins full, we marched round to
all the Professors' houses, danced round the Rebellion and
Liberty Trees, and then returned to the Hall. A great many
of the Class were half-seas over." ^ In 1834 " iced punch was
brought in buckets.^ Colonel T. W. Higginson of the Class of
1 84 1 " can remember when the Senior Class assembled annu-
ally round * Liberty Tree * on Class Day, and ladled out bowls
of punch for every passer-by ; — till every Cambridge boy saw
a dozen men in various stages of inebriation about the College
Yard."' Perhaps the Colonel describes not the scenes of his
undergraduate days but of his boyhood, for it was in 1838, we
are told, that " President Quincy encouraged the conversion of
the Day into the respectable celebration which it has since
been." * To the class of 1838 " Lowell, and the sculptor Story,
and other congenial souls belonged." To them the main
credit of this conversion has been given.* Lowell's influence,
^ Figures of the Pasty p. 49.
^ Historical Sketchy etc., by W. R. Thayer, p. 57.
^Harvard's Better Self, by W. R. Bigelow, p. 7.
* Historical Sketch, etc., p. 58.
*By Henry Ware, in Appleton^s Journal for March, 1870; quoted in
History of Higher Education in Massachusetts^ by G. G. Bush, p. 197.
122 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
whatever it was, must have been exerted from a distance, for
all the spring and summer he was in a state of " suspension "
some miles away. His neglect of his prescribed studies — a
neglect in which perhaps, like him who was bidden to " let
Euclid rest and Archimedes pause," he was " not unwise " —
had been visited by the Harvard form of rustication. " Suspen-
sion," as we read in the Catalogue^ " is a separation from the
University for a fixed period of time. It may be accompanied
with a requirement of residence in a specified place, and of
the performance of specified tasks." Lowell had been sent
to the pleasant village of Concord " to carry on his studies
under the charge of the Minister." He was not as yet an
Emersonian, or he might have sought for consolation from the
Philosopher of Concord under the disappointment that came
upon himj Though he had been chosen Class Poet, he was
not allowed to be present to read his poem to his classmates.
*' It was printed for their use, and the little pamphlet, his first
independently printed production, has become one of the
desiderata of bibliomaniacs." ^
As a necessary part of the modem refinements, by whomso-
ever they were introduced, the friends of the Seniors were
invited to the ceremony. Wine and punch soon fell into the
background as sisters and cousins came to the front. For the
ladies elegant collations — "Spreads," to use the Harvard
term — were provided by the wealthier members of the Class
or by a subscription. There was dancing in the open air in
the Yard and under cover in the Hall. In 1846 Longfellow
records in his Journal: "July 16, Class Day. In the after-
noon a dance in Harvard Hall ; then the farewell shouts at the
doors of the several Colleges, and the wild ring around the old
1 Letters of J. R, Lowell^ I. 27, 31.
_,
b
s^^
'/■ Mil
VII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 123
'Liberty Tree.*"^ In 1850 the following account was writ-
ten : " Cotillons and the easier dances are performed in the
Yard, but the sport closes in the Hall with the Polka and other
fashionable steps. The Seniors again form, and make the
circuit of the buildings, great and small. They then assemble
under the Liberty Tree, around which, with hands joined, they
dance after singing the students* adopted song, Auld Lang
Syne, At parting, each member takes a sprig or a flower from
the beautiful 'Wreath' which surrounds the 'farewell tree,*
which is sacredly treasured as a last memento of College scenes
and enjoyments.*** Adopted^ in this quotation, must be, I
think, a misprint for adapted, for Bums*s song has been fitted
to Harvard after the following fashion : —
" Ye rooms, ye halls, ye rough old bricks,
Ye trees, ye walks of mine !
How are ye hallowed by the dreams
Of * auld lang syne.* " *
Every year the gathering grows larger and larger, and the
" Spreads *' become more numerous and more elaborate. In
the Class Day Supplement to the Harvard Crimsony I found a
column headed : " A List of the men who will spread, with the
places where the Spreads will be given.** There were eighty-
eight hosts in all, but as they had clubbed together in smaller
or larger groups, there were only fourteen places where their
hospitality was dispensed. At the end of the list were such
announcements as the following: "The Pi Eta Spread is in
the Hemenway Gymnasium on Friday in the middle of the
day.** " The Spread in Lower Massachusetts is on Friday at 6.
1 Life of H, fV. Longfellow y II. 50.
2 College Words and CustomSy quoted in An Historical Sketchy etc., p. 58.
* Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 672.
124 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
After the Spread the hosts will receive their friends in their
rooms." So extensive have become the preparations that " the
constant services of a hired manager are required." In the
early part of the century it was often on Commencement Day,
and not on Class Day, that the young Bachelor entertained his
friends. When Prescott took his degree, his father, proud of
his son's having a part assigned to him in the Exercises, gave
a sumptuous dinner to over five hundred guests in a great
marquee. The day ended with "dancing and frolicking on
the green." ^
The simple ceremony of the " Valedictory " had expanded
on more sides than one. To the Orator a Poet, as has been
seen, had been added ; and later on an Odisty an Ivy Orator,
a Chorister, a Hytnnist, and a Chaplain. The Chaplain, the
Hymnist, the Orator, and the Odist represented the sober side
of life ; the Poet and Ivy Orator its humorous. The Ivy Orator
took his name from the custom that once prevailed of each
Class planting an ivy-shoot on Class Day. At the place where
it was put into the ground, he delivered his oration ; but as
the plant never grew, no doubt because it could not stand the
summer heats, so the custom was abandoned. He answers to
the Terrce Filius of the Oxford Commemoration in the old
days, but he never goes to the lengths on which that gross,
though licensed, buffoon used to venture. There are no scurri-
lous jests uttered by him against the President and the Pro-
fessors. About the beginning of the present century the
Orator ventured to give his Valedictory in English. This
innovation the Faculty resisted, as " it gives," to quote their
words, " more the appearance of a public Exhibition designed
to display the talents of the Performers and entertain a mixed
1 Life of W, H. Prescott, p. 25.
vn. HARVARD COLLEGE. 125
audience than of a merely valedictory address of the Class to
the Government, and taking leave of the Society and of one
another, in which Adieu Gentlemen and Ladies from abroad
are not particularly interested." ^ In the end the Faculty gave
in, as Faculties almost always do give in, and Latin disappeared
from Class Day. The Odist composes an ode to be sung to
the tune of Fair Harvard. The Chorister had to write the
music for the Class Song and conduct the singing at the Tree.
For the Song, by a vote of the Class of 189 1, Fair Harvard was
substituted ; so that one-half of the Chorister's task has been
swept away. The Chaplain and Hymnist have disappeared.
The management of the day is imder the control of a Secretary,
three Marshals, and three Committee-men. Every October,
soon after the beginning of the Academic Year, the Seniors
meet to elect their Orators, Poets, and the rest. Those only
have votes who are candidates for the Bachelor's degree at the
next Commencement. The voting is by secret ballot. In the
list of the Poets are found the names of Story the Jurist,
Palfrey and Bancroft the historians, Emerson, Holmes and
Lowell. It is more by chance than by the discernment of his
classmates that Emerson appears in this goodly company, for
he was not chosen till seven of his comrades had refused to be
inspired.^ Among the Orators less distinguished names are
found. In 1846, however, Longfellow recorded in his Jour-
nap : " Class Day. The Oration by Child, extremely good ;
one of the best — on the whole the best — I have heard on
such occasions." Child is Professor F. J. Child, the learned
editor of The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, On the
1 An Historical Sketchy etc., p. 57.
* R, W, Emerson.^ by O. W. Holmes, p. 45.
• Life ofH W, Longfellow^ Vol. IL p. 50.
126 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
publication of the first part Lowell wrote to him: "You
have really built an imperishable monument, and I rejoice as
heartily as the love I bear you gives me the right in having
lived to see its completion." ^ A few years ago the choice of
the class for Orator fell on a negro, in whom there was not a
drop of white blood. That a negro can be a fine speaker had
been shown long before by Frederick Douglass. Whether this
young man was chosen solely for his merits or as a noble
expression of sympathy for a despised race, I do not know.
Perhaps in the choice there was a touch of kindly humour.
The Orators and Poets of 1893 ^^ distinguished themselves
in the examinations. To two of them parts were assigned in
the exercises at Commencement. In the Class Day election the
balance, it seems, is held true between mind and body ; the
four who had been selected for their gifts of oratory and poetry
were balanced by four who were selected for their services in
athletics. The Marshals were the Captains of the Baseball and
Football Teams and of the Boat ; the Secretary was the Man-
ager of the Football Eleven.* The three Committee-men
were, no doubt, if not Orators, Poets, or Athletes, at least
good fellows.
The greatest day in a Harvard student's career is surely also
the longest day. On rising, he puts on evening dress, and he
does not take it off till midnight, and often till long after.
There is, however, for a brief interval an easier costume worn
by those who take part in the exercises at the Tree. According
to the old custom, to the evening dress a tall silk hat was added,
but by the recent vote by which cap and gown have been made
part of the costume of the day, the hat is no longer needed.
1 Letters of y, R, Lowell^ II. 304.
^Harvard Graduates^ Magazinet January, 1893, p. 306.
vn. HARVARD COLLEGE. Ill
How much is done in the course of this midsummer's day is
shown by the following official Programme : —
" 9 A.M. The Senior Qass will assemble in front of Holworthy and
march to Appleton Chapel, where prayer will be offered by Rev. William
Lawrence, S.T.D.^
" 10.45 • '^^ Senior Gass will assemble in front of Holworthy and march
to Sanders Theatre.
" 2 to 5 P.M. Music in the Yard.
*' 3 to 5. Dancing in Memorial Hall.
" 5. The Senior Class will assemble in front of Holworthy, cheer the
College buildings and march to the Tree.
<* 8 to II. Dancing in the Gymnasium and Memorial Hall. Music and
Illumination in the College Yard.
" 8.0. The Glee Qub/wiU sing in front of Holworthy,
" 9.0. The Banjo Qub and the Mandolin and Guitar Club will play on
the Law School steps."
Even when the last dance has come to an end and the last
guest has left, sleep, I am told, does not fall upon the College.
The Seniors spend the few hours of night in talking over the
stirring doings of the great day and in fond memories of their
student life now so rapidly drawing to its close.
" Et jam nox humida cselo
Praecipitat, suadentque cadentia sidera somnos/'
" Nature's soft nurse " bids, but bids in vain.
The weather, which I am told almost always favours Class
Day, this year showed it no indulgence. I have heard Ameri-
cans on our side of the Atlantic complain of the changeable-
ness of the climate, not only of England, but of Europe. It
was a disappointment to me to find how uncertain a New Eng-
land June can be. There was a variety in it that was worthy
^Dr. Lawrence last year succeeded Phillips Brooks as Bishop of
Massachusetts.
128 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
of Cumberland or Devonshire. On the afternoon of the seventh
of the month the thermometer m my room in Cambridge
stood at 91, though the Venetian shutters had been kept closed.
On the thirteenth, at a little village on the sea-coast we were all
sitting round a blazing log fire. On the seventeenth fires were
kept burning all day. On the twenty-fourth, calling at two houses
in Cambridge, in both I found my friends sitting round the fire.
In the southern parts of England I had never seen a fire so late
in the summer, and yet Boston is in the same latitude as Rome.
If the summer is late in coming and is uncertain even when it
has come, in the clearness of the air and the blueness of the
sea, on fine days, it displays the charms of the Mediterranean
shore. Hawthorne was disappointed by the Italian skies. They
were, he said, what he had been used to all his life in New
England. In the exaggerated expectations which he had formed
of them, he had been misled by the English poets, who had
judged them by the quiet colours of cloudy England. It was
with no Italian sky, but with cold and heavy rain that Class Day
set in. The break in the weather that we anxiously looked for
never came, and I was kept a prisoner to the house the whole
day. The following description of all that went on I quote
from a letter written by my wife : —
"Class Day this year broke wet and stormy, much to our
disappointment. Great trouble had been taken to secure for
us tickets for everything worth seeing. Without these tickets
no one can gain admission. The Graduating Students are the
hosts, and issue them to all as their guests. At ten we had
to be in our places in Sanders Theatre. The whole place
looked very much like the Sheldonian at Commemoration,
crowded with mothers and sisters and cousins in gay sum-
mer dresses, a good many of the Professors and a fair
vn. HARVARD COLLEGE. 129
sprinkling of young men. We missed, however, the gowns,
Professors looking only like ordinary mortals; and there was
no Undergraduates* Gallery and no noise such as we are used
to at home. Imagine, if you can, a Commemoration at which
all was done 'decently and in order,' no uproar, no foolish
jokes ; but that is a flight beyond the imagination of any one
who has seen and heard Oxford men on such an occasion.
" The body of the Hall was reserved for those students who
were to receive their degree, and at eleven they marched in,
two and two, in cap and gown. The Bishop- elect followed
with the students who are the office-bearers of the year ; they
took their seats on the dais on chairs placed in front of palms
and flowering shrubs, with a gigantic '93 in flowers fastened
to the gallery over their heads. In this gallery was an excel-
lent string band which played between the various exercises.
The meeting began with prayer, the Bishop praying in the
name of the Class of 1893 ; and then the Senior Marshal
called upon the Orator to begin his Oration. The Orator,
who was a member of the graduating Class chosen for the
office by his classmates, stepped to the front of the dais and
began. He had learned his oration carefully by heart, and
had been trained in the method of delivery; he spoke it
well; matter and style were good, but they lacked fire and
spontaneity. He was followed in turn by the Poet, the Ivy
Orator (whose business it is to make a comic speech full of
allusions to what has lately been happening in the University),
and the Odist, who repeated a short ode of his own composi-
tion. It was then sung by every one to the tune of Fair Har-
vard, i.e, ' My lodging is on the cold ground,* which may be
called the national air of Harvard. After this we were dis-
missed by the Bishop- elect with his blessing.
130 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
"The one distinguishing feature of the gathering was its
completely democratic nature. The President of the Uni-
versity sat there with his wife in the central seat of the Audi-
torium ; but he was nothing more than one of the many
spectators. The Dons, as Dons, were non-existent. The
men of '93 were everything. They had chosen the spokes-
men of the day ; orations, poem, and ode were all addressed
to them; every arrangement had been made by them, and
was carried out by them as supreme. Even in what was said
and sung there was not the slightest reference to any other
authority. Harvard took form in one's mind as a large
democracy, the students governing themselves in all things.
" Our next duty was to attend one of the * Spreads.' Spread
is the name given to a meal provided by the students, and
means lunch or supper, or still more often one that goes on
a great part of the day. It is of the nature of a ball supper ;
salads, sandwiches, and ice-creams, with many varieties of
cake, being what is usually provided. Strawberries and cream
are usually added during the summer. One of the largest and
gayest of the Spreads on Friday was held in the great Gym-
nasium. Here the large hall had been adorned with a pro-
fusion of flowers and evergreens, and with garlands hung from
side to side of the high roof. Again a great '93 in flowers
was conspicuous in front of the gallery. When we arrived
there about half-past three o'clock, dancing was going on
vigorously. The Class of '93 looked very droll dancing in
cap and gown. Many of the girls had pretty dresses and
pretty faces, too, the exercise giving them just that touch of
colour which American girls so often lack. The chaperones
sat round the room, and the long refreshment-table was down
one side ; the band in the gallery above. The expense of the
VII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 131
whole was borne by a small party of young men of the Gradu-
ating Class.
" By half-past four the ball was over, the Gymnasium deserted,
and we were once more plodding through the rain and mire, in
goloshes and waterproofs, to the quadrangle in which were to
take place the Tree Exercises, the thing I was especially anxious
to see. This part of Harvard Class Day is always considered
the most important, as well as the prettiest sight for visitors to
see. The tree, a tall and stately American elm, stands in the
centre of a wide lawn with College buildings on three sides.
For Class Day the lawn is enclosed by tiers of wooden raised
seats, and the tree is garlanded by a long wreath of flowers
wound many times closely round the trunk about ten or twelve
feet above the ground ; while the date of the year in crimson
and white flowers is placed some eight feet higher still. Above
this again the branches spring, the bark below being quite un-
broken and offering a difficult task enough to climbers. The
rain continued as pitilessly as ever. The seats had been
covered with awnings, but not to much effect. When we
arrived they were all shining with water, and every here and
there a small stream descended from some hole, or drop by
drop fell upon some devoted bonnet from a thinner spot in the
canvas. At five o'clock the Class of '94 marched in under
umbrellas ; followed by those of '95 and '96 ; then all in turn
seated themselves on carpets which had been hurriedly spread
upon the grass. A large group of Graduates took up their
position near them ; when all were settled, to the sound of a
band in marched the men of '93. First came the three marshals,
then the band, and then some seventy or eighty young fellows
in football dress, stout jerseys, buff" knickerbockers, long stock-
ings and buff" shoes, and all bareheaded. They came in two by
132 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
two ; the men behind with their hands on the shoulders of those
in front, making a long, continuous winding chain, which wound
round and round the tree, and finally formed a compact mass
encircling it and the Senior Marshal, who stood at its foot in
cap and gown. Those of the Class who were not to take part
in the struggle, also in cap and gown, took up their position
near.
" And now began the cheering. Led by the Marshal they gave
the Harvard yell — Rah-rah-rah ; Rah-rah-rah; Rah-rah-rah;
Har — vard ! rising in a sort of yell and repeated over and over
again in perfect time. It was begun first by '93, and then taken
up by *94, *95, '96, and the Graduates in regular succession. They
cheered the Classes ; they cheered the Halls ; they cheered the
President and a few favourite Professors, and then they cheered
the Ladies ; each body cheering alone and in regular order.
Finally all joined in cheering Harvard, and then the whole mass
standing, visitors and students together, sang Fair Harvard,
As we came to the last line of the song the first marshal gave a
signal to the athletes, and at once a tussling began ; each one
of them trying to get at the trunk of the tree and to mount
high enough on the shoulders of the man in front to be within
reach of the garland. The struggle was tremendous, like a
gigantic scrimmage at football ; the mass seemed at one time
all legs and arms, at another a furious combat in which some
one must lose life or limb. First one and then another rose
high on the backs or shoulders of those below, only to fall back
and be lost in the crowd. The spectators cheered and shouted
and screamed with laughter. When at last the first bunch of
flowers was successfully torn away, we all cheered as if some
great and glorious victory had been gained. It took about ten
minutes to gain possession of the long wreath ; bit by bit it was
VII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 133
clutched away, and flung among the men below. But there
still remained the crimson '93 high above, and I dare say
another ten minutes were spent before the frantic efforts to
reach it were crowned with success. Only two or three men were
brave enough to attempt the feat ; the famous gymnast of the
year was the one finally to achieve it. Again and again he was
dragged down ; again and again we saw him engaged in a free
fight with obstinate opponents from the vantage ground of the
shoulders of his supporters ; his jersey was torn, his body must
have been covered with bruises and his nails all in pieces ; but
in the end the rosy '93 fell amid the shouts of everybody, and
the fun was over.
" But only for a time. The crowd dispersed to rest and eat,
and dress for the various balls and receptions which closed this
busy day. Those students who were lucky enough to have
rooms looking on the College Yard had them thronged with
guests by eight in the evening. From wide-open windows every
one was looking down on the coloured lamps hung from the
fine trees and listening to the Harvard Glee Club, who, in spite
of the heavy rain, sang manfully under their umbrellas the songs
that have been sung for so many years. But we were too wet
and too tired to go out again, and we feel that we shall have to
come back some day to Cambridge to see Class Day under a
blue sky and learn what it really is."
CHAPTER VIII.
The Undergraduates. — Harvardians and Oxonians contrasted. — The Ath-
letic Craze. — A Baseball Match. — Games regulated by the Governing
Body of the University. — President Eliot's Report.
OF my first impressions of the undergraduates, I made the
following record in my journal : "They are shorter and
slighter than our Oxford men, with much less colour; a year or
two older, I think, unless the hot climate makes them look
older. I do not see so many gross, stupid faces, but, on the
other hand, I have not as yet noticed any of those fresh-col-
oured, pleasant, innocent faces which are so attractive at Ox-
ford." On seeing more of the men, I came to doubt whether in
appearance they were older than our undergraduates. Near the
end of my residence in Cambridge, I thus sum up my obser-
vations : " How few are the signs here of university life com-
pared with those seen in Oxford! In Oxford, a real town
though it is, and not a subiu'ban village like Cambridge, the
presence of the students, nevertheless, is much more conspi-
cuous. No one can walk about its streets and roads without
noticing the large number of young men — often moving in a
long stream — young men, moreover, who, as their very ap-
pearance, their dress, their manner of walking, their features
show, are not in business. In the afternoon their, suit of
flannel makes it clear that they are bent on pleasure, or, at
all events, on exercise; in the morning and evening the cap
and gown indicate the student. The style, the very make of
'34
CHAP. vin. HARVARD COLLEGE. 135
their clothes, are not those of the young business man. Their
easy, confident step distinguishes them from the ordinary youth
of a town. The separation of the Colleges distributes this life
over the city, so that undergraduates and graduates are con-
stantly passing along the streets from College to College, or
from College to the University buildings. The Parks, the
upper river, the lower river, and the Cherwell increase this
diffusion. It is increased, moreover, by the Englishman's
love of walking and riding."
In the American Cambridge there is very little of this open
and palpable university life. The College buildings, which
are numerous, are mostly in one enclosure, the Yard. Those
which are not there — the more modern additions — are sepa-
rated from them only by a road. The students, therefore, in
going to and from lectures, do not cross the town. Outside
the Yard I have never seen them moving in a stream, except
on the days of some great baseball or football match, and
then they have but a few yards to traverse. Beyond the im-
mediate surroundings of the College they are scarcely noticea-
ble. A stranger, whose walks did not lead him past the Yard,
might for some time live within a quarter of a mile of the
College, without discovering that he was in a University
town. Boston attracts the students in large numbers, and to
Boston they go, not on foot but on the tram-cars. In their
dress, their general appearance, their gait, I discover little
of the undergraduate. In England and Germany this clan
does not hide itself. An Oxford man lets the world know
that he is an Oxford man. His self-satisfaction gives an
assurance, sometimes even a kind of swagger, to his whole
behaviour. He walks along the High Street as if it belonged,
not to the Corporation, but to himself. His apparel too oft
4
136 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
proclaims the man. There is nothing of this here. The
Harvard undergraduate talks of himself and his comrades as
boys. He has not learnt to swagger. Probably it takes many
years at a great English public school to acquire the true
manner. Like the art of beating the French at Waterloo, it
is best learnt on the Playing Fields of Eton. His dress, too,
is much less costly and showy; for the most part it is of a
dark cloth. I notice none of those waistcoats with which an
Oxford man dazzles the poorer scholars of his college and
startles his friends at home. The ordinary Harvard man
might have stepped out of a city office or a Normal School for
Teachers. He belongs to a poorer class. Clothing, more-
over, is so expensive that many have to be content with one
suit a year. An undergraduate who had visited Europe in the
previous Long Vacation, told me that the clothes he was wear-
ing, for which he had paid three pounds in England, in Cam-
bridge would have cost him six. Every afternoon there are
no doubt men to be seen in the dress of young athletes; but
though there is the greatest possible interest taken in the
yearly boat-race with Yale, and in the baseball and football
matches, nevertheless, those who share in these sports are
far fewer than we should find in an English university. It
is, I am sure, a picked few rather than the mass of men who
play. Nowhere is there such a sight as is to be seen any
afternoon at Oxford on the river and in the Parks on the days
when there is no great race or match. The build of the men
proves, moreover, that they have not gone through that long
course of rough games which has formed the active and
powerful frames of the young English undergraduates. I am
told, however, that during the winter half of the year. North
Avenue is a training-ground for runners, who in the afternoon
vm. HARVARD COLLEGE. 137
and evening sweep along the "sidewalks," as if the smooth
pavement had been laid down for them, and not for quiet,
decent Christians. A noble gymnasium, moreover, has been
lately built, which is much frequented. "The fever of re-
nown," gained not by the brain, but by the body, is spreading
rapidly through the veins of young America. By its " strong
contagion" Harvard has been badly caught. One of my
friends, whose three sons have recently graduated, lamented
to me the excessive interest they all took in the contests of
athletes. How different it was when he was young ! In those
happy days his brother, when home from College, used to talk
of books. His sons* talk was of running and jumping, of
rowing, baseball, and football. The change is great, indeed,
since the time when Dr. Wendell Holmes lamented the gen-
eral indifference of the youth of New England to bodily
exercise. In the seventh chapter of The Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table ^ he wrote in the year 1858: "I am satisfied
that such a set of black-coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled,
paste- complexioned youth as we can boast in our Atlantic
cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.
. . . We have a few good boatmen, — no good horsemen that
I hear of, — I cannot speak for cricketing, — but as for any
great athletic feat performed by a gentleman in these lati-
tudes, society would drop a man who should run round the
Common in five minutes."
Emerson, nearly thirty years ago, speaking of Harvard,
"compared later times unfavourably with his own. 'The
Class, * he said, ' thought nothing of a man who did not have
an enthusiasm for something. * " ^ There is enthusiasm enough
^ The Present and Future of Harvard CoUege^ by Professor W. W,
Goodwin, 1891, p. 11.
138 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
at the present day, but far too much of it is enthusiasm of a
baser sort. The hero of to-day is the captain of a "team."
If a man should now be dropped because he ran round the
Common in five minutes, he would be dropped because a
lighter-footed rival had run round it in four minutes, fifty-nine
seconds and four-fifths. On the last Saturday in June I wit-
nessed the fag-end of the baseball match between Harvard
and Yale. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, kindliest and,
I trust, happiest of old men, in his long life has seen many
revolutions, political, social, literary, and scientific. Has he
ever sat upon the benches of the lofty stands on this great day
of the Harvard year? If he has, he would have had to own
that few revolutions had been more rapid, and none more
thorough, than that whose effects he was witnessing. Society
drop a man who should run round the Common in five min-
utes ! Why, here was society, unprotected by its parasols, for
three hours enduring the blaze of a New England midsummer
sun, now carried high upon the wave of triumph, now sunk
low down in the trough of despair, as victory or defeat alter-
nately hovered over the nine chosen heroes of Harvard. The
Autocrat has known and has outlived many famous men. He
himself was not the least of that group of men — that Satur-
day Club — which gave Boston a fresh renown. His friends
were Prescott, Emerson, Motley, Hawthorne, Agassiz, Dana,
Lowell. What triumph of the most triumphant of these men
could compare with that in which, on this June afternoon, in
the year of grace one thousand eight hundred and ninety-three,
the immortal Jack H was borne along and aloft by those
few, those happy few, who had got hold of one of his glorious
limbs, amid the shouts and the replication of the shouts of
surrounding thousands? It was indeed a great day. Yale
vin. HARVARD COLLEGE. 139
had been at last overcome — Yale, whose long line of victo-
ries, not only at baseball, but at football and on the river,
inflicts on Harvard its solitary shame. It had been overcome,
too, by the mighty strength and the " sage command " of the
glorious Jack H , of Jack H , who for many a day,
like Achilles, had not mingled in the fray. It was no fit of
the sulks which had restrained his ponderous arm and fettered,
as it were, his huge leg. It was to fate, not to caprice, that
he had yielded. For five long weeks he had been " on pro-
bation." A man gets "on probation" by his devotion to the
nobler side of university life, and by his spirited neglect of
his lectures and his lecturers. While he is on it, he is de-
barred from taking part in all matches with outsiders. A
blow, it was felt, was impending over the whole Common-
wealth of Massachusetts, with which the glory of Harvard is
inseparably bound up; but the stern President did not yield
to the indignant outcry. There was to be no Rex Supra-
grammaticus in the College, and the hero, if he had not to
swallow the leek, at all events had to swallow the needful
amount of knowledge. He did it, and he did it in time.
His brain, happily, was unaffected by the unwonted strain; all
that weight of learning he bore lightly as a flower, and his
unrivalled skill as a pitcher he displayed in its fullest extent.
The honour of Harvard, of Cambridge, of Boston, and of
Massachusetts was saved, and the pride of Yale, of New
Haven, and of Connecticut was laid low.
The last act in this "swelling pageant" I had, as I have
said, myself witnessed. "Fag-end," I called it; but when I
used that word, I but imperfectly recalled to my mind the
hero and the triumph. My journal has refreshed my memory.
The following is my record: "On the way to lunch with Pro-
£
140 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
f essor , as I passed the entrance to the baseball ground, I
saw a body of police, twenty-eight in number, marching in to
keep order. The American policemen are much less stolid-
looking than our men; they do not seem part of a machine.
They have been but little drilled. No mischievous under-
graduate, by thrusting his walking-stick between the feet of
the front man, could lay low a whole file of them, as a whole
file was once laid low in the High Street of Oxford. They
have not the air of men who are ever looking over somebody's
head. Their appearance is that of "good householders."
Falstaff would have pressed them without a moment's hesita-
tion. Bardolph would speedily have had "four Harry ten
shillings in French crowns" to set them free. Their work
must be light, to judge by a certain comfortable rotundity of
that part of the body which the English policeman confines
with a belt. Their tunic hangs loosely. " Unbuttoning thee
after supper" could never be uttered by way of reproach
against one of them. I had scarcely seen the last of these
easy-going constables, when there drove up in procession four
two-horse flies, containing the Yale team, and some of their
chief supporters. On this fine summer day they came in
closed carriages, as if they were too delicate to stand the air.
Such "drags" as I have seen in Oxford I never see here. I
was late in getting back to the ground, so hard had I found it
to tear myself away from the good talk of my friend, the most
cheery of learned Professors. A vast gathering had been fol-
lowing the changing fortunes of the game for full two hours.
Round half the field stands had been raised for the reserved
seats, sloping upwards to the height of nearly twenty feet.
They all seemed full. The very roofs of the neighbouring
buildings were crowded, while on the level ground, and up the
vm. HARVARD COLLEGE. 141
sloping bank at one end many thousands were massed to-
gether. A dollar (four shillings and a penny) was more than
I cared to pay for a seat; for half a dollar I got standing-
room. The people were orderly and good-humoured, though
very many, like myself, got but glimpses of the game over the
heads of those who stood in front. There were not a few
negroes in the crowd, who elbowed their way like the rest.
It was surprising to see how many of the working class could
afford so large a sum as half a dollar for admittance. A com-
mon labouring- man, however, could earn it by two and a half
hours* work.
The game, so far as I could see it, is but a poor one com-
pared with cricket. It is the old baseball of my boyhood
expanded and refined. It is almost as much below cricket
as skittles is below billiards. It is, however, far more easily
understood and followed by the ordinary spectator. Its alter-
nations of triumph are sudden. It is not an affair of days,
but of hours. A match can be played between lunch and
afternoon tea; but what do these benighted heathen cousins
of ours know of afternoon tea? As fortune began to incline
towards Harvard, the din of applause became oppressive.
The cheering — the "Harvard Yell," as it is called — being
mechanical, led by conductors, and kept up for many minutes
together, is tiresome. The undergraduates sat all together,
massed in rows, one above the other. At the foot of each
block of seats stood the leader of the cheering, facing the
spectators, and giving the time by waving both his hands, the
men responding, not only with their voices but with the move-
ment of the upper part of the body. The Harvard " yell "
I have already described. Yale responds with rah nine
times repeated, but without any pause at the third and sixth
142 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
repetitions^ followed by Yaky also drawn out and in an as-
cending scale. Even Wellesley, the Ladies' College, has
its gentle "yell" — W-e-lj l-e-s; 1-e-y; Wellesley. This
cheering, it seemed to me, went on all the time some great
player was in, or else when the fortune was so evenly balanced
that friends needed encouragement and foes depression.
It was just as if at a cricket-match the clapping was kept
up through many "overs" together. Being so mechanical,
it had none of that exhilarating effect of the loud but brief
applause at one of our matches after a great hit, which at
once subsides into a dead silence as the bowler takes the ball
and prepares to deliver it. It must surely mar the pleasure
of the lookers-on, and, moreover, unfairly depress the oppo-
sing nine, who have to play in the continuous din that is raised
against them. In the slang of the field this is known as " rat-
tling the team." It is foes, not friends, who are rattled. In
this match it was, I am told, carried to a height never before
known, to the great indignation of many of the older men.
Earlier in the season the Crimson had mourned over the decay
of "the old Harvard spirit," due, they maintained, to the
rapid increase in the number of undergraduates. This spirit
was one of "gentlemanliness." A Harvard man, it used to be
said, could never understand "the Yale fondness for pure
noise." Their understandings must have been a good deal
enlightened by this match, though perhaps it might be ob-
jected that the noise was anything but pure, having in view
victory through intimidation.
At the end of the game, when Harvard was victorious, the
crowd rushed to the goal. It was a strange sight this throng,
till this glorious moment so closely packed, so easily kept in
by the barrier of a single cord, on a sudden streaming in
VIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 143
dense masses towards one point. The victors were hoisted
on men's shoulders and carried round the field at a running
pace. The hero of the day, borne before all the rest, was
Jack H , a huge mass of bone, flesh, and muscle, unwieldy
but immortal. When at length he and his eight great breth-
ren reached the Pavilion, they went up to the balcony and dis-
played themselves to the admiring and shouting host below.
Whether in England, in the yearly matches at cricket and
football between Oxford and Cambridge, such wild scenes of
triumph are now to be witnessed I do not know. It is many
a year since I was a spectator; in the days when Plancus was
consul there was sobriety at all events in our games. If in
the idolatry of bodily strength and bodily skill our American
cousins are carrying craziness beyond even the point to which
we have advanced it, they are but bettering our instructions.
Let them remain where they are; in a year or two we shall
catch them up in the mad race.
I could wish that at Harvard they had been content to fol-
low us in our athletic frenzy, and had stopped short of our
slang. Even the humblest of " the ten leading Universities "
of some Western State ought to feel degraded should it be
spoken of and written of as the 'Varsity. Thirty-five years
ago in Oxford this vile pronunciation was confined to the
men who hung about the cricket-grounds and the College
barges, ready to pick up a chance sixpence by rendering
some trifling service, or to drink a gentleman's health without
rendering any service at all. Even a junior scout would have
disdained to use it. From these idlers it passed to the
cricketers and boating-men, and so gradually onwards to the
whole body of undergraduates. Now it is familiar as a house-
hold word in the mouths of Fellows of Colleges and Tutors.
144 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Grave Proctors have not been kept by the velvet sleeves of their
gowns and their dignity from employing it, and from the
lips of Professors in their lighter moods it occasionally drops
when they wish to show that they are not unacquainted with
the modes of the modern world. Major Pendennis caught
from the young men the fashion of speaking of his card as
his "pasteboard." Degradation has not as yet spread so far
as this at Harvard. No Professor, no Assistant Professor, I
verily believe, has as yet lost so much of " the old Harvard
spirit" as to call his beloved Alma Mater the 'Varsity.
Matches are regulated by the governing bodies in Harvard
in a way which is altogether unknown in Oxford. There the
control, such as it is, is exercised by each College. The
University, beyond giving over part of the Parks to the cricket
and football clubs, knows nothing of games. At Harvard, up
to the year 1882, there had been but one restriction imposed
on the athletes. No match or race could take place till after
the last recitation^ hour on Saturday (one o'clock), or after
four o'clock on other days. This rule shows how great is the
difference in the daily life of the two Universities. At Oxford
the common hours for exercise are between half-past one and
half -past four. In the winter half of the year, by four o'clock
or a little later all the games at football are over, and men
stream homewards from the Parks, in all the glory of mud
and sweat, not yielding the path to any. About the same
time the boating-men are flocking in from the river. In
summer, when there is no match, the cricketers return by half-
past four. They all come back in time to change their
^ That which we call a college lecture, that is to say, a class taken by a
college tutor, as distinguished from a public lecture delivered by a uni-
versity professor, is at Harvard known as a recitation*
vra. HARVARD COLLEGE. 145
clothes and take a cup of tea before the reading-men get to
work with their tutors. This kind of work goes on till nearly
seven — the general hour for dinner — and is often resumed
after a two hours' interval. In my time at Oxford, "the
rather luxurious practice," with which President Eliot charges
the Law School, " of using for lectures chiefly the hours from
nine to one," ^ was, I believe, very general. With the stroke
of one we had done with lecturing and the tutors had done
with us — the rest of the day was ours, to dispose of as we
pleased. I remember the kind of shock it gave me when, on
a visit to Oxford, two or three years after I had taken my
degree, calling in the evening on a young and zealous tutor I
found him engaged with a small class of reading-men. There
used to be, and no doubt there still is, a great difference, not
only among different Colleges, but among the tutors of the
same College, in the strictness with which attendance at lect-
ures is enforced. One of my tutors, who was described in
the Cricketers^ Guide as "the remains of a fine player," was
full of indulgence when a match was coming off. As Master
of the College, he still kept up his interest in games. The
last time I saw him was one day in the late autumn when he
was drawn in his Bath Chair to the Football Field. A great
match was to be played, and though he had nearly reached
the limit of fourscore years, he would not miss it. A pleasant
story is told of the kind old man which shows the tact with
which he governed the undergraduates. The College boat was
one year at the head of the river. The eight, in their pride
at seeing one of the smallest of the Colleges in this great posi-
tion, invited the University crew to dine with them in Hall.
1 Annual Reports of (he President and Treasurer of Harvard College^
1891-92, p. 25.
L
146 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
There is a limit in the cost of the dinner beyond which no
one is allowed to go. This they would have exceeded by the
haunch of venison which they ordered. The manciple, not
caring to face the wrath of headstrong youth, instead of refu-
sing to provide it, consulted the Master. He sent for the Cap-
tain of the Eight, and told him that by a regulation of the
College which was not to be set aside, the venison could not
be had. As the young man, full of vexation, was leaving the
room, the old man called him back. "You are going," he
said, " to entertain the University crew. It is a great day for
you and the College, and I am sorry that any of our regula-
tions, excellent though they may be in themselves, should
stand in your way. I think I see a way out of the difficulty.
There is no rule of the College which forbids the Master to
ask you to accept a haunch of venison, and I shall have great
pleasure in sending one for you and your friends."
In Harvard, in the spring of 1882, one of the Professors,
who had none of the tastes of my old Master, drew the atten-
tion of the Faculty to the list of matches of the Baseball Club
for the coming season. Out of twenty-eight, nineteen were to
be played away from Cambridge. "Could the members of
the teams," he indignantly asked, "be said to be fulfilling
the purpose for which they came to College ? " A Standing
Committee on the Regulation of Athletic Sports was ap-
pointed. It was composed of three members, all of the Fa-
culty. They had the good sense to begin their work by taking
the leading athletes into their counsels. " The attitude of the
young men was one of friendly tolerance. They evidently
feared that in the main the Members of the Committee
were practically too inexpert to be safely intrusted with legis-
lation on such important matters. . . . The Faculty received
vm. HARVARD COLLEGE. 147
from them a remonstrance, in which it was skilfully but
clearly intimated that they should hesitate to pass laws in
regard to a game which they did not understand. This gave
rise to the celebrated mot of one of the older members, a man
of gentle spirit but then thoroughly roused, who said that he
and his colleagues, it was true, might not know when the
ball was kicked properly, but they certainly did know when a
man was kicked improperly. The game was at this time
notoriously rough. During this discussion a new definition
of the Rugby game was given by a Cambridge wit. ' The
games,* she said, *in which they carry the ball and kick one
another.*"
After the first Committee had sat for three years, its place
was taken by a second composed of five members, two of
whom were undergraduates. All five were selected by the
President of the University. Like its predecessor, " it regu-
lated athletic contests as friends and not as enemies. Mean-
while trouble was brewing in a new and unexpected quarter."
The Board of Overseers took alarm "at the abuses, excesses,
and accidents incident to athletic exercises. In 1886-87
there had been, on the average, more than one intercollegiate
contest each week of the College year." The elderly men
who sat on the Board looked back to those uncontentious
days, when the annual boat-race with Yale alone disturbed the
smooth current of university life. The race with Oxford,
which in the summer of 1869 lined the banks of the Thames
with a dense crowd, being rowed in the Long Vacation, was
not an exception. " I did not expect our crew to win," wrote
Lowell to the author of Tom Brown^ " though I hoped they
would. Especially I hoped it because I thought it would do
more towards bringing about a more friendly feeling between
148 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
the two countries than anything else. I am glad to think
that it has had that result as it is." ^ I watched the race from
a point about half-way along the course. The Harvard boat
was leading by nearly half a length. The result we did not
learn till the umpire's steamer came down the river with the
Oxford flag flying at the top. Some minutes before the news
of victory reached us the result was known in all the chief
cities of the United Slates.
The alarm of the Overseers in 1888 led to the appointment
of a newly modelled Committee. It consisted of three mem-
bers of the Faculty and three graduates of the College, ap-
pointed by the President and Fellows with the consent of the
Overseers, and of three undergraduates chosen by indirect
election. It is subject to the authority of the Faculty; but
during the last four years this authority has not once been
exercised. Saturday, as far as possible, has been made the
day for all kinds of contests. On no other day of the week
can any take place outside Cambridge, " unless permission is
first obtained from the Committee in writing." Articles of
agreement have been drawn up by it between Harvard and
Yale, by which a dishonest practice is stopped which had
crept into some of the contests. In the eagerness for victory,
"men who were not bona fide students and who were not
amateurs" had been taken into the "teams." Harvard and
Yale agreed that henceforth no one should be allowed to play
who had ever engaged for money in any athletic competition.
By another rule, intercollegiate matches have almost wholly
been confined to New England. As Massachusetts, one only
of the six New England States, is one hundred and sixty
miles long and one hundred broad, the confinement does not
"^Letters of J, R, Lowell^ ed. 1893, H* 4^.
VIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 149
seem excessive. President Eliot, in his Report to ike Board
of Overseers for last year, points out the evils which arise
when the match takes place near one of the great towns.
" The public interest in baseball and football has made it easy
to collect large sums of gate-money, both on College grounds
and on public grounds convenient to New York and other
cities. The money thus easily got is often wastefully and
ineffectively spent. There is something exquisitely inappro-
priate in the extravagant expenditure on athletic sports at such
institutions as Harvard and Yale — institutions which have
been painfully built up by the self-denial, frugality, and pub-
lic spirit of generations that certainly did not lack physical
and moral courage, endurance, and toughness, yet always put
the things of the spirit above the things of sense. At these
Universities there must be constant economy and inadequacy
in expenditure for intellectual and spiritual objects; how re-
pulsive then must be foolish and pernicious expenditures on
sports." ^ This collection of gate-money on College grounds as
surely admits of an easy remedy as it needs one. The charge
of a dollar for a seat at the baseball match seems to me exces-
sive; but this was surpassed at the football match played last
year between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania on
Thanksgiving Day, when the lowest price for a seat was a
dollar and a half (six shillings and two pence), while so much
as two dollars and even two dollars and a half was charged.
In Oxford almost all the matches, both of cricket and foot-
ball, are played in the University Parks, which are open to all,
gown and town alike. There, without any payment, I have
watched even the great Grace play — that summer hero, per-
haps the most famous man in England from May till August.
"^ Annual Reports, 1892-93, p. 14.
150 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
In the remaining eight months he and his fame hibernate.
New playing-fields are shortly to be opened at Harvard. They
should be kept pure from this contamination of gate-money.
"It is not," to quote the President's words, "an appropriate
function for a College or University to provide periodical
entertainments during term-time for multitudes of people
who are not students."^ These multitudes would not attend
if, as in the Parks at Oxford, the spectators had nothing but
standing-room provided, and that free of charge. It is the
high prices which make the spectacle fashionable.
In the last ten years the four great sports, baseball, boating,
football, and athletics, have grown so fast " that undergradu-
ates are now unable single-handed to manage them success-
fully." To "assume the office of intimate advisers to the
officers of each of the athletic organizations " was more than
the Committee chose to do. They proposed that a permanent
Graduate Advisory Committee should be appointed by each
association, composed of three graduates "who in their own
College days had been leaders in athletics." The plan was
approved of by the undergraduates, and the Committees have
been established.
The training of the athletes has not been neglected by the
President and the Fellows. So early as 1883 the Committee
on Athletics " recommended that there should be attached to
the staff of the Gymnasium a person of good education and
breeding, with the qualifications requisite to enable him to
advise students as to the best modes of training and practice
in Track Athletics and Field Sports."^ The following year
^ Annual Reports^ 1892-93, p. 12.
2 The word Field Sports at Harvard does not mean ** the diversions of the
field, as of fowling, hunting, fishing " (to use Johnson's definition). It
means, I think, such exercises as jumping, leaping, etc.
THE ^i'"'
PUBLIC i.
■fOVK
RAR"
R
VIII. , HARVARD COLLEGE. 151
an Assistant in the Department of Physical Training was
accordingly appointed. " He is an officer of the College and
is paid from its funds. Under his skilful training Harvard
has had teams which have met with only two defeats in the
intercollegiate contests with Yale in Track Athletics and Field
Sports." Nothing better shows the strong hold that races
and matches have taken of Young America than an otf er made
three years ago by some graduates of Harvard of " ten thou-
sand dollars to be paid to Mr. Bancroft, who was then engaged
in the practice of his profession in Boston, for three years'
service as coach simply of the University and Freshman crews."
The offer was declined by the officers of the Boat Club — why,
we are not told.^
T have often thought, in walking by the river at Oxford and
watching the training of the crews, that the labour they under-
went, the strictness of the discipline to which they were ex-
posed, and the abuse which they had to suffer in silence,
made the life of a boating-man harder than that of a young
soldier, and almost as hard as the criminal's on the treadmill.
But their lot is freedom itself when measured by the standard
of Harvard and Yale. They breathe, at all events, the air of
heaven, and are not made, during the winter months, to tug at
the labouring oar in a dismal vault. In the long frosts of
New England the rivers are frozen hard and boating becomes
impossible. At such times the crews are exercised in a great
tank, covered in and kept unfrozen by the heat of a furnace.
There, under the eye of their trainer, they pull their oars
^ These facts I have extracted from an article entitled The Committee on
AthleticSf published in the Harvard Graduates* Magazine for January, 1893.
In the number for March, 1894, it is stated thus: "Thousands of dollars
are now paid for the services and expenses of graduate ' coaches.' *'
152 HARVARD COLLEGE, CHAP.
through the water without moving the boat, for it is fastened
to the side. Had Dante seen them at work, he would have
added one more torment to his Hell.
President Eliot in his Report ^ deals at some length with
the great and rapidly growing evil of this excessive devotion
to athletic sports. He is fully aware of the good that has
been done by the growth of manly exercises in American
Colleges. "There has been," he says, "a decided improve-
ment in the average health and strength of Harvard students
during the last twenty-five years." "Athletic sports," he adds,
"have supplied a new and effective motive for resisting all
sins which weaken or corrupt the body; they have quickened
admiration for such manly qualities as courage, fortitude, and
presence of mind in emergencies and under difficulties; they
have cultivated in a few the habit of command, and in many
the habit of quick obedience and intelligent subordination;
and finally, they have set before young men prizes and dis-
tinctions which are uncontaminated by any commercial value,
and which no one can win who does not possess much pa-
tience, perseverance, and self-control, in addition to rare
bodily endowments." But, on the other hand, carried as they
so often are to excess, they do not " permit the main end of
College life — hard study. No student can keep up his
studies, and also play his full part in any one of these sports
as at present conducted. The faithful member of a crew or
team may, perhaps, manage to attend most of his lectures
or other College exercises; but he rarely has any mind to
give to his studies." As I read this passage I called to mind
how nearly forty years ago one of my tutors at Oxford pointed
out to me — not that any pointing out was needful — the
1 Annual Reports^ 1892-93, pp. 12-22.
vin. HARVARD COLLEGE. 153
drowsy state in which a great oarsman — the chief glory of
our College — always came to lectures. Over his Greek and
Latin he rested from the real labours of the day. He was as
sleepy over his book as he was wakeful over his oar. His
vast muscles seemed to have invaded his brain. " Wantonly
exaggerated athletic sports," continues the President, "con-
vert the student into a powerful animal, and dull for the time
his intellectual parts; they present the Colleges to the public,
educated and uneducated, as places of mere physical sport,
and not of intellectual training; they make familiar to the
student a coarse publicity which destro5rs his rightful privacy
while in training for intellectual service, and subjects him to
insolent and vulgar comments on his personal qualities; they
induce in masses of spectators at interesting games an hysteri-
cal excitement which too many Americans enjoy, but which
is evidence, not of physical strength and depth of passion,
but of feebleness and shallowness; and they tend to dwarf
mental and moral pre-eminence by unduly magnifying physi-
cal prowess."
In Harvard Stories there is set before us this scene of
"hysterical excitement." The football match with Yale is
described, where the friends and supporters of each Univer-
sity muster nearly ten thousand strong, among them "Gov-
ernors, Congressmen, Judges, Architects, and Clergymen."
After a long struggle, the ball is at length carried over the
Yale line. "Then did all the Harvard hosts shout with a
mighty shout that made the air tremble. For five minutes
dignified men, old and young, cheered and hugged each other,
and acted as they never do on any other occasion, except,
perhaps, a College boat-race."^
1 Harvard Stories^ by W. K. Post, 1893, ?• 23.
CHAPTER IX.
Caps and Gowns. — Harvard College and University. — The Dormitories.
— Room Rents. — Students* Life Seventy Years Ago. — Memorial Hall.
THE Harvard men in their imitation of the English uni-
versities are doing better in their attempt to introduce
the cap and gown. In America, republican simplicity has
gone too far in abolishing state and in discarding robes.
Nowhere but in the Supreme Court at Washington is so much
even as a gown worn by the Judges. Barristers everywhere are
robeless and wigless. Yet, if "robes and furred gowns hide
all," in the courts of more than one City and perhaps of more
than one State the temptation to wear them must surely some-
times be very strong. In New York, in no remote antiquity,
there have been Judges known who, it might have been ex-
pected, would have kept them on term time and vacation, day
and night. Among all the Bishops of the Episcopal Church,
I am told, there is but one apron and but one pair of gaiters
to be seen. What are they among sixty millions of people ?
In Appleton Chapel at Harvard, where every Sunday evening
the university sermon is preached, no seats are set apart for the
Professors. The President even elbows in his way with the
rest, and takes a place wherever he may find one unoccupied.
He and the immortal Jack H , if that hero ever brings
down his mighty soul to the low level of a sermon, might sit
shoulder to shoulder. On the evening when I attended the
^54
CHAP. IX. HARVARD COLLEGE, 155
service, I chanced to sit just behind a dignitary of the Univer-
sity. When, on standing up for the opening hymn, I discovered
that he was wearing a dark grey coat and a pair of brown shoes,
and when I thought of our Vice-Chancellor in the red and
black gown of a Doctor of Divinity, or in the crimson gown of
a Doctor of Civil Law, marshalled to his chair of state by the
Bedells with their silver maces, and supported by the long line
of Doctors, Proctors, and Heads of Houses in their gowns
and hoods, the organ pealing forth, and the whole congregation
— Masters, Bachelors, and undergraduates — rising to do them
honour, my mind was greatly troubled. Lost in thought, it was
some time before I could give my attention to the preacher.
The need of ceremony is gradually becoming felt. On Com-
mencement Day, when all the degrees of the year are given, the
gown has for some while been commonly worn by " the Graduat-
ing Class." On this great day, and on this alone, the President
and the Professors wear their gowns. The bright adornment
of the hood was for the most part wanting. Nevertheless, on
the shoulders of a great classical scholar, over his Harvard
gown, I saw the blue hood of a Doctor of Laws of Edinburgh ;
and on the shoulders of one of the youngest of the Professors,
the red and black hood of a Master of Arts of Oxford. Some
fifty or sixty years ago. Professor Ticknor — so the story runs —
brought back from Oxford, where he had received an honorary
degree, a gown which was, he said, that of a Doctor of Civil
Law. This he wore at Harvard on solemn occasions. On re-
signing his professorship, he bequeathed it to Longfellow, who
succeeded him in his chair, who in his turn wore it, and in his
turn, on his resignation, bequeathed it to his successor Lowell.
In its faded glories the author of the Biglow Papers delivered
his opening address, troubled though he was by a doubt that it
156 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
was not really the gown of a Doctor of Oxford. In the year
1873, when Oxford conferred on him an honorary degree,
he looked round the Sheldonian Theatre for a robe of the
same kind as his venerable relique. After a long search he
discovered a single specimen. It was, he was told, the gown
of an Archdeacon !
Prescott, if in his later years he was ever present on Com-
mencement Day, must, I should think, have worn the Doctor's
gown which was conferred on him at Oxford. " He had," says
his biographer, " already received more than one honorary
degree at home ; but, with his accustomed ingenuousness and
simplicity, remembering how lavishly and carelessly such dis-
tinctions are conferred by most of our American Colleges, he
could not repress his satisfaction that he was " now a real
Doctor." ^
The square cap has been but lately introduced — not, I
believe, before the summer of 1892. Till then the tall silk hat
had been always worn with the gown. Nowhere is this hat
much seen in New England. In the streets of Boston I doubt
whether it is worn by one man in a hundred. It is not there,
as it is in the city of London and in the Temple and Lincoln's
Inn, the very badge of commercial and professional respecta-
bihty. Neither is it seen on the broad Avenues to the west of
Boston, where are the houses of the fashionable world. On
Sunday, however, I am told, before and after church it is com-
monly worn by highly respectable people. For Commence-
ment the graduating Bachelor bought one for the first and last
time. A young man of a frugal mind was content with hiring
one for the day. At Oxford the gown of the honorary Doctor
is, in like manner, commonly hired, and perhaps sometimes
1 Life of W. H. Prescott, by George Ticknor, p. 293.
IX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 157
the cap. In the Crimson, a little while before the great day of
last year, " a Member of the Graduating Class who loves con-
gruities " complained of " the incongruity of the action when the
Seniors removed their caps in entering the auditorium of
Sanders Theatre. It jarred a little upon one's sense of fitness.
The cap, indeed, is not a hat to be removed during exercises,
but on the contrary to be worn. In Cambridge and Oxford
its place is thus understood. The unique effect of both is quite
lost when one is taken away ; especially when the cap is of the
peculiar form." The unique effect of a large body of under-
graduates wearing their caps on Degree Day in the presence of
the President — the Vice-Chancellor, that is to say, and more
than the Vice-Chancellor — of this American University, was
prevented by a letter from a better informed correspondent.
Americans, like all other foreigners, do not easily understand
the mixed government of Oxford and Cambridge, each with its
numerous Colleges, self-governing and independent corpora-
tions, and its one University. In the Crimson, in an article
headed The Oxford Student, I find it stated that " no Oxford
student is allowed to enter or leave the University after nine
o'clock. The gates are shut at that time." An Oxford man, of
course, enters the University on the day he matriculates, and
leaves it when he goes out of residence. Many never leave
it till they leave life. It is no more capable of having gates
than a Federal Government, or any other metaphysical body.
In the New England Cambridge, College and University seemed
to me interchangeable terms. For instance, in Professor QtooA.-
"^'xvl^ Present and Future of Harvard College, though the learned
author mainly considers the Arts Course, the Course, that is to
say, which has its seat in the College, nevertheless he also deals
with the whole system of a University. No one, so far as I
158 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
heard, speaks of Harvard University, but always of Harvard
College. It was not till I turned over the pages of the Cata-
logue ^ that I discovered the difference. " Harvard University,'*
as there I read, " comprehends the following departments :
Harvard College, the Lawrence Scientific School, the Graduate
School, the Divinity School, the Law School, the Medical School,
the Dental School, the School of Veterinary Medicine, the Bussey
Institute (a School of Agriculture), the Arnold Arboretum, the
University Library, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, the
University Museum, the Botanic Garden, the Herbarium, and
the Astronomical Observatory.*' The President of the College
is the President of every Faculty and President of the whole
University. The Professors of the College are Professors of the
University, but not all the Professors of the University are Pro-
fessors of the College. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,
for instance, is Emeritus Professor not of Harvard College, but
of Harvard University. The accomplished editor of Lowells
Letters is a Professor of Harvard College and also of Harvard
University. It was, writes Mr. W. R. Thayer, " the Presidency
of Kirkland," who held office from 1810 to 1829, "that wit-
nessed the expansion of Harvard from a College into a Uni-
versity by the creation of several departments or schools, in
addition to the Academic department." Mr. Thayer never-
theless entitles his work, An Historical Sketch of Harvard
University from its Foundation to May, i8go. He thus seems
to confuse the University with the College, going back for
its foundation nearly two centuries before, according to his
statement, it was created. Harvard, however, in the ordinary
sense of the word was a University from the beginning, for it
has alwa5rs been a corporate body giving instruction in " polite
1 The Calendar of the University.
IX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 159
learning," and conferring degrees. So early as 1657, in An
Appendix to the College Charter^ I find it stated that " the Corpo-
ration and the Body of Overseers remain to the present time
the governing powers of the University." Up to the time then
that the new Schools were added, somewhat early in this century,
the College was the University and the University was the
College. Its founders, who were mainly graduates of our Eng-
lish Cambridge, had hoped, we may feel sure, that as wealth
increased, pious founders would arise, by whose munificence
new Colleges would cluster round Harvard, as they had clus-
tered round the earUest foundations in the old country, each
a corporation in itself, and all forming one great University.
Here, as the years went by, should some wanderer come from
the banks of the English Cam, he would, they dreamt, in very
truth find
'* Parvam Trojam, simulataque magnis
Pergama."
If such were their hopes and such their dreams, these hopes
and these dreams have this very year in part come true ; but
in a way which would have startled these old Puritans, if not
dismayed them. By a vote of the Governing Bodies of Har-
vard University and by an Act of the Legislature, an institu-
tion in Cambridge in which women students have for some
years received an academical education, has been united to
the University, while it still remains an independent corpora-
tion. RadcHffe College, the college of the " sweet girl-grad-
uates," is the second founded in the American Cambridge.
May it not be the last 1
Till this year the University had followed a course of its
own. Of the new " Departments " which had gathered round
it, the Divinity School alone bears any likeness to one of our
160 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
Colleges. Like them it has its Chapel, Library, and rooms
for residence, but it has no separate Corporation, no common
kitchen and no common dining-hall. The students, who are
scarcely forty in number, board where they please. They are
all Bachelors of Arts of Harvard or of some other University,
or graduates of a Theological School. The members of the
Lawrence Scientific School can have rooms in College. The
students in the Law School have only the privilege, shared in
by all the Departments, of having their meals in Memorial
Hall. For their instruction they have indeed a stately Hall
and a noble Library. The Graduate School, as its name im-
plies, is composed of men who have already taken their degree.
They have no local habitation. The three Medical Schools are
situated in Boston, three miles or so from Cambridge. These
students live in lodgings. The School of Agriculture is on a
farm. There is, therefore, excluding Divinity Hall, but one
College in Harvard in the Oxford and Cambridge sense of
the word.
To the Americans, our peculiar Academic system can be
made clearer than to the French or Germans by Professor
Freeman's ingenious comparison of their forty-two States, each
self-governed, but held together by a Federal Government.^
They are familiar, moreover, with the notion of students re-
siding in collegiate buildings, under a discipline more or less
strict. "Harvard," writes Professor Goodwin, "began as an
^ Milnian, in his History of Latin Christianity, ed. 1858, Vol. VI.,
p. 102, writing of the time of Wycliffe, says : " The English Universities
had already begun to take their peculiar character, a league, as it were, of
separate, independent Colleges, each a distinct republic, with its endow-
ments, statutes, internal government; though the University was still para-
mount, and the Chancellor, with his inferior officers, held the supreme,
all-embracing authority."
DL HARVARD COLLEGE, 161
English college of the Cambridge type, and it remained essen-
tially an English college down to the early years of this cen-
tury. ... It has always had the traditional freedom of an
English college, and none of the smaller discipline of a Ger-
man gymnasium ; but it has never had any of the very different
freedom of a German university." ^ More than half of the
students of the College live in great blocks of buildings known
as Dormitories, mostly standing in the Yard. These Dormi-
tories may be likened to the different quadrangles of a large
Oxford College, such as Christ Church, or, better still, to the
New Buildings of Magdalen — still known as New, though it
was in that " stately pile " that Gibbon had his rooms. Each
Dormitory stands apart. Round the Yard there is* no lofty
enclosure with its single gateway, its great doors thrown open
in the daytime and closed after dark, its Httle wicket, and
its porter's lodge. There is, to be sure, at the main entrance
a gateway of fine proportions, built a few years ago by a former
student, but it stands there for state, not for use. The Yard is
almost everywhere enclosed by nothing more than a low rail-
ing, with numerous openings. Undergraduates can leave their
rooms and return to them at all hours. Noctes atque dies
patet janua. There is no "gateing" here.*
The twelve Dormitories of the College " have accommoda-
tions for 973 students, provided all double rooms are occupied
by two persons." In the oldest buildings the occupant has but
a single room, in which he lives by day and sleeps by night.
Many of the apartments consist of one sitting-room and two
bed-rooms. Two students often join together in taking one of
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College ^ p. 21.
^ At Oxford an undergraduate is said to be gated when he b forbidden
to leave the College after the dinner hour.
M
A
162 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
these, for the expense of the sitting-room is shared. " I shall
chum next year with Dorr," wrote Emerson, ** and he appears
to be perfectly disposed to study hard." ^ Chumming was of
old common enough in Oxford ; the evidences of it were left
less than forty years ago. When I entered Pembroke Col-
lege in 1855, there did not happen to be a set of rooms vacant.
By a University statute an undergraduate was at that time re-
quired to sleep within his College during his first three years of
residence. Another Freshman and I had each to find a sitting-
room in a neighbouring street. For a bedroom I had to
choose between " a double room," or a hole under a staircase
which was commonly used as a "scout's" pantry. With an
Englishman's love of independence, I chose the pantry. In
Harvard it often happens that a double room has but a single
tenant, when it is occupied by a student who is rich enough to
pay the full rent. The rents range from II25 (;^5.2.o) to II350
{jQ'ji.io) a year. There are, however, only eighteen rooms for
which the charge is so low as II56 (;£i 1.9.0).^ In the Oxford
Colleges the lowest rent \s jQ^ (J^i^.^6). At Oriel the average
is jQii (I53.80) ; at New College, jQi^ (II68.46) ; at Balliol,
£^S (^73*35)- ^^ Christ Church the lowest rent is jQ^
(;?39.i2), and the highest ;^28 (1 13 7). In Magdalen, even
in Gibbon's "stately pile," not more than ;^20 {$^S) is
charged ; in the other Colleges the rents are below this sum.
In Harvard 292 rooms are rented more highly than the dearest
1 Emerson in Concord, ed. 1889, p. 23.
2 " The occupants of the only low-priced rooms in the College Yard
dormitories received in March the following notice: 'By vote of the
Corporation, February 26, 1894, the scale of prices of rooms in HoUis and
Stoughton is to be increased from the beginning of the academic year
1894-^5.' The new rates are from 50 to 75 per cent, higher than the
old." Harvard Graduates^ Magazine, June, 1894, p. 604.
DC. HARVARD COLLEGE, 163
in Oxford. As a considerable set-off against this higher charge,
the residence is longer by eleven weeks in each year.
In Oxford, when I was an undergraduate, the furniture was
always the property of the occupant, who took it, or as much
of it as he pleased, at a valuation from his predecessor. What-
ever additions he made were in like manner valued. For the
furniture of my rooms, which were in the Attics, I was charged
on entrance about £^\^ (J68.50). I laid out ^^4 ($19.56),
and received on leaving nearly as much as I had paid at first.
At the present time in many Colleges the furniture is owned
by the Corporation, who charge for it in a higher rent. In
Harvard the rooms are let unfurnished. Professor Peabody,
in his lively Reminiscences, thus describes the furniture as he
had known it nearly seventy years ago : " In my time a
student's room was remarkable chiefly for what it did not
have — for the absence, I might almost say, of all tokens of
civilization. The feather-bed was regarded as a valuable
chattel; but ten dollars [;£2.i] would have been a fair auc-
tion-price for all the other contents of an average room. I
doubt whether any fellow-students of mine owned a carpet. A
second-hand dealer had a few threadbare carpets, which he
leased at an extravagant price to certain Southern members of
the Senior Class. The rooms were heated by open wood-fires.
Almost every room had among its transmittenda a cannon-ball,
which on very cold days was heated to a red heat, and placed
on a skillet ; while at other times it was often utilized by being
rolled down stairs at such times as might most nearly bisect a
tutor's night-sleep." ^
The late Master of my College, who died less than three
years ago, told me that, when he was a Junior Fellow, the
"^Reminiscences of Harvard College^ p. 196.
164 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
floor of the Common Room, which was carpetless, was
sprinkled with fine sand every morning. An ancient Fellow of
Exeter College, who is still remembered by one or two of the
Seniors, angrily resisted the proposal to introduce a carpet into
their Common Room. If one were laid down, he said, he
would never set foot on it. It was laid down, and he kept to
his word.
Mr. Frank Bolles, late Secretary of Harvard University,
whose untimely death is greatly deplored, recently published a
curious collection of letters from forty students of the College,
— all " very poor, earnest, scholarly, eager to secure remunera-
tive work, and likely to be methodical and accurate in money
matters," in which " are described in detail their necessary ex-
penses."^ Some of these men lived in furnished lodgings;
others have not separated their room-rent from their outlay for
furniture. In the sixteen letters where the charges are kept
apart, the lowest expenditure in a year on furniture was ^15
(;£i.o.5) ; the highest $^^ (;£9.i6.o) ; the average being
II20 (;^4.i.8). Some of this outlay would, no doubt, be re-
covered by each student as he went out of residence, but the
sale is not managed by the College as it is at Oxford. There
is no transference from the out-going to the in-coming tenant.
Every man before leaving sells his furniture as best he can,
piece by piece. It sometimes happens that a rich student,
in all the carelessness which comes from a full purse, leaves his
furniture behind as a present to his fortunate but unknown
successor.
A Loan-Furniture Association has lately been founded,
" which lends students sets of furniture at a price just sufficient
to replace the property as it is worn out. The charge for a
1 Students* Expenses^ by Frank Bolles, 1893, P* 9*
IX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 165
set is $$ {jQi,o,^) a year." It is managed by a Board of
Directors chosen by ballot from among the officers and stu-
dents of the University.^
The students who do not " room " in College — to use a
word in common use in America — reside in " private Dormi-
tories," in boarding-houses, in private families, or in ordinary
lodgings. The University Committee on the Reception of
Students, at the opening of each year, publishes a descriptive
list of rooms to let, with the rents asked for the academic year.
"This grouping of facts and figures," writes the Secretary,
" has tended to establish uniformity and stability in rates. By
covering a large residence area, the list has extended competi-
tion and made rates more moderate than they might otherwise
have been." ^ The following entries which I have selected from
this list show both the character of the lodgings and the fulness
of the information : —
" Rent $50 [;f 10.4.6], one-eighth of a mile from the College, one room
on the fourth flour [the third according to our reckoning, for in America the
ground floor is the first], twelve feet by eleven, with one window to the
south, furnished; stove; light ; fuel not provided; no bath-room."
** Rent $200 [;f40.i8.o], suite of two rooms on the second floor, one six-
teen feet and a half square, the other sixteen by eleven, with four win-
dows to the south and west, unfurnished; stove ; no fuel or light."
" Rent 1^500 [;f 1024.0], half a mile from the College; suite of two rooms
on the second floor, one twelve feet by fourteen, the other eleven feet by
thirteen, with five windows to the north and west; stove; bath-room;
no fuel or light."
Many of the lodgings consist of only one room. In Oxford,
in the lodgings licensed by the University, in which alone under-
graduates are allowed to lodge, a separate bedroom must be
1 Students' Expenses, p. 5 ; Harvard University , by Frank BoUes, p. 5.
* Students Expenses, p. 5.
166 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
provided. It is, however, sometimes little better than a closet.
" Good order is maintained in College and private Dormitories
by graduates or instructors holding appointments as Proctors.
Proctors are under the direction of the Regent. At the dis-
cretion of the Regent, a Proctor may be placed in any private
house where students lodge, if the maintenance of good order
in the house seems to require it." ^ This is a heavy, though a
just tax on the householder, who has to provide a room for
the Proctor free of charge. A studious set of men living in
College have been known to ask that a more rigorous Proctor
might be sent to reside on their staircase.
The students board where they please. There is no buttery-
hatch or kitchen-hatch, whence breakfasts, lunches, and suppers
are sent out to men's rooms. They had both existed in old
days, for they were not among the mstitutions from which the
Puritans had fled, who, with all their strictness, were by no
means careless of the creature comforts. In the early days
each student '* received his sizing of food upon a pewter plate
and his beer in a pewter mug. They were delivered by the
butler to the servitors," who would carry them into the Hall.*
The buttery-hatch fell first. In the first year of this century it
was closed forever. The kitchen-hatch struggled on for a few
years longer, but it, too, was at length closed. " Commons,"
the meals provided by the College and eaten in the Hall,
continued till 1849.' Professor Peabody gives the following
1 Harvard University, by F. Bolles, p. 5. " The Regent is a University
officer who exercises a general supervision over the conduct and welfare of
the students.'' Catalogue, p. 32.
* The Early College Buildings at Cambrie^e, by A. M. Davis, p. 22.
■ An Historical Sketch of Harvard University , by W. R. Thayer, 1890,
p. 42.
IX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 167
description of a student's fare and daily life, as he had known
it seventy years ago : —
" The student's life was hard. Morning prayers were in sum-
mer at six ; ^ in winter about half an hour before sunrise, in a
bitterly cold chapel. Thence half of each Class passed into
the several recitation-rooms, and three-quarters of an hour
later the bell rang for a second set of recitations, including the
remaining half of the students. Then came breakfast, which,
in the College Commons, consisted solely of coffee, hot rolls
and butter, except when the members of a mess had succeeded
in pinning to the nether surface of the table, by a two-pronged
fork, some slices of meat from the previous day's dinner. Be-
tween ten and twelve every student attended another recitation
or a lecture. Dinner was at half-past twelve. There was another
recitation in the afternoon, except on Saturdays ; then evening
prayers at six, or in winter at early twilight ; then the evening
meal, plain as the breakfast, with tea instead of coffee, and
cold bread for the hot rolls. After tea the Dormitories rang
with song and merriment till the study-bell, at eight in winter,
at nine in summer, sounded the curfew for fun and frolic, pro-
claiming dead silence throughout the College premises. On
Sunday all were required to attend worship twice each day in
the College Chapel. . . . The charge for Commons was a
dollar and seventy-five cents a week [seven shillings and two
pence]. The food had not been deficient in quantity, but it
was so mean in quaUty, so poorly cooked and so coarsely served
as to disgust those who had been accustomed to the decencies
of the table, and to encourage a mutinous spirit, rude manners,
^ Dr. Johnson, writing from University College, Oxford, on June i, 1775,
says: **I went this morning to the chapel at six.'' Letters of Samuel
yohnson^ I. 323.
168 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap*
and ungentlemanly habits ; so that the dming-halls were seats
of boisterous misrule and nurseries of rebellion." ^
It was in coming from Hall that Prescott the historian was
struck in the eye by a piece of hard crust thrown by a disor-
derly student, and half-blinded for life. Like Milton, he was
supported in his task — supported by a deep love of learning
and an unconquerable spirit.
In defiance of rules, the undergraduates began to take their
meals outside the College. It was in vain that President
Quincy,* who came into- office in 1829, purchased in England
for the use of the Hall a handsome service of plate stamped
with the College seal. During the war between the North and
the South it was all sold. For some time, however, it had been
lying idle, for "Commons" had been aboHshed a few years
earlier. When the kitchen was closed, " the half-score or more
of swine," no doubt, disappeared ; in Professor Peabody's time
they had been kept in sties close to the back of the Hall.
For fifteen years the students boarded where they pleased —
singly or in clubs. According to the American custom, even
those who lived in lodgings must have gone out of the house
for their meals. Our lodging-house system, where each lodger
provides his own food and has his meals in his own room, and
where the landlady supplies the cooking and the service, is un-
known in New England. All who occupy rooms in a house
either take their meals at one common table or go abroad for
them. There could be no Autocrat of the Breakfast Table with
us. Our Autocrat would be a king without subjects. In 1865,
1 Reminiscences, pp. 29, 197.
^ The name of this distinguished New England family is always pro-
nounced Quinzy, The English author De Quincey is in like manner by
Americans called De Quinzey,
i
IX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 169
the Corporation fitted up an old railway station for a dining-
club. As they had met with no success as caterers, they put it
mainly under the management of the members. How far had
"Fair Harvard" sunk beneath its English model — "but oh
how fallen ! " — with its undergraduates dining, not in a noble
hall, but in a renovated " depot." ^ The age of meanness was
soon to pass away. In the Civil War twelve hundred and thirty-
nine Harvard men served in the army and navy of the North.
Ninety-five fell fighting on the side of liberty. To their mem-
ory a noble building has been raised under the name of
Memorial Hall.
In it more than a thousand students take their meals. As
they pass in through the spacious transept, they see inscribed
before them on the walls the names of those who fell. Few
more touching records are anywhere to be read than the long
list of these men who died for their country, most of them in
the very prime of their youth. Here in a few simple lines,
without one wasted word of praise, are given each man's name,
his birthplace, his age, his standing in the University, and the
battle in which he fell. Dull, indeed, must be the heart of the
young American who does not here feel his love strengthened
for that Union and that liberty which these men died to save.
'* So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must.
The youth replies, / can,''*
The dining-hall is himg round with the portraits of Harvard
worthies, old Presidents, Judges, and Governors of the Common-
1 A railway station — or rather I should say a railroad station — is com-
monly called a depot. Though in trait and restaurant the final / is
sounded by Americans, in depot it is left silent.
170 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. ix.
wealth; soldiers and builders-up of Constitutions; Story the
great jurist ; Prescott, Emerson, Motley, Longfellow, and Lowell.
Here stands the bust of Charles Russell Lowell ; " the perfec-
tion of a man and a soldier," as Sheridan said of him. Fifteen
years before the battle at Cedar Creek, in which he fell, his
uncle had urged the lad " to pay his way honourably in life by
being of use." ^ He paid his way full royally.
1 Letters of J, R. Lowell, I. i8i.
CHAPTER X.
A Visit to Three Dormitories. — Dining Qubs. — The Liquor Law. —
Baths. — Signs and ** Shingles. " — Qubs. — Politics. — Christmas. — A
Student's Library.
ON a pleasant afternoon in June a friendly undergraduate
showed me three sets of rooms ; the first in a lodging-
house, the second in Hastings, the most modern of the Dormi-
tories, and the third in Matthews, a Dormitory built twenty-one
years ago. In the lodging-house he himself lived with three
friends, each having a separate bedroom, but all sharing in a
common sitting-room. I might almost have thought myself in
a comfortable lodging in Oxford. In the sitting-room there
was a piano and a couch or two, but none of those absurdly
deep and low chairs in which the English undergraduate
delights, though, if his room is small, a single one nearly blocks
it up. On the walls hung engravings and photographs, mostly
gathered by my undergraduate friend in a recent tour in
Europe. There is, I am told, a small knot of men which
affects engravings after Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and their school
of painters. On the shelves there was a large and well-chosen
set of books, most of them historical, for he was studying his-
tory. I asked him how with his three chums — " room-mates,"
to use the American term — he managed to secure a quiet
time for study. He replied that he mostly read in the Library
— in a room set apart for students of history, and well stocked
with all the works they can need. Of the authors most in
171
172 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
request there are several copies kept. His meals he took in
Memorial Hall. He complained much of the quality of the
food and the cookery. Though in his own home a plain table
was kept, nevertheless the fare always seemed to him luxurious
after Harvard. Some allowance must probably be made for
the ordinary discontent of an undergraduate. I remember
how in my college days some of my fellow-students grumbled
over their dinner — "it was not fit," they said, " for a gentle-
man to eat " ; though it was quite as good as any young fellow
with a healthy appetite could require, and much better than
many got at home. From a late number of the Crimson I
have extracted the following information about the meals in
Memorial Hall : " There have been on the average one thou-
sand and eighty-five students per meal, half at the club tables
and half at the general tables. The price of board has aver-
aged for the past year three dollars ninety- two cents [i6s.]
a week. The bread is baked in the kitchens. The food left
over is never served again in any form, but is sold daily to
the poor people of Cambridge. Among the items of expendi-
ture are 756 boxes of oranges, 13,680 pounds of grapes,
590 pounds of honey, 306 tons of ice, and 534 tons of
coal." The consumption of ice seems enormous; in an
Oxford College I doubt whether in my time a single pound
was bought for use at the table, and even now it is very rarely
seen. Ices, if we indulged in any, were ordered from the
confectioner's. In America ice is everywhere used at almost
every meal, at all events in the summer. If they ever come
to take afternoon tea like other good Christians, they will, I
verily believe, begin it, and perhaps end it, with a glass of iced
water. Ice-cream — ice-milk would, I suspect, more accurately
describe the dish — is twice a week served instead of pudding
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 173
to the one thousand and eighty-five students in Memorial Hall,
and is served plentifully. Americans who have travelled com-
plain of the niggardliness of the helping of ices in England. At
my first evening party at Cambridge I was so much astonished
at the size of the piece that was brought me that I asked the
servant to let me have only half the quantity. Even then I
had at least three times as much as I was used to at home.
Everything is on a great scale in the United States — even
ices. After this experience I had no difficulty in understand-
ing how one thousand and eighty-five students required three
hundred and six tons of ice for thirty-six weeks of residence.
After all, it only gives them a weekly allowance of seventeen
and a half pounds for each man, and a great deal of it they
take in icing their water.
The charges of Memorial Hall were too high for the poorer
students, who, in 1889, founded a Club of their own, under the
name of the Foxcroft. It opened with sixty members, but in
less than three years it numbered over two hundred. It pro-
vides no common meal, but every one orders what he pleases,
as at a tavern. The average expenditure is less than two
dollars eighty cents a week (eleven shillings and six pence),
while some members bring theirs as low as two dollars (eight
shillings and two pence) .^ A student gives the following
curious account of a club on a much smaller scale : —
** 1 have tried boarding in several ways and find the most pleasant and
economical, as well as healthful, to be a club of about twenty-five men,
which we manage ourselves. We have an organization under the man-
agement of a board of three Directors, who oversee matters, recommend
members, and decide other questions. We hire a lady who furnishes
dining-room and everything, except dishes, and prepares the food. A
Steward collects the board, buys provisions, and manages the finances for
^ Harvard University^ by F. Bolles, p. 5; Students^ Expenses, p. 4.
174 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
his board. Monthly statements show the financial standing, and we live
as well as possible upon ^2.50 [loj. 3^/.] per week. We have good food
and plenty, as attested by the fact that each of our men has gained in
weight each year. Many wiser heads have predicted our failure, but by
close economy and a general feeling of co-operation, we are this year
more prosperous than ever."i
It is in vain for any young scapegrace of a student at dinner
in an American University " to remember the poor creature,
small beer." To desire it would show as vilely in him as in
Prince Hal. My friend, the undergraduate, told me that this
prohibition had, he thought, a bad result. It was better for
those who liked a glass of beer to take it at their meals, and
not, as they now do, in their rooms. It cannot be bought in
Cambridge, which, with its widely-scattered population of
seventy thousand thirsty souls, has put itself under the prohi-
bition law; but it is got in casks or in bottles from Boston,
and is offered to callers as wine used to be offered at Oxford.
After a great victory at baseball or football, men are known to
go all the way to Boston to drink, and often drink heavily.
Under the guidance of my friend, I passed from his lodgings
to Hastings Dormitory, where the accommodation is excellent.
Like the other dormitories, it is built with separate staircases,
on much the same plan as an Oxford College. There were,
moreover, bath-rooms for common use, and a water supply to
each floor. In all the other dormitories the water has to
be carried up in cans from the ground floor, as is still the
case in most Oxford Colleges. Every staircase has its por-
ter and " goody." The " goody " corresponds to our bed-
maker. "Tenants who desire to employ any one to make
fires, black boots, etc., must arrange with the porters of the
buildings in which they live." So says the University Catalogue.
1 Students' Expenses, p. 35.
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 175
The porter is not required to carry up fuel or water, to light
the fire, to carry down the ashes, or to take care of the lamps.
For each of these services there is a separate charge. The
poorer students save their money by doing some or all of these
duties themselves. My guide hoped that a wealthy benefactor
would, before long, be found, who would lay a supply of water
on every floor of every dormitory. The use of the bath in the
bedchamber is, I was informed, not common. Less than sixty
years ago it was scarcely known at Oxford. The Head of one
of our Colleges, who, on Sunday evenings when he is in the
vein, charms the Common Room with his stories of past days,
told me that soon after he entered, an aggrieved " scout " com-
plained to one of the tutors of an undergraduate on his staircase,
who required him every day to carry all the way up to his room
a can of cold water for his morning bath. The tutor replied
that he could not interfere, and that his master's orders must
be obeyed. At the same time he sent for the youth, who, like
Swift, " washed himself with oriental scrupulosity," and remon-
strated with him on the needless trouble he was giving. " I
myself," he added, "take a hot bath once a week, and no
gentleman need take more." When I entered Oxford in the
year 1855, the morning bath had become somewhat general.
At Harvard, the River Charles which flows hard by, into which
Longfellow, Lowell, and the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
used to plunge, is now too foul for bathing. There are no
public baths in the town. The Gymnasium has a few, but a
very few. In the Crimson I have seen more than one com-
plaint of their deficiency. In this respect Harvard is far
behind Yale, whose noble gymnasium is amply supplied. It
has been said, and with some reason too, that Harvard has
only to make its wants known, when a benefactor speedily
176 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
arises. I trust that the voice of a stranger may reach a rich
man's ears, and remove this reproach from a great University.
The rooms we visited in Hastings were on the top floor.
They were pleasant and comfortable — very like the rooms in
one of our Colleges, only the bedchamber was far better.
There was the wide window-seat with its red cushions and out-
look over the tops of the graceful American elms. Above the
two doors of the sitting-room were hanging one or two printed
notices, which had been appropriated or misappropriated by
some means or other. It is the pride of a Freshman to have
his walls adorned with signs and ''shingles'' which he has
" ragged." ^ An oblong piece of wood called a shingle takes
the place in America of the brass plate on the outside door.
It is not fastened to the door, but is hung near it on the wall
These shingles, and in fact all kinds of announcements and
notices, the adventurous Freshman delights to carry off, sur-
veying his room with just pride, when he sees on the walls
such inscriptions as : " Jones & Co., Civil, Sanitary, and Land-
scape Engineers"; "Thomas Smith, M.D., Ofl&ce Hours 2-4;
7-9 " ; " Hair-dressing and Complexion Parlors " ; " Under-
takers. Locker's Casket Warehouse " ; " The College Dining
Rooms and Ice Cream Parlors." These trophies correspond
to the door-knockers which have been known to adorn the
rooms of a Christ Church undergraduate. One kind of shin-
gles is won by easier, but, perhaps, no less glorious means.
** Peace hath her victories no less renowned
Than war."
Harvard abounds in clubs, and each club has its own shingle.
1 ** Ragging f^m^\y means stealing!^ — Harvard Stories, by W. IC Post,
p. 66.
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 177
These are not looked upon as lawful trophies of war. There
is honour among thieves. Shame and not glory would be the
lot of him who should hang on his walls the shingle of a club
to which he did not belong. So nice is the point of honour
that^ much as admission into some of these clubs is coveted^
when the period of election is drawing near, a youth of a deli-
cate mind, if he has a friend among the members, shuns his
rooms for fear he should be suspected of improperly canvassing
him for his vote. With the cavalier poet he would say, —
** I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.''
Some clubs, it should seem, are started only to increase the
display of shingles. A student told me that he belonged to
more than one which, to the best of his knowledge, had never
met since the day of their creation. Undergraduate-nature
seems to be the same on both sides of the Atlantic, however
much it may vary in its manifestations. In America it is per-
haps a little more transparendy boyish. Some of these clubs
imitate the follies of Freemasonry in their secret rites of initia-
tion. Their very names they try to conceal, letting themselves
be known to outsiders only by one or two letters of the Greek
alphabet. The most famous of all the clubs, the Phi Beta
Kappa, — " our beloved Phi Beta Kappa," as Professor Good-
win jusdy calls it, — which was founded in 1779, remained a
mystery for more than fifty years. It was not till 1831 that
"the veil of secrecy was withdrawn, and the mystic letters
$. B. K. were found to stand for ^iXwrotf^ta Biov KvPepin^rri^ —
Philosophy the guide of life. The A. K. E. is now the most
harmful society in the College ; its regular meetings resemble
the Kneipe of German students ; its neophytes are subjected to
N
178 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
silly and injurious hazing, under the guise of initiation." These
three letters stand for the Dickey Club, a society conspicuous
for its brutality and its folly .^ A few years ago it carried
matters to such a pitch that its barbarous rites of initiation
were made known by the father of a student whose health had
suffered under them. A strong and general feeling of indigna-
tion was roused. Fortunately the members are often satisfied
with merely bringing down the neophyte to their own level, by
compelling him publicly to make a fool of himself. He is
forced to dress himself in a ridiculous costume, and either in
the streets or at some great baseball or football match to strut
about. So much is this the practice, that if any young man is
seen in the neighbourhood conspicuously making a fool of him-
self, without the justification of being drunk, he is at once set
down as a candidate for the Dickey Club. The members
would do well to change their name to the Dogberry Club, and
to take as their motto, — " But, masters, remember that I am
an ass." Nevertheless, so strange is the timidity of youth in
the presence of their own set of companions, that not many
men, as I am informed, when elected to these clubs dare to
decline the dishonour. Timid though some of these youths
may be, nevertheless, if the need arose, they would show, I
have little doubt, that though they dared not face the scoffs
of the Dickey Club, they were not unworthy sons of the men
who faced death on the bloody battle-fields of Virginia.
In our universities such follies are unknown ; they have even
well-nigh died out in our public schools. We are not indeed
1 "The A. K. B. (I am informed), like *. B. K., is a fraternity having
branches in many colleges; the Harvard society started as a branch of this,
but has long since ceased to recognize any connection with the general
society."
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 179
free from a certain kind of tyranny even in Oxford. The
undergraduate, poor though he may be, who does not pinch
himself to subscribe to the boat-club is too often looked upon
askance. I remember hearing one of my companions spoken
ill of on this account. He was very poor, but when the Flor-
ence Nightingale Fund was raised his subscription was the
largest in the College.
Not a few of the Harvard Clubs have shaken themselves free
from these follies of initiation and secrecy. It is not easy to
believe that in some of them they had ever existed. Emerson
was elected to a club, and became thereby, as he wrote to his
brother, " one of the fifteen smartest fellows." It is incredible
that the New England philosopher, even when in a short
jacket, ever consciously made a fool of himself. " There are,"
said Burlingame, the first American Minister to the Court of
Pekin, " there are twenty thousand Ralph Waldo Emersons in
China." We could as easily picture to ourselves Confucius
submitting to being " hazed " as the sage of Concord.
The Medical Faculty Club deserves immortality for one of
its pranks. " It conferred its honorary degrees liberally upon
conspicuous persons at home and abroad. Not only did it
raise Chang and Heng, the Siamese twins, and Day and Martin,
the proprietors of the celebrated blacking, to the rank of
Doctors of Medicine, but it had the audacity to send a di-
ploma to Alexander, Czar of all the Russias. The Emperor,
not to be left behind in the race of honour, sent to the Medical
Faculty Club a valuable case of surgical instruments, which by
a fortunate mistake was delivered to the Medical School of the
University." ^ It is perhaps by no means wonderful that the his-
torian Motley, himself a Harvard man, many years later writing
1 An Historical Sketch of Harvard University , by W. R. Thayer, p. 6i.
180 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
of " the affection which is supposed to exist between Russia
and America," said : " At any rate it is a very platonic affec-
tion ; being founded, however, on entire incompatibility of char-
acter, absence of sympathy, and a plentiful lack of any common
interest, it may prove a very enduring passion." ^ The wit of
the Medical Faculty Club has long been a matter of the past.
" Its proceedings have been kept so secret for so many years
that only on Class Day are even the Seniors who belong to it
known, from their wearing a black rosette with a skull and
bones in silver upon it." When these clubs first took their rise
Harvard was little more than a great school. The students
were mostly mere lads, and the discipline was strict, as it had
been of old in Oxford and Cambridge. It is no longer a
school. It is a university and a great university. It is time
for it to put away childish things.
The strife of the last Presidential election led to the forma-
tion of two poHtical clubs — The Harvard Republican Club
and The Democratic Campaign Club. Under their manage-
ment a vote was taken of the whole body of undergraduates.
It showed that if the choice of President had been in their
hands. General Harrison would have carried the day over
Mr. Cleveland by 1114 votes to 851. The learning of the
University went the other way. Of the Professors whose
views could be ascertained, a very large majority indeed were
for Mr. Cleveland. The Democratic Club came to an end
with the election, but not before, to quote the Harvard Grad-
uates^ Magazine, "it had strengthened the feeling that there
is no incompatibility between one's membership in a univer-
sity like Harvard and a dignified participation in political
affairs, even in a strictly partisan way." What a curious in-
1 Correspondence of J, L. Motley ^ New York, 1889, II. 336.
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 181
sight is given by such a passage as this into the vast difference
between England and America in the great field of politics !
In England, at all events outside London, a man who should
altogether refuse to play his part in political life, would be
much less respected. However dignified he might be, if he
stood quite aloof from public affairs, he would be looked upon
as a bad citizen. Day has dawned in the United States, and
good men are seeing that the more corrupt party-life may
be, the more it is each man's duty to do his best to work its
purification.
The Harvard Republican Club, numbering about six hundred
active members, still carries on its operations. During the
Presidential election it far outdid any Society that ever existed
for the Diffusion of Knowledge — or Ignorance. More than
thirty thousand speeches, documents, and circulars were sent to
the students in Cambridge. In the great Republican torch-light
procession in Boston " over six hundred Harvard Republicans
marched, wearing crimson gowns and white caps, the Law
School being distinguished by the barrister's wig." The wig,
a compliment, we may take it, to the English Bar, is some slight
compensation for the general aim of the Republican party to
ruin our trade. For the first time, we are told, in American
political history " College speakers " (thank heaven, they are
not called orators !) were sent about to public meetings. At
Oxford, in my time, the speeches of undergraduates were
confined to the narrow limits of the College Debating Societies
and of the Union. They never overflowed into the town and
the neighbouring villages. I remember how much surprised
I one day was on learning that some of my fiiends — two of
them now famous as writers on constitutional history, one a
Liberal and the other a Liberal-Unionist — were going all the
182 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
way to Birmingham to hear John Bright make one of his great
speeches. Had we ever thought of speaking, in those days
of a narrow franchise our eloquence would have been of little
avail It was not till working-men got a vote that youthful
speakers bestirred themselves. In the old days in a corrupt
constituency such as Oxford then was, and among the squires
and farmers in the surrounding counties, no undergraduate
would have got a hearing.
Harvard boasts of three Musical Clubs, The Glee Club, The
Pierian Sodality, and The Banjo and Mandolin. Of their skill
I know nothing, but in their dealings with each other they
seem to be unusually harmonious. In the short Christmas
vacation of the winter before last, uniting in one body, they
made a musical tour throughout the country. The first per-
formance they gave on December 22, at New York, and the last
at Albany on January 2, having in the meantime travelled as far
west as Milwaukee, a great city on the shore of Lake Michigan.
I doubt whether a Club of Oxonians would traverse a longer
distance than these wandering musicians, were they in a like
tour to begin their performances in Brussels and end them in
Paris, having in the short interval of eleven days given them
also in Venice, Genoa, and Naples. The trip was taken in the
midst of the American winter. So much were the trains
delayed by the snow that once, at least, if not twice, the musi-
cians were prisoners in a snow-drift at the very time that they
ought to have been in the Music Hall. It seems strange to
us that so large a party of young men should be willing to be
away from their homes at Christmas. Longfellow recorded in
his Journal on December 25, 1856 : " Not a very merry
Christmas. We are in a transition state about Christmas in
New England. The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being
k
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 183
a cheerful, hearty holiday, though every year makes it more
so."^ Samuel Sewall, one of the cruel judges who sent the
Salem witches to the gallows, more than once records in his
Diary, with great satisfaction, the utter disregard of the festival,
in spite of the efforts of a Church of England governor. Time,
no doubt, has done much to loosen the bonds of Puritanism,
and to give a cheerfulness and a heartiness to the holiday in
lands where once it was strictly not kept ; but the genius of one
man has done even more than time. Neither New England
nor Scotland has been able to withstand the kindly influence of
Charles Dickens. In the diffusion of the Christmas spirit his
Christmas Carol has done more than all the Societies and all
the preachers. I remember a story of a poor half-witted fellow
who lived in a village in Scotland. When the yearly fast came
round, which was kept on different days in different parishes,
oppressed by the gloom of his own village he was heard to
say, "I'll just go across the burnie and hear them whistle."
The Scotch and the New Englanders, now that the general
joy of Christendom has been brought home to their hearts,
have become in like manner oppressed by the gloom in which
they were spending the great yearly festival. They have done
much to scatter it ; but " the rear of darkness " still seems to
overhang them, or we should not have seen these lads, far
from their homes, spending so much of Christmas-tide in a
Pullman car.
This digression about Clubs has led me far away from my
friendly undergraduate and from my visit to students* rooms.
He next led me to Matthews — one of the Dormitories in the
Yard. Here, too, I could almost have thought that I was in an
Oxford College, and here, too, I found shelves well stocked
1 Life of H. W, Longfellow, II. 290,
184 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
with books. I was not to infer, I was told, from what I had
seen that afternoon, that the ordinary undergraduate owns a
library. I have examined the expenses of the forty poor stu-
dents published by the Secretary of the University, and find
that their average yearly expenditure on books and stationery
— for these two items are not kept apart — was about nine-
teen dollars and a half (^^3.19.8.). One man one year
raised his outlay to fifty dollars (^^i 0.4.0.), and one brought
his as low as four and a half (i8s. 5d.). As I looked over
my host's collection I called him "an honest man," think-
ing how Johnson, when he was shown Dr. Bumey*s collec-
tion, said to him : " You are an honest man to have formed
so great an accumulation of knowledge." He replied that
from childhood he had been brought up to think that he
ought to have books of his own. I wish wealthy EngUshmen
could have had this wholesome belief given them from their
cradle. It would be a blessed time for authors. Even re-
spectability, the god at whose altars we offer up our most
costly sacrifices, no longer requires that the home of an English
gentleman should have a decent library. So far as books go
he is naked and not ashamed.
My host showed me a copy of 77ie Filgrini's Progress which
he had lately had splendidly bound. It was, he said, the first
book that he had ever loved ; most of it he knew by heart.
He quoted Johnson's saying to Percy's little daughter, when
the great man found that she had not read it : " No ; then I
would not give one farthing for you " ; but by a slip of memory
he confused Bishop Percy with Bishop Butler. I told him how
the only time I had the honour of meeting Mr. Gladstone, he
had insisted on the pre-eminent place Butler held among the
great writers of the eighteenth century, and how I had re-
I
X. HARVARD COLLEGE. 185
marked how strange it was that the author of the Analogy is
nowhere mentioned either in Johnson's recorded talk or in his
writings. Our host knew enough of EngUsh ways to give
us afternoon tea. He flavoured it with shoes of lemon instead
of cream, after the Russian fashion. He had invited one or
two of his friends to meet us, and the time slipped pleasantly
by in a talk about authors and books.
Had I visited a room in one of the more ancient Dormi-
tories, I might have been shown names and dates carved in
the woodwork by earlier occupants. These short and simple
annals have not been written in the light of day. They are
cut in some secret place, behind the wainscot or under the
floor. The new-comer oft-time has a long search before he
can discover them. He adds his name and preserves the
mystery.
d
CHAPTER XI.
Harvard " Boys." — " Harvard Indifference." — Harvard and Yale. —
Honest Poverty. — Oxford Servitors. — Poor Students. — ** Money
Aids."
AN anecdote which I have from a Senior — a man, that is
to say, in his fourth year — seems to indicate a certain
modest timidity in the American undergraduate. Nowhere in
the United States, I am told, does a young man carry a walking-
stick. It belongs there to the evening of life, as it belonged
in ancient Greece. That it was used half a century ago is
shown by a regulation of 1849 forbidding a student to take
his cane into Chapel. An attempt has been lately made to
reintroduce it into Harvard, probably by some undergraduate
who has been to England, and noticed how in our Universi-
ties it has become as indispensable a part of the outfit for
walking as a hat. My friend the Senior says that hitherto it
has only been under the cover of night that he and his friends
have ventured to carry a cane.^ I hope, by the way, that they
do carry it, and do not commit the vulgarity of letting it
touch the ground, as if it were of any manner of use to them.
I am not sure, on second thoughts, that an English under-
graduate has any more courage in doing what is unusual. In
1 A friend who has read my proof-sheets writes to me : "I am afraid this
man was playing on your credulity. Almost every student carries a cane,
except when going about in Cambridge for exercise, or to lecture." If the
story is not true, it ought to be; so I leave it in.
186
CHAP. XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 187
my day we never, when in cap and gown, carried an umbrella,
however heavily it might rain. We used to wrap our gowns
round our shoulders and run. This point of etiquette no
longer exists. It has yielded, I conjecture, to the large in-
crease in the number of undergraduates not lodging in Col-
lege. Even at the present day, a man carrying a walking-
stick when he is in cap and gown is a sight never seen in
either graduate or undergraduate. A cripple alone can vent-
ure to use one without blushing. It is only a few years ago
that a Master of Arts, a Fellow and Tutor of his College,
gravely pointed out to me the impropriety of which I was
guilty in using a walking-stick when in my Academic costume.
I have never repeated the offence, except once when I was
lame. On the other hand, an undergraduate, and perhaps
even a Junior Fellow, would have a feeling of uneasiness, if
not of positive shame, if he were caught walking about in his
ordinary costume without a cane in his hand. A cane, I have
been told on very good authority, is the distinguishing sign
of the University man when not in cap and gown. Without
it a " man " may be mistaken for an errand-boy. The use of
the word many not only in our universities, but even in our
schools, nay, in our preparatory schools, where boys are no
more to be found than the pinafores which were worn in my
young days, is a sign, however, of the greater confidence of
the English youth. In America, boys are still boys, at all
events in name; for often they are forward enough in con-
duct. Even in Harvard there are no men among the under-
graduates; they always speak of themselves as boys.^
Harvard has not been quite free from a certain kind of
^ The same friend writes to me : « This is chiefly among the students
from the West; not at all so in the case of the typical student, least of all
d
188 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
affectation which is only too common in the English Universi-
ties, but which is known in America as "Harvard indiffer-
ence." It was not from their forefathers that the New Eng-
enders got this poor quality. It was never carried across the
sea in the ships of the early settlers. It is the very opposite
of that stubborn strength of character, and of that burning
zeal which sent them to the wilderness, and their descend-
ants, "the embattled farmers," to Concord, Lexington, and
Bunker Hill. It is the contempt for all that eagerness of
heart and thought and life which inspires " the young enthu-
siast" when first "he quits his ease for fame." "I do not
love a man," said Goldsmith, "who is zealous for nothing."
These lovers of indifference he would have shunned. Long
indulged, it becomes ingrained in the character. It is a great
maker of bad citizens. In a young man it almost always
begins with affectation, and happily often dies an early death.
It is killed by his nobler qualities, or by some strong influ-
ence from without.
More than sixty years ago Channing rebuked it. When
the Revolution of 1830 broke out in France, he was "asto-
nished that the freemen of America, especially the young,
should be so moderate in their expressions of joy. He went
back in memory to his boyish days, when the Cambridge col-
legians had processions, speeches, and bonfires. Now all was
still. One evening a graduate called upon him. ' Well, Mr.
,* said he, 'are you too so old and so wise, like the
young men at Harvard, as to have no foolish enthusiasm to
throw away upon the heroes of the Polytechnic School ? ' * Sir, '
answered , ' you seem to me to be the only young man I
one who has social training." I was, however, much struck with the use of
the term boy; so I leave the text unchanged.
I
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 189
know.' ' Always young for liberty, I trust,* replied Dr. Chan-
ning with a bright smile and a ringing tone, as he pressed
him warmly by the hand."^ Thirty years had to pass, and
then this Harvard indifference was swept away by the South-
ern revolt. In the presence of that dreadful strife, indiffe-
rence would no longer have been ridiculous, it would have
become hateful.
Professor Goodwin thinks that it was by "the equable
pressure" of a revised system of instruction and examina-
tion that "the older enthusiasm" of the place was mainly
repressed, and this indifference was encouraged.* Free play
was no longer given to the student's mind. He was forced
to attain to mediocrity in many subjects, and was not en-
couraged, and was scarcely allowed to secure excellence in
one or two. There had been students who had refused to
cramp themselves in the narrowness of the prescribed course.
Lowell read widely, and was rusticated in consequence.
Motley escaped this disgrace, but not the reproach of his
tutor, who one day " remonstrated with him upon the heaps of
novels upon his table. * Yes, ' said Motley, * I am reading
historically, and have come to the novels of the nineteenth
century. Taken in the lump, they are very hard reading.* ***
At the present day the author of The Biglow Papers and the
historian of the Dutch Republic could have indulged their
tastes to the full. This " Harvard indifference ** cannot surely
long survive the great reforms in education which have already
done so much to transform the University from a mere place
of teaching to a place of learning.
'^Memoir of W. E, Channing, 1848, III. 304.
* The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 13.
• Holmes's Memoir of J, L, Motley, ed. 1889, p. 13.
190 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
There is another fault for which Harvard men are reproached
by their rivals and enemies. They are distinguished, it is
said, by a certain priggishness, a certain consciousness too
openly shown that they are not only the salt, but the superfine
salt, of the earth — a priggishness and a self-consciousness
which, it is said, sometimes cling to them throughout life.
What Boston is to Masachussetts, what Massachusetts is to
New England, what New England is to the United States,
what the United States are to the Universe, that Harvard is to
Boston. Among " the five points of Massachusetts decency "
laid down by Wendell Phillips, to be a graduate of Harvard
College holds the second place. The " old Harvard spirit "
on which they prided themselves, was thought by some to be
the spirit of a gentleman carried to preciseness. They are
fond of telling a story of a man who had twin sons, one of
whom he sent to Harvard, and the other to Yale. Before
they entered College, no one, not even their father, could tell
them apart; but after graduation the difference was plain.
One was a Harvard gentleman, the other a Yale tough. Wealth
and family are said to count for much at Harvard. The New
Englander is as proud of his pedigree, and often with as
much reason, as any English nobleman or squire. A Bache-
lor of Arts of Yale, who recently spent two years at Harvard,
the first as a graduate-student, and the second as an instruc-
tor, — evidently a fair-minded man, — writes : " I have lived
long enough at Yale to know that Yale students are not com-
monly ruffians; and I have seen enough of Harvard to know
that Harvard students are not as a class snobs. Yet there is
a slight element of truth even in these gross caricatures; it is
the difference between 'Fair * Harvard and 'Dear Old * Yale.
The Harvard atmosphere occasionally produces * an affectioned
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 191
ass/ and the Yale spirit sometimes turns out an insolent
rowdy." ^
I have been told by one familiar with the Continental Uni-
versities that, measured by their standard, the Harvard stu-
dents are deficient in those graces which were so dear to Lord
Chesterfield's heart. In formal politeness, in the lesser
morals, the students in their behaviour towards a Professor
fall short of the standard which is observed in Germany and
France in their behaviour towards each other. Nevertheless,
beneath this somewhat unpolished outside much real kindness
lies hidden. A young Professor, who had but recently joined
the University, told me that in the midst of the work of his
first term he had been struck down by diphtheria. His pupils
not only every day sent flowers and fruit, but begged that one
of them in turns should always sleep in his house as long as
the illness lasted, so that in case of sudden need there might
be a swift messenger close at hand to summon the doctor.
He had won their hearts, as I learnt from another source, by
his courage and his devotion to his work. As soon as he
knew the nature of his illness, he had sent them word that he
was attacked by a dangerous malady, which would very likely
carry him off; but that he hoped that they would go on with
the experiments on which he had left them engaged. To
such students as these might be applied Goldsmith's saying
about Johnson : " He has nothing of the bear about him but
the skin."
Whatever pride of wealth and birth may exist in Harvard
or in Yale, no student in either of these great Universities
need hang his head for honest poverty. Many of them gain
their own living more or less, and gain it by bodily labour.
1 The Harvard Crimson, June 23, 1893.
192 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Wages are so much higher in America than in the old country
that it takes far less time, and draws far less on a man's
strength for him to earn money by the use of his arms and
legs. Bodily work, happily, is not commonly looked upon
as anything degrading. To gain his livelihood by the sweat
of his brow is not disgraceful even in an undergraduate.
Emerson, when a student in Divinity Hall, after he had taken
his degree as a Bachelor of Arts, falling ill, went to his uncle's
farm for a change. The Emersons were too poor for idle-
ness, so he helped to till the ground. "Working here in the
field with a labourer, they fell a-talking, and the man, a
Methodist, said that men are always praying, and that all
prayers are answered. This statement struck Emerson, and
upon this theme he wrote his first sermon, which he preached
that summer in Waltham in the church of his uncle Ripley.
Next day in the stage-coach a farmer said to him, ' Young
man, you'll never preach a better sermon than that.' "^ Not
only will students work on a farm, for which they might as
Republicans plead, if they were weak-minded enough to need
a plea, the example of the ancient Romans, but they work as
servants. They have not that miserable shame of " doing any-
thing menial " which so often besets needy people in the old
country, who would think it less dishonourable to live on alms
than by honest service. When I was at Yale, I was told that
the poorer students of that University, without any loss of
general estimation, help to gain their livelihood by bodily
work. Some of them in the winter tend house-furnaces, which
only need looking after early every morning and late every
evening. In America, the whole house is often warmed by a
single furnace in the cellar, whence hot-water pipes are carried
^ Emerson in Concord, 1889, p. 31.
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 193
to the hall and all the rooms. The maid-servants never
attend to it, for it is not thought to be fit work for a woman.
Wages are so high that it is only the wealthy who can afford to
keep a man-servant, so that the furnace must be tended by
the master of the house and his sons, or by an odd- job man.
Such a man is said "to do the chores."^ A student tries to
get two or three houses to look after in the same part of the
town, so that he may not lose time in going from one to the
other. Some give their services as waiters at the clubs where
their comrades take their meals, receiving in return their
board free of charge. I was assured by an undergraduate
that no one is thought worse of for doing such work as this.
Emerson, in his first year at Harvard, had a room rent-free in
the President's house, by holding the post of President's
Freshman. He had to carry official messages to the students
and officers of the College.
It was common enough in Oxford till early this century
for undergraduates to wait at table. Dr. Johnson repre-
sented to Lord Macaulay's great-uncle, a Scotch minister, the
advantages of a servitorship, by which a poor scholar earned
his living and his education by menial services given during
part of every day. Two servitors of his own College attained
great eminence last century, though an eminence of a very
different kind. One was Whitefield, the famous Methodist
preacher, and the other Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury.
^ Chortt which is of the same root as char in charwoman^ is used to
describe the odd jobs about a house which are properly done by a man.
It is never applied to the work done by a charwoman. By Shake-
speare (I follow Johnson's edition) chore is used of woman's work : —
<<The maid that milks and does the meanest chores." Anthony and
CUopaira, Act IV., Sc. 15.
o
m HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Each of them might proudly have said with the King's
son: —
** Some kinds of labour
Are nobly undergone, and most base matters
Point to rich ends."
I was told in my undergraduate days, but I do not know
whether there is any truth in the story, that it was the Earl
of Derby, afterwards Chancellor of the University and Prime
Minister, who gave the system of servitorships the blow of
which it died. When he was a gentleman-commoner of
Christ Church he refused, it was said, to be waited on by
his fellow-undergraduates. Dean Liddell informs me "that
in 1830, when he first went up to Christ Church, the Junior
Servitor used, immediately after grace had been said, to walk
up to the High Table with a sauce-boat. This was of course
a relic of the old custom." In Exeter College, less than half
a century ago, the Bible-clerk* dined off the leavings of the
Fellows' Table. He used to come late to dinner, hitting off
the time when the joint was likely to be done with, and
could be sent down to him.
Goldsmith, who had too often suffered humiliation, and who
felt its bitterness to the full, had raised his voice against the
system. "Surely," he wrote, "pride itself has dictated to the
Fellows of our Colleges the absurd passion of being attended
at meals, and on other public occasions, by those poor men
who, willing to be scholars, come in upon some charitable
1 « The Bible-clerk had the duty of reading the lessons in chapel and of
saying grace in Hall." Dr. Murray's Dictionary, In my College the
Bible-clerks — there were two of them — did not read the lessons. In
Chapel they kept the list each service of those who were present. In Hall
they said grace. They were on an equality with the rest of the under-
graduates.
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 195
foundation. It implies a contradiction for men to be at once
learning the liberal arts, and at the same time treated as slaves ;
at once studying freedom and practising servitude."^ He
forgot that often it was the case, if not indeed always, that the
charitable foundation in itself was not sufficient to support
and educate these poor men. Like many a needy student
outside a university, for part of each day they had to work for
their living. Whitefield had been a servant in his mother's
inn at Gloucester — the inn whose praises are sounded in
Tom /ones. When he came to Pembroke College he was
still a servant, but he was a student also. It is doubtful
whether poor scholars were not greatly wronged by a change
which was meant to give them freedom. The funds which
supported them, now that the badge of servitude was re-
moved, were far too commonly competed for in examina-
tions by all alike, and far too often fell to the lot of the
well-to-do. In the long training needed for the athletics
of the class-room, money is of great service, for by money
the services of the most skilful trainers are secured. The
poor man fighting with difficulties may get the better edu-
cation for the great main of life; but through the narrow
straits of the examination-room the son of the rich man,
unless his industry has been sapped by wealth, is often borne
along in triumph. "As many a poor man has worked his
passage over the sea to some settlement where a freer and
a larger life awaited him, so by a servitorship has many a
man worked his way from a life of low drudgery to some high
and honourable calling. The student-servant is no longer to
be found at Oxford. But the poor student who, in his eager-
* An Enquiry into ihe Present State of Polite Learning in Europe^
Chap. 13.
196 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
ness to fight his way by his learning, is ready for any duty,
however humble it may be, finds one way barred to him that
was open to the men of former generations. " ^ I knew a young
man who supported himself and his widowed mother by the
humblest kind of work in a large factory. By great self-denial
he had got together a well-selected library of five or six hun-
dred volumes. In philosophy his knowledge was surprisingly
great, considering the difficulties against which all his life he
had struggled. In some parts of the Natural Sciences he was
deeply interested. When, on a visit to Oxford, he was taken
into one of the lecture-rooms at the Museum, he sat down on
a bench, and looking about him, after a pause said that there
was no sacrifice that he would not make could he sit there as
a learner. "How gladly," he exclaimed, "would I sweep
out these rooms, if I could thereby get a right to sit on these
benches." There was indeed no honest service that he would
not cheerfully have rendered could he thereby have supported
himself as an Oxford student. "Gladly wolde he leame."
Inquiry was made on all sides, but with all the wealth of the
University there was no opening for such a man.
At Yale I was told of a fund of money which, not many
years ago, had been placed in the hands of one of the Pro-
fessors by a wealthy man, as a memorial to a son who had died
in his undergraduate days. It was to be used in the relief of
needy but meritorious students. The Professor sent for one
of the most promising of his men, an Irishman and a Roman
Catholic, who was, he knew, very poor. The young man,
when assistance was offered him, nobly replied that there were
others who stood in greater need than he did, for he had regu-
^ I am quoting a book which I published in 1878 under the title of Dr,
yohnson : His Friends and His Critics, p. 30.
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 197
lar employment, — enough to make the two ends meet. He
rose every morning at four o'clock, and went to a newspaper
office, where he was engaged in the delivery of the papers.
The Professor pointed out to him that such work as this
lessened his strength for his studies, and so at last he induced
him to take the money. At the end of his University course,
he came out the first man of his year. The same Professor,
who had spent part of the summer vacation in an hotel on the
mountains, told me that one morning rising early he came
across a youth who was the night-watchman and shoe-black of
the house. Falling into talk with him, he learnt that he was
a student of one of the Western colleges. On being asked
for the first line of the /Eneid, he readily gave it. The first
line of the Iliad he did not know, for as yet in his Greek he
had not gone beyond the New Testament. In his night-watch
he had his hourly rounds to make, one or two furnaces to look
after; in the morning he had the shoes to clean. In the
intervals of work he had time enough left for the vacation task
which had been set his class — the perusal of four novels, two
of which were Esmond and Dombey and Son, At the Chicago
Exhibition my friend the Professor found out that a Bath-
chairman whom he employed was a university student. An-
other Yale Professor told me that in his undergraduate days
"ability and good-fellowship were the qualities which did
most to make a student generally popular. There was a small
set of poor men, distinguished by their ability, into which the
richest men would have been proud to enter." At the pre-
sent time I fear that both at Yale and Harvard excellence in
athletic sports would outweigh with many of these men even
ability and good-fellowship.
Out of regard to the convenience of the poor students, the
198 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Long Vacation down to the year 1869 came in the winter.
"The longest vacation," wrote Ticknor, in 1825, "should
happen in the hot season, when insubordination and miscon-
duct are now most frequent, partly from the indolence pro-
duced by the season. There is a reason against this, I know,
— the poverty of many students who keep school for a part of
their subsistence."^ It was in the winter that the children
attended school. In the summer they were, no doubt, em-
ployed on the farms. Even at the present day, in New Eng-
land, the village schools are commonly closed from about the
middle of June to the middle of September. A Plan for the
Distribution of the Tutors^ Work and Service^ drawn up in
1766, gives a curious insight not only into the poverty of some
of the students, but into a mode of life altogether different
from that which now prevails. It was proposed "that, to
prevent the great inconvenience attending some of the scholars
going home at one time and some at another, in the spring
and fall, to procure clothing, there shall be a short vacation in
the spring and fall." ^ The clothing which they went to pro-
cure no doubt had been spun and woven on their fathers*
farms.
By the substitution in recent years of the summer for the
winter as the time of the Long Vacation, the poor but indus-
trious student has gained more than he has lost. I was one
day taken by a friend into a large hotel on the southern coast
of Cape Cod where the maid-servants and the waiters were
mostly school-teachers or university students. Many of the
women belonged to one of the Colleges where women-
students are admitted, and four of the waiters were Harvard
undergraduates. The shoeblack of the year before had
* Life of George Ticknor ^ I. 358. ^ Quincy's Harvard^ II. 498.
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 199
•
been a medical student from New York. This season he
had earned his promotion, and was now the bath-room stew-
ard. These young people did their work well, my friend
told me, and were courteously treated by the guests. They
would not, he added, have tamely submitted to rudeness.
They all took their meals together, apart from a lower class
of servants who did the rough work of the kitchen and scul-
lery. An American lady told me that sometimes at a winter
dance in Cambridge or Boston a girl would meet among the
guests a Harvard undergraduate who had been a waiter in
the hotel where she had passed the summer. I asked her
what reception he would have. It depended, she said, on
the character of the girl. Most, having sense and good feeling
enough to respect him for his courage in earning his living,
would be pleased; some few would be offended.
When I was staying in a seaside village, I four times took
a drive in a hired carriage. One day my driver was an
undergraduate home for the vacation, and another day a youth
who next term was to enter college. On the third day I was
driven by a man who worked in a large shoe-factory, and who
was taking a week's holiday. His uncle, he said, had been a
Senator of Massachusetts. One of his nephews had just entered
Brown University, and he hoped in time to send his own son
there also. With one of my companions, who was a Harvard
Professor, he discussed the advantages and disadvantages of
some of the New England Universities.
In the Harvard Crimson^ as the Long Vacation was draw-
ing near, there appeared from time to time advertisements by
business firms offering employment, such as the following : —
" Houghton, Mifflin and Co. are desirous of corresponding
with College men who like employment through the summer."
200 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
" A large manufacturing house wishes a brainy [sic] young
man for its office."
Students, moreover, who were already acting as agents, put
forth their advertisements.
" Yale's disadvantages. — She has not eight quick sail or rail-and-
water routes to the World's Fair, as I have. Stop at Washington, D.C.,
Niagara Falls, White Mts. 1 13.60 saved. Tickets to all points West.
Please call before I leave, June 20."
"HOTEL SORRENTO, Sorrento, Me. — First-class in every re-
spect — has a beautiful location, on Frenchman's Bay, seven miles from
Bar Harbor. SPECIAL RATES for July. Charles V. Carter, Mang.
Illustrated pamphlet and terms of . . . " ^
The Governing Body of Harvard, in their desire to bring
the University within the reach of poor scholars, seven years
ago opened " an Employment Bureau in the University Ofl&ce.
All needy students are encouraged to seek through this
agency for opportunities to earn money. As the Bureau
extends its services to those who are about to take degrees
in Arts and Sciences, and as it is able to secure permanent
positions for the great majority of those who are graduated
with good standing, men of small means feel more confidence
in their future, and less dread of being unable to repay loans
and advances to those who are encouraging them in securing
a College education." ^
There are usually about two hundred names on the books of
the Bureau. From the letters of the poor students I have
extracted the following account of the ways by which money
is earned : —
"Teaching a private school and giving lessons in German to students in
the CoUege."
^ I have suppressed the names and addresses of these two advertisers.
^ Students^ Expenses, p. 5.
THE NE^^V YO^ K
PDBLIC 1 RAFv
ASTOR, LEN-^.X A NO
TILDEN FOU. ■:.■"), i . .:^
R
-A
n. HARVARD COLLEGE. 201
** Officiating in a small congregation."
** Lecturing and writing for papers."
" Waiting on table, ^ teaching night-school, tutoring, singing, and by at
least a dozen other business schemes."
" Tending the furnaces in the house where I roomed."
" Gardening."
" Index-making."
** Laboratory assistant."
" Clerk in a summer hoteL"
" Qerk in Memorial Hall."
" Porter in a summer hotel."
" Publishing ndtes, waiting on tables, t3rpe-writing, outside jobs, as post-
ing bills, copying, etc."
** Odd jobs, publishing placards, advertising scheme, teaching school,
publishing books."
The notes which one of these students published were no
doubt those which he had taken down in the lecture room.
The Dean of the College in his Report for 189 2.-93, speaking
of that temptation which besets lazy students everywhere to
do no work until just before an examination, says : " If they
were then left to themselves, they might learn the consequence
of idleness and teach it to their successors; but, unhappily,
their demands have created a supply of wage-earners who sell
notes, make a careful study of the questions likely to occur
and recur in large elementary courses, hold, on the night
before an examination, 'seminars* in which they review, at
one, two, or three dollars a ticket, the work of a half-year,
and in general abet idle students in shirking their daily duty."
At Harvard, as at Oxford and Cambridge, the orthodox race
of "crammers" or "coaches" flourishes, composed entirely of
graduates who have acquired a great dexterity in driving know-
ledge into heads not always intended by nature to receive it.
^ In America the servant waits on table; in England, at table.
202 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
The following advertisement I cut out of the Harvard Crim-
son : —
" History J2 Review, — The course will be reviewed in Manter [a
Block of Rooms] at 2 to-day as follows: English History from 1760 to
1837, *t 2 p.m.; English History from 1837, ^^'^ Continental History at
7.15 p.m. Fee for each review, $4 [i6j. 4^.]. Gentlemen will confer a
favour by not opening accounts for reviews."
In the last paragraph it is delicately implied that the four
dollars must be paid before the "review" begins. With such
men as these the Dean does not attempt to deal. Indeed, he
admits that in certain cases they have their use. The under-
graduates who traffic in notes he would suppress so far as he
can. " Students engaged in illegitimate coaching," he says,
" should receive no scholarship or other pecuniary aid; for,
however studious they may be, however resolute in educating
themselves, however temperate in their private life, they are
— directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously —
enemies to College learning. College morality, and College
honour."^
One of the poor students, describing his trials as a Fresh-
man, says : " Part of this year I was very poor. My washing
I did myself. About mid-year I was so short of money that
for nearly two months I ate but one or two meals a day. This
was the hardest period of my course, but rather incited than
discouraged me." In spite of all he went through, he ends
by saying: "My health, when I entered, was very poor. I
left College strong in body, better than at any time for ten
years. I have no hesitation in saying that an economical
student can get through honourably and happily for three
hundred dollars a year [;£6 1.6.0]."^ "A poor student's
^ Annual Reports t 1892-93, p. 103. ^ Students* Expenses, p. 43.
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 203
berth," writes another man, "is not exactly a bed of roses, but
I know that a sober-minded, industrious man can study in
Harvard College, and not only exist, but have an enjoyable
time on four hundred dollars a year [;^8i.i5.o]." ^ A third
writer says: "A bright scholar or a shrewd business fellow
can entirely pay his expenses at Harvard ; but it is no place
for a poor scholar or a lazy man." *
There is a danger lest, in this sharp struggle for existence
in a university, somewhat too much of " the shrewd business
fellow " may be brought out in a youth's character. Almost all
these ways of earning money are honourable; but the adver-
tising scheme is unworthy of a student. I do not like the puff
of the young man who heads his advertisement, "Yale's Dis-
advantages." Such a heading would, no doubt, catch the eye
of a Harvard man; but it would little please him to know
that in his own University a race of young Barnums is grow-
ing up.
In the Boston Sunday Globe for December 31, 1893, "a
Poor Student at Harvard" published his Memoirs. He is
apparently still at College, so that a supplementary chapter
will some day have to be added. His father works in a fac-
tory, earning about nine dollars (;^i.i6.9) a week. The
son entered Harvard with a capital of twenty-seven dollars
(;^5.io.3), all that was left over, after he had paid his debts,
of his earnings in the summer as a waiter in a mountain hotel.
He hired a room thirteen feet long by seven wide. At first
he spent on his food no more than one dollar and fifteen
cents a week (4S.io^d.). "I remembered," he writes, "how
Garfield had lived for thirty- three cents [is.4^d.] a week on
milk. I felt sure if he could, I could." He soon found that
^ Student^ Expenses^ p. 22. * lb, p. 26.
204 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
his health was sinking under the spare diet, and that he was
becoming unfit for work. He took a better dinner, and so
raised his expenditure to two dollars and sixty-five cents a
week [los. lojd.]. " It kept me well; only I would get awfully
hungry every night at about ten o'clock. I used to drink
water for that." He at once set about earning money, and
before long was made one of the waiters at the Foxcroft Club.
He suffered from the humiliation of his position. "I felt
that there was a sort of feeling against me by many, and it
grated against my pride to be at the absolute mercy of some
of the men there. I have always thought that some knew just
how I felt, and rather added to my discomfort in all the ways
they could." He does not, however, give any instance of
insolence or unkindness. A man in such a position as his
is apt to see "the proud man's contumely " even where there
is none. He was too poor to pay for a laundress, and had to
keep his soiled linen till Thanksgiving Day, when he took it
home and had it washed there. When his clean clothes came
to an end he wore a jersey. "This, of course, caused re-
marks, which I felt very deeply, but I went on my way with a
heightened colour, but still with a feeling that I was doing
what was right."
In his vacations he got work as a druggist's assistant, as
head-waiter, and afterwards as manager in a summer hotel,
and as bookkeeper in a shoe-factory. He and one of his
comrades were engaged one summer by a firm of publishers
to sell books. " We were given a large city several hundred
miles away. We started in high feather; we walked and
tramped the streets for a week, and I never sold one. My
partner sold three, but two days later they all countermanded
their orders. That was the last straw, — we quit." It was, I
XL HARVARD COLLEGE. 205
suspected, an undergraduate who, one day when I was sitting
under the veranda of a house at a seaside village on Cape
Cod, asked me to buy, first some books and then some scents.
He asked but once, and went away the moment I refused.
By his looks and his gentle manners, he seemed far too good
for so bad a trade. A man can pay too dearly even for a
university education. The " Poor Student " in term-time got
various kinds of employment. He canvassed for more than
one election; he worked in a lawyer's office; he read proofs,
and he was an author's copyist. This last piece of work
extended into the vacation. In term-time he used to begin
work with the author at ten at night, and kept on at it till an
hour and a half after midnight; all through the vacation he
was employed from twelve to fifteen hours a day. When this
heavy task came to an end he got an engagement on a news-
paper as the Harvard correspondent. "It was the busiest
time of the year. Two things had to be followed daily, — base-
ball and rowing. It really took all my day from three in the
afternoon. It was just the time of the year when I needed
every hour on my College work. The examinations were at
hand. But there was no help for it." He has gone through
the main part of the struggle, he says, and now makes enough
money to be able to indulge in a few comforts. He has no
longer to try to endure a New England winter in a fireless
room. When the thermometer fell below zero he had been
forced to order a supply of coal. He laments that his studies
have suffered greatly from the need that he has always been
under to give so much of his strength and time to earning
his bread. "But," he adds, "I have more than ten times
overbalanced that by the practical knowledge that comes
only by actual personal experience. When I get through
206 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Harvard there'll be no such thing as my 'going out into the
world/"
Many of the wealthy students are ready enough to help their
needy comrades. "Rich men," wrote the Dean of the Col-
lege in 1892, "even rich undergraduates, answer cheerfully a
call for money; but generosity of this sort tends to pauperize
such students as take kindly to pauperizing. Something has
been accomplished by a sort of floating loan-fund. Money
for the student is put into the hands of the Dean, who gives
the student to understand that, as soon as it is returned, it
will be lent to some other student equally in need. The
obligation thus involved is thought to be more effective than
a written promise to pay, which seems of itself a sort of quid
pro guo.^* ^
It is not only on his earnings that the poor scholar has to
depend. Just as we have in Oxford and Cambridge endow-
ments for scholarships and exhibitions, so Harvard is in pos-
session of large funds for distribution as "money-aids to
students. Merit and need are the elements which determine
distribution."^ No money is given, as it is so abundantly
given in the great English Universities, to merit alone, how-
ever great it may be. The merit of the wealthy student is at
Harvard rewarded only by honour; but even honour will not
always stir him up. " It is an interesting inquiry, " writes the
President, " how the College can supply the rich young man
with an appropriate stimulus to do his best. The problem,
however, is one which does not vex Harvard College alone ;
it has long vexed rich parents and civilized society." ' When
1 Annual Reports^ 1891-92, p. 88.
2 Harvard University^ by F. Bolles, p. 7.
^ Annual Reports, 1891-92, p. 21.
%
XI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 207
Lord Southampton asked Bishop Watson of Llandaff, "how
he was to bring up his son so as to make him get forward in
the world, ' I know of but one way,' replied the Bishop; * give
him parts and poverty. ' * Well, then, ' replied Lord Southamp-
ton, * if God has given him parts, I will manage as to the
poverty. * " ^ Poverty at Harvard, however great, without at
all events some parts, is not looked upon as a title to relief.
Those only are to be helped who are worthy of receiving a
liberal education. In 1887 about fifty thousand dollars
(jQiOy22S) were thus distributed; by 1893 the fund had in-
creased to eighty-nine thousand (jQi^,2oo.) By such leaps
and bounds does munificence advance in the United States.
Even this large sum can scarcely suffice for all the demands
of studious poverty. "One-half the students," writes a Har-
vard Instructor in Philosophy, "must be conceived as very
poor, brought to College by intellectual and practical ambi-
tion, working hard at their books and for their maintenance,
and without time or money for much recreation, exercise, or
society. This class, from which the best scholars generally
come, is dubbed * the grinds. ' " ^ They are like the men whom
Arthur Pendennis despised, who every afternoon were to be
seen in their hob-nailed shoes trudging along the Trump ing-
ton Road.
Of the well-to-do students the expenses seem to be higher
even than at Oxford. How much they have risen in the last
fifty years is shown by the following passage in the Life of
Charles Sumner.^ " His College bills did not exceed the
average bills of his Class. Including instruction, board in
commons, rent and charge of room, fuel, use of class-books
1 H. C. Robinson's Diary, I. 337.
3 Educational Review, April, 1894, p. 322. ' Vol. I., p. 53.
208 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap. xi.
and other fees, they amounted for the four years to less than
eight hundred dollars [;^i63], which is now quite a mode-
rate expenditure for a single year." An undergraduate may
still live in great comfort at Oxford on two hundred pounds
a year, even though out of this sum he has to defray his out-
lay on clothes, amusements, and travelling.
CHAPTER XII.
From a College to a University. — George Ticknor. — Influence of Ger-
many. — Oxford G)lleges Forty Years Ago. — Provincialism. — Founda-
tion of New Schools at Harvard. — Duties of Professors.
THOUGH Harvard College had from the beginning been
a university, in that it was a place where the arts and
sciences were studied and where degrees were conferred, yet
it was a university after the later English, and not after the
continental manner. It did not freely impart knowledge to all
who sought it in all the great departments of learning. It
bound down the students to a certain limited course ; it con-
fined them to a four years* track to be beaten by all alike.
Along this track all moved at the same pace — the quick kept
back by the slow, the hard workers by the idlers. There was
not that choice between classics and mathematics which, even
under the early examination schemes at Oxford, was allowed
to a certain extent ; neither was there that separation made
between passmen and classmen^ in the college lectures by
which the abler students were carried over a far wider field.
Everywhere there was a dead level, a dreary uniformity. Down
to the year 1767 each tutor had taught every subject to the
Class assigned to him, throughout the whole course. In
that year a change was made, and henceforth Greek, Latin,
1 Classmen or Honours-men at Oxford correspond to those who at Har-
vard take their degree cum laude, magna cum laude, summa cum laude,
P 209
210 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
philosophy and mathematics were assigned each to a single
teacher.* The tutors were no doubt for the most part sound
scholars of the old narrow school — much the same kind of
men as the masters of the English grammar schools and the
Fellows of the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges. Among them,
however, had never risen a Bentley or a Porson, not even a
Markland or a Parr, to set and to keep the standard of scholar-
ship high. Greek must have been but little studied, for, accord-
ing to Ticknor, in the early years of the present century, " a
copy of Euripides in the original could not be bought at any
bookseller's shop in New England." ' He had been educated
at Dartmouth College — Daniel Webster's College. " It is.
Sir, a small College ; and yet there are those who love it," said
that great advocate, with his eyes full of tears, when upholding
its charter before the Supreme Court. Ticknor had afterwards
studied privately under a good scholar, an Englishman, who
had been taught by Dr. Parr. On leaving him, he entered a
lawyer's office, but his heart was not in his work. In the year
1 8 14, when he was two and twenty, he chanced to read a
defence of the University of Gottingen that had been written
"against the ill-intentions of Jerome Bonaparte." He had
never before known the true nature of a university. "My
•astonishment at these revelations," he writes, " was increased
by an account of its library, given by an Englishman who had
been there. I was sure that I should like to study at such a
university, but it was in vain that I endeavoured to get further
knowledge upon the subject. I would gladly have prepared
for it by learning German, but there was no one in Boston who
could teach me. Nor was it possible to get books. I bor-
rowed a Meidinger's Grammar, French and German, from my
1 Quincy's Harvard, II. 132. 2 ^ifg of ^. jj^ PrescoU, p. 8.
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 211
friend, Mr. Everett, and sent to New Hampshire, where I
knew there was a German Dictionary, and procured it. I also
obtained a copy of Goethe's Werther (through Mr. Shaw's
connivance) from amongst Mr. J. Q. Adams's books deposited
by him, on going to Europe, in the Athenaeum." ^ Neverthe-
less, in all this dearth of Greek and German books Boston was
known as " The Literary Emporium." ' Judge Story, writing
of Harvard as he had known it in the last years of the eigh-
teenth century, says ; " The intercourse between us and foreign
countries was infrequent ; and except to English literature and
science, I might almost say, we had no means of access. Even
in respect to them we had little more than a semi-annual
importation of the most common works. Two ships only plied
as regular packets between Boston and London, one in the
spring and the other in the autumn, and their arrival was an
era in our college life." • Ticknor's father, a well-to-do Boston
grocer, who, like Ticknor himself, had passed through Dart-
mouth College and had a respect for learning, allowed his son
to give up the law and to go and study at Gottingen.
It was a great day in the history of Harvard when this young
Bostonian set out to explore a German university. On Novem-
ber lo, 1815, he wrote to his father from Gottingen of his
Greek tutor. Dr. Schultze : " Every day I am filled with new
astonishment at the variety and accuracy, the minuteness and
readiness, of his learning. Every day I feel anew, under the
oppressive weight of his admirable acquirements, what a morti-
fying distance there is between a European and an American
^ Life of George Ticknor ^ I. If.
^ At all events, a few years later it was frequently so called. Life of
H. W. Longfellow, I. 37.
» Life of Joseph Story ^ I. 48.
A
212 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
scholar ! We do not yet know what a Greek scholar is ; we do
not even know the process by which a man is to be made one.
Dr. Schultze is hardly older than I am. It never entered into
my imagination to conceive that any expense of time or talent
could make a man so accomplished in this forgotten language
as he is." ^ For the first time in his life, something beyond a
mere collection of books, a library fit for scholars was opened
to the young American. He had, moreover, at his service a
large staif of able and learned Professors. " At least seventy
or eighty different courses of lectures," he wrote, " are going on
at the same time." Some of the Professors were poor enough,
for the miseries caused by the great wars still overhung the
land. One of them told him " that when Germany was thus
impoverished, if a Professor at Jena appeared in his lecture-
room with a new waistcoat, the students applauded him;
being asked what occurred if a new coat made its appearance,
he exclaimed : * Gott bewahre ! such a thing never hap-
pened.* " ^ Ticknor was struck with " the accuracy with which
time is measured and sold by the Professors. Every clock that
strikes is the signal for four or five lectures to begin and four
or five others to close. In the intervals you may go into the
streets and find they are silent and empty ; but the bell has
hardly told the hour before they are filled with students, with
their portfolios under their arms, hastening from the feet of one
Gamaliel to those of another — generally running in order to
save time, and often without a hat. As soon as they reach the
room they take their places and prepare their pens and paper.
The Professor comes in almost immediately, and from that
time till he goes out the sound of his disciples taking notes
does not for an instant cease." *
1 Life of Ticknor, I. 73. 2 7J. j. 280. » lb, 1. 82.
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE, 213
Ticknor had been studying at Gottingen little more than a
year when he received from Harvard the offer of the Smith
Professorship of the French and Spanish Languages and Litera-
ture, and the College Professorship of the Belles-Lettres.^ He
was to stay on in Europe for some time longer to complete his
education. He stayed four years in all, studying in Germany,
France, Italy, and Spain, One lesson the future Professor
learned in a talk with Goethe, on whom he called when passing
through Weimar. " Once Goethe's genius kindled, and in spite
of himself he grew almost fervent as he deplored the want of
extemporary eloquence in Germany, and said that the English
is kept a much more living language by its influence. * Here,'
he said, * we have no eloquence — our preaching is a monoto-
nous, middling declamation — public debate we have not at
all, and if a little inspiration sometimes comes to us in our
lecture-rooms, it is out of place, for eloquence does not teach.' " '
Ticknor was but eight and twenty when he returned to America,
and entered on his new duties at Harvard. On August lo,
1 819, he delivered his opening address in the Old Church of
Cambridge before " a cultivated audience " which came together
"to listen to the utterance of the ripest scholarship America
could then boast"* These are the words of Ticknor's bio-
grapher, George Hillard, himself no mean scholar. America
surely can look back with some complacency on the advance
she has made in learning since those days.
Ticknor, though he was by far the most important, was not the
first student sent from the United States to qualify himself for
a Professor's chair. In 1802, Benjamin Silliman at the age of
twenty-two had been appointed Professor of Chemistry and
Geology at Yale. Of neither science had he any knowledge,
^Life of Ticknor^ 1. 116, 321. ^3, 1. 114. *Ib. I. 320.
214 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
but he had distinguished himself in his mathematical studies.
Such appointments are not unknown in the history of English
Universities. Last century Watson, afterwards Bishop of Llan-
daff, was appointed to the Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge.
He was as ignorant of the science as young SilHman. Never-
theless, of his Chemical Essays Sir Humphry Davy said that
" he could scarcely imagine a time in which they would be
superannuated."^ From the Chair of Chemistry he was trans-
ferred to the Chair of Divinity, of which he knew no more
than an ordinary parson — that is to say, very Httle. By his
industry, however, he filled the post not without distinction.
In the same University seventy-six years ago, Adam Sedgwick
was made Professor of Geology, though he was as ignorant of
that science as Watson had been of Chemistry. He, too, justified
the appointment. In like manner in modem days Oxford has
seen a retired naval captain appointed to a Professorship of
History over the heads of Dr. Stubbs, Mr. Freeman, Mr.
Froude, Mr. Church, and Mr. Pearson. No doubt it was
thought that with time he would add to his first class and his
orthodoxy a competent knowledge of the subject which he
was advanced to teach. This, I believe, he has succeeded in
doing. The late Professor of Arabic in Oxford, who had been
appointed with the same ignorance and the same expectation,
never took the trouble to dispel the one and to satisfy the other.
Silliman made but a short stay in Europe. For the winter
session he studied in the University of Edinburgh. On his
return to America he wrote : " A much higher standard of
excellence than I had before seen was presented to me, espe-
cially in Edinburgh." ^
^De Quincey's Works, II. io6.
^Life of Benjamin Silliman, I. 195.
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 215
In 1825, six years after Ticknor entered on his duties at
Harvard, Longfellow graduated at Bowdoin College — the
Alma Mater not only of him but of Hawthorne. It so hap-
pened that at the Commencement at which he took his degree,
the Board of Trustees voted to found a Chair of Modem Lan-
guages. The young Bachelor of Arts, who was but eighteen,
had, it is said, in his examination pleased one of the Trustees
by his elegant translation of an Ode of Horace. An informal
proposal was made by the Board to his father that the youth
" should visit Europe, for the purpose of fitting himself for his
position, with the understanding that on his return he should be
appointed to the Professorship." ^ Accordingly, he spent three
years in France, Spain, Italy, and Germany. Like Ticknor, he
studied in Gottingen. On his return at the age of two and
twenty he received the appointment. Five years later, on
Ticknor's resignation, he was offered his Professorship at Har-
vard; but it was suggested to him by the President that he
would do well " to reside in Europe, at his own expense, a year
or eighteen months for the purpose of a more perfect attain-
ment of the German." For eighteen months he studied the
Northern languages in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, and Hol-
land, and on his return at the age of twenty-nine was made
Professor.*
It was " with the vision of a real University, where all the
great divisions of human knowledge should be duly repre-
sented and taught," that Ticknor "returned fresh from a two
years* residence at Gottingen."' He was before his time,
and he saw the vision "fade into the light of common day."
"When I came home from Europe," he writes, "not having
1 Life ofH. W. Longfellow, I. 68. « lb. L 203, 243.
» Life of G. Ticknor, II. 422.
216 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
been educated at Cambridge [Massachusetts], and having
always looked upon it with great veneration, I had no misgiv-
ings about the wisdom of the organization and management of
the College there." * He soon discovered how great were the
changes which were needed in Harvard. He set about one
of the hardest of tasks that a young man can take upon him-
self — to teach teachers, to instruct instructors, to convince a
University that its time-honoured system needs a thorough
reform. The President was against him; almost all the Pro-
fessors were against him ; even the students were against him.
The President was Kirkland, whom Lowell has so pleasantly
described. "He was a man of genius, but of genius that
evaded utilization. . . . There was that in the soft and
rounded (I had almost said melting) outlines of his face
which reminded one of Chaucer. . . . He was one of those
misplaced persons whose misfortune it is that their lives over-
lap two distinct eras, and are already so impregnated with one
that they can never be in healthy sympathy with the other." ^
Ticknor appealed to the Corporation, who consulted the whole
body of teachers about his proposals. A large majority of
them steadily resisted any change of importance.' Among
the Professors was Edward Everett, "whose coming from
Germany," Emerson said, "was an immediate and profound
influence in New England education."* It does not appear,
however, that he supported Ticknor in his great reformation.
Some years later, when he was President of the College, " he
threw his weight against the system." *
1 Life of G. Ticknor, I. 354.
* Literary Essays, by J. R. Lowell, cd. 1890, 1. 83.
■ Life of Ticknor, I. 356.
* Higher Education, etc., p. 215.
* Annual Reports, 1883-84, p. 16.
xn. HARVARD COLLEGE. 217
In July, 1823, nine men, of whom Judge Story was one,
met at Ticknor's house to consider what steps should be taken
to reform Harvard. The faults which he found with the sys-
tem he stated both in a paper which he laid before them, and
also in a pamphlet which he subsequently published. "All
our Colleges," he said, "have been long considered merely
places for obtaining a degree of Bachelor of Arts, to serve as
a means and certificate whereon to build the future plans and
purposes of life." No change had been made in the old
system by which every student was taught by every tutor,
receiving exactly the same instruction, neither more nor less,
as the rest of his classmates. But at Harvard "there are
now," he continues, "twenty or more teachers and three
hundred students, and yet the division into Classes remains
exactly the same, and every student is obliged to pass through
the hands of nearly or quite every instructor. The recita-
tions [the lectures of an Oxford College] become mere enu-
merations. The most that an instructor now undertakes is to
ascertain, from day to day, whether the young men who are
assembled in his presence have probably studied the lesson pre-
scribed to them. . . . We are neither an University — which
we call ourselves — nor a respectable High School, which we
ought to be. . . . As many years are given to the great
work of education here as are given in Europe, and it costs
more money with us to be very imperfectly educated than it
does to enjoy the great advantages of some of the best univer-
sities on the Continent. And yet who in this country, by
means here offered him, has been enabled to make himself a
good Greek scholar? Who has been taught thoroughly to
read/ write, and speak I^tin? " ^ Nearly half a century later,
1 Life of G, Ticknar, I. 356-363.
218 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
as one of the Trustees of the Zoological Museum at Harvard,
Ticknor had to address a Committee of the Legislature of
Massachusetts. Speaking of the great work done by Professor
Agassiz in the University, he said that by making Natural
Science "move," he had made languages, history, and liter-
ature follow. " Natural Science has tended to open Harvard
College; to make it a free University, accessible to all,
whether they desire to receive instruction in one branch or
in many."*
The whole work of the College was not, however, confined
to "recitations" at the time when Ticknor was trying to
introduce his reforms. Professor Peabody writing of those
days says: "The recitations were mere hearings of lessons,
without comment or collateral illustrations. The leading
feature of the College was the rich provision made for
courses of lectures. It may be doubted whether so many
lecturers of an exceptionally high order have ever, at any one
time, been brought together in the service of an American
College. By far the largest part of our actual instruction was
that of the lecture-room, where it was our custom to take
copious notes, which were afterwards written out in full. The
amount of study and actual attainment was, I think, much
greater with the best scholars of each class, much less with
those of a lower grade than now. The really good scholar
gave himself wholly to his work. He had no distractions, no
outside society, no newspapers. Consequently there remained
for him nothing but hard study; and there were some in every
class whose hours of study were not less than sixty a week." *
Ticknor, it must be remembered, wrote as a young man, with
1 Life o/G. Ticknor, II. 423.
* Reminiscences of Harvard College^ p. 202.
xn. HARVARD COLLEGE. 219
his mind full of the evils which thwarted him at every step;
Professor Peabody as an aged man, complacently surveying a
happy and a studious youth. What he tells us of the study of
German shows how limited was the range of knowledge in
New England. It was in the year 1825 that he joined the
first German class ever formed in Harvard. " We were looked
upon with very much the amazement with which a class in
some obscure tribal dialect of the remote Orient would be
now regarded. There were no German books in the book-
stores. A friend gave me a copy of Schiller's WalUnsteiiiy
which I read as soon as I was able to do so, and then passed
it from hand to hand among those who could obtain nothing
else to read."^
In many respects a member of one of the smaller Oxford
Colleges forty years ago was quite as ill-provided with instruc-
tion as a Harvard undergraduate. In my own College, for
instance, during the greater part of my residence, there were
but three tutors, among whom were divided all the depart-
ments of learning that were taught. The Master, it is true,
every Sunday lectured on the Epistles of St. Paul. Of the
three, one taught mathematics, and mathematics alone. Happy
was the youth who had a taste for that science, as he met with
all the encouragement that can be given by a most able teacher.
The other two took between them the rest of the sciences that
were recognized in the College — Latin, Greek, metaphysics,
ethics, logic, ancient history, and divinity. One of them was
a sound, old-fashioned scholar, but a somewhat ponderous
teacher; the other was a man of amiable character, but of
very moderate attainments. In later years he one day mod-
estly owned to me that he had never cared for books. For-
1 Reminiscences of Harvard College^ p. 117.
220 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
tunately for us, we were able to obtain a certain amount of
instruction outside the College. The end was at length com-
ing to that long and shameful succession of University Pro-
fessors who, to quote Gibbon's words, "well remembered that
they had a salary to receive, and only forgot that they had a
duty to perform." Some still survived — one or two even
now are extant — men who, if they did anything, did noth-
ing more than year after year offer to read aloud the same
course of lectures. An ardent and ingenuous youth of my
time, or a little earlier, attended the first lecture of the yearly
course of the Camden Professor of Ancient History, and
formed the whole audience. The venerable Professor sat
silent in his chair for some ten minutes; then addressing him,
he said : " Sir, it seems that you alone wish to hear my lect-
ure. Perhaps it will do you quite as much good if you take
it to your rooms and read it there to yourself; but if you
desire it, I will, as I am bound by the statutes of the Univer-
sity, deliver it orally." The youth politely assented to his
suggestion. He read it, found it pleasingly written, returned
it, but did not venture to form the audience for the second
lecture. To some of the Chairs younger men had been ap-
pointed. Mansell was lecturing on Aristotle, Jowett on Plato,
and Conington on Latin composition. Their lectures were
open to the undergraduates of every college. So many men
attended Conington' s lectures on Latin prose composition
that he ceased giving them. The College tutors, he said,
were throwing their work on him. It seems incredible that
less than forty years ago a course of public lectures in the
University of Oxford was brought to a close because it was so
largely attended. Conington, no doubt, was indignant at being
drawn away from his higher work as a scholar by the drudgery
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 221
of correcting twice a week some hundred exercises. That he
should be provided with an assistant professor did not seem
to have occurred to anybody's mind. Natural Science was at
this time just beginning to be recognized — crouching like a
second Cinderella among the scornful sister sciences. In my
first term I saw the foundation stone laid of the New Museum
by the Chancellor, the Earl of Derby. One of my college
friends was placed in the first class in the first examination
ever held in Natural Science. His high position had cost him
but a few months' study. I remember his telling us one even-
ing at dinner how that day in the Schools^ he had gone up
to an examiner and pointed out an error in the paper of
questions. The poor man nervously maintained that he was
right, and offered to show his authority. He produced some
learned work ; but, as my friend convinced him, he had alto-
gether misread it. Oxford, in many of the great branches of
learning, and in some respects in all, was indeed far distant in
those days from that " real university " of which Ticknor had a
vision. There is still not a little for her to do before it shall
be completely realized, but in the last forty years, much, very
much, has been done. How much, too, has been done in
Harvard !
It was in the spring of 182 1 that Ticknor, by an appeal to
the President, made his first attempt to transform the College.
By June, 1825, though he had failed to convince either him or a
large majority of the Professors, he had brought over the Cor-
poration and the Overseers to many of his views. They were
willing to do as much as perhaps it was wise to attempt. They
divided the College into departments, in which the under-
graduates were to be classified according to their proficiency ;
^The examination-rooms.
222 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
they allowed a limited choice of studies, and they admitted to
special studies students who had no intention of taking a
degree. ^ The reform failed, as reforms almost always do fail
when they are under the management of those who do not
wish well to their success. There are few bodies of men who
cling more to old ways and old customs than teachers, unless
perchance it be their pupils. The undergraduates — at all
events the dull and indolent majority — raised the standard of
revolt. They, it seemed, liked the good old system by which
quick and slow, well-taught and ill-taught, jogged along at the
same even pace. Their acts of disorder were so frequent
that in less than two years the old system was resumed to
nearly its full extent, everywhere but in the Department of
Modern Languages. There Ticknor, working his own scheme,
met with great success. He describes how in January, 1826,
fifty-five Freshmen entered for French, of whom forty-eight
were wholly ignorant of the language. The seven who knew
something of it he put into an advanced class by themselves ;
the rest he broke up into five alphabetical divisions. In
March he rearranged them all according to their proficiency.
By the end of the year " there were more than five hundred
pages between the highest and the lowest divisions, besides a
great difference in grammatical progress." Of the seven who
had the lead on entering, not a single one kept it. The system
succeeded, he maintained, because " the law was administered
according to its spirit and intent, by officers who approved it,
and it was, from this administration of it, felt by the students to
be useful, just, and beneficial." ^ Perhaps, after all, the acts of
disorder in the other departments were due more to the preju-
dices of the Professors than to the obstinacy of the pupils.
1 Life of G. Ticknor, I. 362. 2 lb. I. 367.
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 223
Ticknor*s biographer tells us that " he often dwelt with satis-
faction on the fact that, in the fifteen years during which he
was Professor, he was never obliged to apply to the College
Faculty on account of any misdemeanour in the recitation-
rooms under his charge, or in his lecture-room ; nor did he
ever send up the name of any young man for reproof." The
constant opposition which he encountered, whenever he tried
to realize his vision of a great university, at last wore out his
patience. "As long as I hoped to advance these changes,"
he wrote, " I continued attached to the College ; when I gave
up all hope I determined to resign." ^
Harvard was impeded in its progress, not only by that
inherited narrowness which is common to so many universities,
but also by an excessive provincialism unknown in England
and Germany. Between Oxford and Glasgow a close connec-
tion has existed for nearly two centuries. Adam Smith spent
six or seven years of his youth at Balliol College. When
Motley followed his countrymen to Gottingen, the Hanoverian
University, he had for his fellow-student that Prussian of Prus-
sians, Bismarck. But Harvard, so far from being the University
of the United States, was not even the University of New Eng-
land, and scarcely of Massachusetts. In 1831, B. R. Curtis,
writing to Ticknor from Northfield, in the northwest of that
State, about the causes of dissatisfaction with Harvard in that
part of the country, mentions as " the last, but far from least
cause, that it is the College of Boston and Salem, and not of
the Commonwealth." * Thirteen years later, in 1 844, Mr. D.
A. White, in an address to the Alumni, maintained that " Har-
vard is fast becoming simply a High School for a portion of
1 Life of G. Ticknor, I. 368, 400.
* Life ofB, R. CurHs, I. 50.
224 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
our youth of Boston and its vicinity." ^ Even at the present
time^ with all the width of its studies and the liberality of its
government, it has scarcely succeeded in becoming the great
National University. A writer in the Harvard Graduates^
Magazine for January, 1893,' says: "The frequent remark is
true, that Harvard is a Massachusetts and New England Col-
lege. Although the whole number of Harvard men [he is
speaking of graduates] is greater by 800 than the whole num-
ber of Yale men, yet in the Middle States Harvard has only
1303 and Yale 1986. In the State of New York Harvard has
976 graduates and Yale 141 7. In sixteen Western States
Harvard has 669 graduates and Yale 915.'' It was mainly
Harvard's Unitarianism which made the outlying States
unfriendly towards her. " The West is Orthodox. The States
of the West are filled with Congregational, Presbyterian, Bap-
tist, Methodist, and Episcopal Churches. To certain Western
men the word Unitarian means something almost as harrow-
ing as the word Indian meant to their children of forty years
ago. Harvard is no longer a Unitarian College, but the repu-
tation of Harvard as a Unitarian College still lingers." * Even
the attempt to free it from religious domination of any kind
gave a shock. In 1846, B. R, Curtis, who had been a Judge
in the Supreme Court of the United States, and who was a
member of the Corporation, wrote : " I am pained to learn,
even imperfectly as yet, how lax Mr. Quincy's administration
has been of late years, and how lazy many of the Faculty have
become. What do you think of a New England College where
most of the teachers do not go to church at all, and next to
none go in the afternoon ? " * This laziness was not due to Presi-
^ History of Higher Education in Massachusetts^ p. 82.
2 lb. p. 194. » lb, p. 200. * Life of B, R, Curtis, I. no.
\
XII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 225
dent Quincy's example, for " during the sixteen years of his
administration he was absent from prayers twice only, and then
he was detained in Court as a witness." ^ It was, as I have
shown, in the hope of overcoming all prejudices connected
with religion, that nearly forty years ago the attempt was made
to lop off the Divinity School from the University. It is, no
doubt, the same hope that so liberally opens the College
Chapel and the Lecture Room to divines of every denomina-
tion, and that last Commencement conferred the honorary
degree of Doctor of Divinity on the Bishop-elect of Massa-
chusetts and of Doctor of Laws on a Bishop of the Roman
Catholic Church. The prejudice happily seems to be weak-
ening. In 1886 only sixteen in every hundred students came
from the West and South; by 1892 the proportion of sixteen
had risen to over nineteen. Nevertheless, " Massachusetts
alone furnishes considerably more than half the total num-
ber." »
By the foundation of the School of Medicine in 1783, of
the School of Law in 181 7, and of the School of Theology in
18 19, much had been done towards preparing the way for a
real University. " In the estabUshment of our Schools of The-
ology, Law, and Medicine," writes Professor Goodwin, * " which
largely follow German precedents, we made the greatest depart-
ure from our English antecedents." It was not so much in
their first establishment as in their later modifications that
"these three professional Schools have," to use his words,
"fairly represented three of the Faculties of the German
1 An Historical Sketchy etc., p. 45.
^ Harvard Graduates* Magazine^ January, 1893, P* 248. There are
more than three hundred Catholic students in the University. lb, June,
1894, p. 531.
■ The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 22.
4
226 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap. 3CII.
University." The Faculty of Arts and Sciences had, moreover,
been greatly widened and strengthened. In the first fifty years
of the present century more than twenty professorships in
the different schools were established. The work generally
demanded of the Professors, new and old alike, was excessive
in amount and far too mechanical in quality. They sat behind
a schoolmaster's desk many more hours every week than they
filled a Professor's chair. While in term time their whole
strength was used up, not so much in lecturing as in hearing
lessons, their vacations were not long enough to allow of much
scholarly work. Longfellow, soon after his appointment, began
to complain bitterly of his position, as the following entries in
his Journal show: "March 6, 1839. I am weary and sick
to-night. College duties called me from my bed before day-
light I hate such over- early rising. The apparition of a tall
negro with a lanthorn in my bedroom at such a holy hour dis-
turbs the morning vision. Breakfast at six is intolerable."
"March 18, 1839. ^ ^^^^ three lectures a week and recita-
tions without number. Three days in the week I go into my
class-room between seven and eight, and come out between
three and four — with one hour's intermission." " September
21, 1839. My work here grows quite intolerable, and unless
they make some change I will leave them — with or without
anything to do. I will not consent to have my life crushed out
of me so." ^ He asked for an assistant in the French courses.
The Corporation in reply voted : " The Smith Professor ought
to continue to give all instruction required in the French
language." He refused to submit, and in the end was allowed
" a French instructor." ^
1 Life offf, W. Lon^fellaWf I. 315, 316, 332.
2 lb, pp. 330, 336.
CHAPTER XIII.
The Elective System. — American Schools. — The Study of Greek at Oxford
and Cambridge. — Examinations and Prizes. — The Graduate School.
THOUGH Ticknor's great scheme of reformation failed
for the time, yet the seeds were sown. Retrograde Presi-
dents might be appointed such as Jared Sparks, of whom Long-
fellow recorded in his Journal ; "June 20, 1849. Mr. Sparks's
inauguration. His Address very substantial, but retrograde.
He spoke of the College only, and not of the University." ^
Nevertheless, as time went on, and the men who had been bred
under the old system dropped off one by one, their successors,
many of whom had studied in Germany, revived the scheme
and slowly but steadily carried it forward into every depart-
ment. Harvard grew more and more unlike its mother Uni-
versity, showing, to use Professor Goodwin's words, that its
" chief reforms in teaching and in organization have been in-
spired from Gottingen and Berlin rather than from Cambridge
and Oxford." ^ It was at something more than the perfection
of Harvard as a place of instruction and education that the
young reformers aimed. They were bent on making it a great
seat of learning, where not only men should be taught all that
is already known, but where teachers and students should join
in advancing the boundaries of knowledge.
It was not till the year 1867 that the first great step was taken
1 Life ofH, W. Longfellow, II. 142.
* The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 22.
227
A
228 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
towards this noble end. " It was in that year," writes Professor
Goodwin, " that the elective system of studies was introduced.
It gave a great, even an unexpected, stimulus to freedom of
every kind both in teaching and in studying.^ " The Faculty,"
to quote President Eliot*s words, " set out upon a road which
they have steadily followed ever since." ' It was not till seven-
teen years later that the victory was won all along the line.
The faults of the old system are nowhere more clearly shown
than in the following anecdote told of Prescott's College days
by his biographer, George Ticknor. " Mathematics seemed to
constitute an insurmountable obstacle. He became desperate
and took to desperate remedies. He committed to memory,
with perfect exactness, the whole mathematical demonstration
required of his class, so as to be able to recite every syllable
and letter of it as they stood in the book, without comprehend-
ing the demonstration at all, or attaching any meaning to the
words and signs of which it was composed." At length " he
went to his Professor and told him the truth; not only his
ignorance of geometry, and his belief that he was incapable of
understanding a word of it, but the mode by which he had
seemed to comply with the requisitions of the recitation-
room, while, in fact, he evaded them ; adding, at the same
time, that as a proof of mere industry, he was willing to persevere
in committing the lessons to memory." The Professor was a
sensible man. " He merely exacted his attendance at the
regular hours, from which, in fact, he had no power to excuse
him ; but gave him to understand that he should not be troubled
further with the duty of reciting. The solemn farce, therefore,
of going to the exercise, book in hand, for several months,
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 6.
2 Annual Reports^ 1883-84, p. 21.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 229
without looking at the lesson, was continued, and Frescott was
always grateful to the kindly Professor for his forbearance/' ^
Charles Sumner had no more taste for the study than his
friend Prescott. " With downright frankness he said one day
in the recitation-room to the Professor who was pursuing him
with questions : ' I don't know, you know I don't pretend
to know, anything about mathematics.' Quickly, but good-
humouredly, the Professor replied, getting the laugh on
the pupil, ' Sumner ! Mathematics ! mathematics ! Don't you
know the difference? This is not mathematics. This is
physics: " 2
One of the most eminent mathematicians at Oxford told me,
that in the days when for the final examination for the Bach-
elor of Art's degree some mathematics were required, he had
before him an imdergraduate who professed to know the first
six books of Euclid. Whatever proposition he was called upon
to do, he at once without a moment's hesitation drew the fig-
ure ; then, leaning back in his chair and fixing his eyes on the
ceiling, he rapidly and without error went through the whole
demonstration. He had done all that was required of him,
and he took his degree ; nevertheless, it was as clear as day
that he was as ignorant of Euclid as he had been the day before
he was first made to take his stand on this huge tread-mill.
I remember how one of the friends of my undergraduate days
— a man who has since made a mark in literature — tri-
umphantly in the presence of two or three of us committed
his copy of Colenso's Arithmetic to the flames the moment he
had passed his examination.
Emerson's ideal university was a place "where attendance
at lectures should be voluntary, and where the students' conduct
1 Life of IV, H. Prescott^ ed. 1864, p. 21. * Life of Sumner , I. 47.
230 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
should be in the hands of the ordinary city police." ^ As re-
gards the attendance at lectures, the approach that has already
been made towards his ideal would perhaps have satisfied the
philosopher, at least for a time. Professor Goodwin, in his
Address to the Phi Beta in 1891, said : " It is perfectly possi-
ble (though I sincerely hope it is not probable) that some
whom we welcome here to-day for the first time have never
studied a word of Greek or Latin, a line of Mathematics, or a
page of Philosophy, Logic, or History, during their under-
graduate course. And yet these were almost the only studies
by which a student could gain admission to our Society fifty
years ago." ^
Before they entered the College they must have studied, at
all events, the elements of some of these subjects. But even in
the examination which they had to pass for admission ' a con-
siderable freedom of choice is allowed. Elementary Greek,
Latin, French, and German are among the subjects required in
the ordinary course ; but one of the ancient and one of the
modem languages may be omitted by those who pass in a
certain number of more advanced subjects. For instance, for
Greek and German might be substituted Physics and Chemistry,
and a higher knowledge in Latin, French, and Mathematics.
A candidate who has failed in some of the subjects, but who
has distinguished himself in others, might nevertheless be ad-
mitted, on the condition that he makes up his deficiencies
during his college course. Till he has done this he cannot
advance beyond the Sophomore Class.* The candidate, for
1 Educational Review for April, 1894, p. 317.
^ The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 5.
^ Matriculation is a word not apparently in use in Harvard.
* Catalogue^ p. 189.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE, 231
entrance into the Medical School^ must pass in English, Latin
(the translation at sight of simple Latin prose), Physics, Chem-
istry, and in any one of the following subjects : French, Ger-
man, Algebra (through quadratic equations). Plane Geometry,
Botany. Those who have taken a degree in any recognized
college are examined only in Chemistry.^
In the College the only " prescribed studies " — studies in
which all alike must share — are for Freshmen, Rhetoric and
English Composition (three times a week) ; Chemistry (lect-
ures, once a week first half-year) ; German or French for
those who do not present both for admission (three times a
week) ; for Sophomores and Juniors, Themes and Forensics.'
Seniors (the men in their last year) are left unconstrained.
With all this freedom of choice, from every student in every
year a certain amount of work is required. The studies are
divided into courses and half courses y according to the estimated
amount of work in each, and its value in fulfilling the require-
ments for the degree of A.B. or A.M." In each of his four
years a student must pass through four of these elective courses,
receiving instruction three hours a week in each. Instead of
one course he may take two half-courses.* Besides his " pre-
scribed studies," therefore, he attends lectures twelve hours a
week during thirty-six weeks of the year for four years in
succession.* He is not left free to rove from study to study
among the three hundred and thirty courses which, in their
1 Catalogue, p. 373.
* ** Twelve themes. — Lectures and discussions of themes. — Forensics.
— Lectures on argumentative composition. — A brief based on a master-
piece of argumentative composition. — Four forensics preceded by briefs.
— Discussions of briefs and of forensics.'' lb, p. 75.
' Catalogue^ pp. 64, 205.
* Some part of the time each year is occupied in examinations.
232 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
tempting varieties, are spread before him, taking a sip at each,
and then leaving it on the morrow " for fresh woods and past-
ures new." "The elective system," writes President Eliot,
''is not an abandonment of system. It is emphatically a
method in education, which has a moral as well as an intel-
lectual end, and is consistent with a just authority, while it
grants a just liberty." ^ " The Freshman Class is placed under
the special charge of a Committee of the Faculty," composed
of twenty-one members, " each member of which acts as adviser
to a certain portion of the class. Every Freshman is required
to submit his choice of studies to his adviser at or before the
beginning of the year ; and his work is to be carried on under
the supervision of that officer." Even when the student is out
of his Freshman year, " his choice is limited to those studies
which his previous training qualifies him to pursue." When
once his choice has been made at the beginning of each aca-
demic year, he can make no change without permission.^ In
the college slang, a Freshman's adviser is known as his nurse.
After I had written this chapter I received the following
letter from a young Bachelor of Arts, who took his degree last
summer magna cum laude. He says : —
" As you will doubtless have heard and read pretty much all that can
be said in favour of the elective system, I shall try to show you a little bit
of the other side.
<< A considerable number of men, in choosing their courses, look only to
the convenience of the hour set for the recitations [lectures], and select
a course because it chances to fall in with their arrangements, without any
regard to its subject Fellows have often come to me and said: 'Tell
me a good course in the second half year, I do not want a nine o'clock or
an afternoon lecture.' This naturally does not apply to Freshmen, whose
choice is limited and directed by advisers.
^ Annual Reports, 18S4-5, P* 4* ^ Catalogue^ pp. 20&-^.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 233
** Again, a great many fellows take pains to look for courses known in the
College slang as snaps — that is, easy courses. These are now far more
difficult to find than they were even when I came to College, five years ago;
for it very soon comes to the ears of an instructor, that his course has the
reputation of being a snap^ and he takes steps to correct the impression.
** In default of a snap an easy-going fellow will often choose a very
largely attended course, knowing that convenient arrangements for cram-
ming can be made before examinations. There are a number of men in
Cambridge, who make it their business to do such work, either by private
instruction, or at rather high rates — generally two dollars [eight shillings
and two pence] an hour — or by seminars, that is, a general review of the
course, given in the form of a lecture the night before the examination.
I have repeatedly seen cases of men receiving a respectable mark, after no
further preparation than attendance at a seminar. At these, I am told,
the instruction is very efficiently given.
** There are a certain number of courses, which are taken by a rery
large majority of every class at some time or other. Men are attracted to
them by the personal reputation of the Professor, and by a sort of tradi-
tion : every one has taken them, and it is the proper thing to do. Such
courses are those given by Professors Norton ^ and Shaler.^ The exagger-
ated attendance at these courses reacts unfavourably upon them; notably
those of Professor Norton, where the class is so large that no suitable room
can be foimd to accommodate it.
" On the other hand, there are certain courses which are taken, I sus-
pect, largely from a sense of duty. The best examples of these are the
courses in the United States History and elementary Political Economy.
These, without being exceedingly difficult, are by no means snaps, I fancy
that they are largely taken by the advice of fellows' fathers; not unfre-
quently, however, because a man wants to read the newspapers intelli-
gently and the like.
" A great danger of our system, even to industrious fellows, is the ten-
dency to early specialization. A boy comes to college with a strong dis-
like for, say Mathematics, and is not likely ever to take any courses in that
department. On the other hand, he may be rather good at the Classics and
fond of general reading, and so he drifts into Greek and Latin, or Litera-
ture, and finds on graduation that he has a quantity of special information
in one line, that may, or may not, be of use to him, and is wofully de-
fective in general information. The burden of the lamentation of all my
1 Professor of the History of Art * Professor of Geology.
234 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
classmates during their Senior year was, 'Oh, that I had my college
course to arrange over again ! '
" In spite of all the evil I have said of the elective system, it still appears
to me to be infinitely better than that followed in our other universities."
Professor G. H. Palmer, who was a somewhat late convert
to the merits of this system, who in advocating it, describes
himself as ** that desirable persuader, the man who has himself
been persuaded," put the following question " to some fifty re-
cent graduates : ' In the light of your present experience, how
many of your electives would you change ? ' I seldom," he con-
tinues, '' find a man who would not change some ; still more
rarely one who would change one-half. As I look back on my
own college days, spent chiefly on prescribed studies, I see that
to make these serve my needs, more than half should have been
different. There was Anglo-Saxon, for example, which was re-
quired of all, no English literature being permitted. A course
in advanced chemical physics, serviceable no doubt to some of
my classmates, came upon me prematurely, and stirred so in-
tense an aversion to ph3rsical study that subsequent years were
troubled to overcome it. One meagre meal of philosophy was
perhaps as much as most of us Seniors could digest, but I went
away hungry for more. . . . Prescribed studies may be ill-
judged or ill-adapted, ill-timed or ill-taught, but none the less
inexorably they fall on just and unjust. The wastes of choice
chiefly affect the shiftless and the dull, men who cannot be
harmed much by being wasted. The wastes of prescription
ravage the energetic, the clear-sighted, the original — the very
classes who stand in greatest need of protection." ^
At the Commemoration in 1886, the President of the Alumni
Association indulged in a boast which, well-founded though it
1 The New Education, by G. H. Palmer, pp. 14, 37.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE, 235
was, has of late years been a source of mischief to the cause
of education in America. Self-complacency is none the less
dangerous when it is found in a whole nation. Speaking of the
first settlers, he said : " One great principle they contributed
to the science of government, and the greatest of states and
statesmen might well be proud of the contribution. That the
education of the people is a public duty ; that there is a right
in every child and youth in the land to its rudiments, and to
the opportunity for a larger and more liberal culture ; that the
provision for this is a legitimate public expenditure, — are
principles of the greatest importance, and for these the world
is indebted to them. The monuments to their own just fame
which they reared by the establishment of this College and
their provision for public schools are not to be found alone in
these halls, . . . but equally in the humblest village schoolhouse
wherever in the broad land it nestles in the valley or by the
wayside." ^
If it is true that America in public education was once ahead
of all the nations, that lead she has lost. Cobden and Bright,
were they Hving, would no longer point to her as an example
for England to follow. In elementary education, in which we
were so backward, we have now not only caught her up, but
outstripped her. In the secondary schools, moreover, where
university students receive most of their early training, she lags
still farther behind. Instead of advancing, as we have greatly
advanced of late, she has not, we are told, even maintained her
former standard.
" It is a notorious and discreditable fact," writes Professor
Goodwin, "that our students now come to college at the age
of nineteen with no more knowledge than an English, French,
1 Harvard College, a^oth Anniversary, p. 251.
236 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
German, or Swiss boy has at seventeen, and — what is more
discreditable still — with no more than our own New England
boy had at seventeen fifty or sixty years ago. One of the
greatest of the many great services which the President of the
University has rendered to the cause of education is the com-
plete demonstration which he has given, not only of these facts,
but also of their causes. . . . The real waste of time seems
to be effected chiefly in schools of the lower grades, where the
skill sometimes shown in spreading the elements of learning
thin would be laughable were it not pathetic. . . . Boys enter
Exeter Academy now older than they once left it for college ;
and at this age (sixteen or seventeen) they are required merely
to ' have some knowledge of Common School Arithmetic, writ-
ing, spelling, and the elements of English Grammar.' I select
Exeter as an example, not by way of censure, but honoris causa.
We are sure that she does her best with the material which
comes to her from the lower schools. And this is the best
which one of the oldest and most ambitious New England
academies can now demand from boys of sixteen and seven-
teen, hardly as much as she could once have demanded and
obtained from boys of twelve and thirteen."^
Two years ago a Committee on Secondary School Studies
was appointed by the National Education Association. The
Chairiiian was President Eliot. The Committee nominated
nine " Conferences," each composed of men of great experience
in the subject which it was to investigate. In the nine reports
which they issued, one common desire was found running
through all : " That the elements of their several subjects should
be taught earlier than they now are." * The Latin Conference
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College^ pp. 36-39.
^ Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies, Washington,
1893, p. 14.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 231
reported : " In the United States the average age at which the
study of Latin is begun is about fifteen years, and probably
above the number rather than below it. In England and on
the Continent the study is seldom begun so late as at the age
of twelve, and much oftener between the ages of nine and eleven ;
in other words, from four to six years earlier than with us." ^ In
a footnote on this passage there is seen the curious change
which has come over the words Grammar School in America.
"In Michigan," we read, "successful experiments have been
made in introducing the study of Latin into the Grammar
School ; and the trial is also being made in certain Grammar
Schools in Massachusetts." In England, Grammar School
almost everywhere retains the sense in which Johnson defines
it : "A school in which the learned languages are grammatically
taught." Such a school no doubt once was "The Faire Gram-
mar School " in the American Cambridge, now, by an unhappy
change, known as the Washington School. So much has even
the tradition of the older education passed away, that " in a
recent Convention of Teachers, not far from Boston, a story of
some English schoolboys, who appeared to be as far advanced
in their studies as most Sophomores or Juniors in New England
colleges, was received with many expressions of astonishment
and with some of incredulity."'
Of this general neglect to lay the foundations of the higher
learning at an early age, there are doubtless many causes of which
I know nothing. I have been told that many an American
father, whose youth had been one hard struggle, is bent on
letting his children have what he calls " a good time." " There
^ Report of the Committee on Secondary School Studies^ Washington,
1893, p. 60.
^ School and College^ February, 1S92, p. 99.
238 HARVARD COLLEGE, chap.
must," writes Professor Goodwin, ^'be a thorough awakening
and change of heart on the part of indulgent parents, so that
they shall no longer consent to the long periods of idleness
which now interrupt their children's study, or, at least, shall no
longer encourage and seek to extend them." ^ Schoolmasters
seem almost as weak as parents are indulgent. "Another evil,
one peculiar to this country, but a most unnecessary one, is the
constant interruption of study by calls of society, and by a
thousand other distractions which in other countries would
never be allowed to break in upon study in school."* But
who can look for strictness in schoolmasters, who hold their
office by an uncertain tenure, and who might be cast adrift by
the votes of a few touchy parents ? " Some of the conditions
of the public school service in this country," writes President
Eliot, "particularly the uncertain tenure of office, and the fluc-
tuating quality of school committees or boards, are unfortunately
averse to the creation of .a class of highly educated and ex-
perienced schoolmasters; but custom, if not statute, makes
some public school offices fairly permanent, the endowed
schools of the country already offer a considerable number of
desirable posts, and the large cities support many profitable
private schools of great merit." * That hateful system of "the
spoils to the victors," has been allowed, it seems, to cast its
taint even on the education of children.
The money which is laid out freely on schools is not always
laid out wisely. " The same profuse liberality which spends a
quarter or a half million of dollars on a schoolhouse would be
equally ready to equip the school within on a corresponding
^ School and College, February, 1892, p. 104.
^ The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 37.
• Reports, 1891-92, p. 16.
xin. HARVARD COLLEGE. 239
scale^ if it only knew how this could be wisely done." ^ Bad
systems of teaching, moreover, "which are imposed on the
teachers by standing rules, and often compel a good teacher to
waste nearly as much time as a poor one," are answerable for a
great part of the general backwardness. The quick and eager
boy is sacrificed to the dull and sluggish, the hard worker to the
idler. "Classes often have an amount of work given them
for a year which any bright boy or girl can do in three months,
while there is no regular provision by which those who can do
it in less time shall as a matter of course go on to other work." *
It is this dead level at which the pupils are kept, added to the
extraordinary delay in setting them to study Greek and Latin,
which brings the most promising lads to the University so far
behind our highest standard. There are no scholars of Balliol
or of Trinity, Cambridge, to be found among them. " It is
now a familiar truth to most of us," writes Professor Goodwin,
" that students come to Harvard College at nineteen, in most
cases badly prepared to pass an examination which boys of
sixteen or seventeen would find easy work in England, Germany,
France, or Switzerland. Most of these young men have spent
the preceding three, four, or five years in doing boys' work,
which should all have been finished before they were sixteen.-
At their age time is precious, at least in their parents' eyes, and
there is generally a struggle to finish their work in the shortest
possible time. The preparatory schools, therefore, devote their
chief energies to ' fitting ' candidates for the examination, which
the College mercifully divides between two years to temper its
severity. It is, after all, a mere 'pass' examination, which
seldom gives any opportunity to display real scholarship ; and
'^ School and CoUege^ February, 1892, p. 100.
^Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 37.
240 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
yet it is held to be a distinction to attain three-quarters of the
mark in any subject; and this attainment is paraded as an
' honour/ which reflects glory on the pupil and on the school
which sent him." ^ After giving an account of the classical
authors studied in the higher forms at our Westminster School,
Professor Goodwin continues : "These boys need very little of
this to enter either Cambridge or Oxford, where, in most colleges,
hardly as much is required for admission as at Harvard or Yale ;
but they know that those who bring only the absolute require-
ments for admission are practically excluded from all the better
instruction at both Universities, where no scholar of distinction
gives his time to ' pass men.* " How little the highest kind of
instruction is generally given in the American High Schools is
shown by the fact that, " although Harvard draws rather more
than one-third of her students from States outside New Eng-
land, the whole number of students who have come to her from
the High Schools of these States during a period of the last
ten years is but sixty-six. Fitting for college is becoming an
alarmingly technical matter, and is falling largely into the hands
of private tutors and academies." ^
It is not the duller students at Harvard, or even perhaps the
average students, who are below the standard of the same two
classes of men at our Universities. Nothing could surpass the
grossness of the ignorance of many of the undergraduates who
come from our most famous schools. I used to hear one of the
first mathematicians in Oxford piteously lament the hard fate
which condemned him to try to put a little arithmetic into
the heads of young men whose understandings had been hope-
^ Harvard Graduated Magazine, January, 1S93, p. 190.
* The New Education, by G. H. Palmer, Professor of Philosophy in
Harvard University, p. 75.
xin. HARVARD COLLEGE. 241
lessly disordered by bad teaching. " Why, sir, do you not use
your common sense?" he one day impatiently asked one of
his pupils. '' I did not know that common sense had anything
to do with arithmetic," was the reply. We are not, however,
quite so bad as we were. We have made some advance since
the day — forty years or so ago — when a promising classical
scholar, fresh from Eton, was seen by his tutor adding up a
column in which he had entered 2S. 6d. six times over. He
was thus laboriously arriving at the cost of half a dozen pairs of
stockings which he had just bought. " Why do you not do it
by multiplying? " asked the tutor. " I do not know what you
mean," the youth modestly answered. When he was shown the
process and had had explained to him all the mystery of the
multiplication table, he was so much taken with the extraordi-
nary facilities which it afforded, that in less than a week he had
it by heart.
In America, it is clear, a better classification is needed both
in the schools and in the Universities. Democratic equaUty has
been allowed, it seems, to invade even the province of the mind.
All the realm of learning is in common. It is felony, not to
drink small beer, but to ask for stronger ale than most heads
can stand. In the school there should be that sixth form which
the dull and backward are never suffered to encumber ; and even
in this sixth form there should be no absolute equality of study.
The ablest scholars, while they did all that was done by the
others, should have a wider range of subjects. In the University
there should be established that division between " passmen "
and "classmen" which is for the benefit of the slow and
ignorant almost as much as of the well-trained scholar. He
must no longer be made to work on the same lines as the dunce
and the idler, merely doing well what they do ill. It is on a
R
242 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
higher level he should study, and at a greater pace that he should
advance. At Harvard, as I am informed by one of the most
eminent of the Professors, ** it is perfectly possible for the best
scholars (in rank) to earn their rank and their scholarships too
in courses of study in which the lowest in rank can pass without
censure. This is intolerable ; and yet it would require a severe
wrench to break us off from it. Our higher courses, it is true,
give students an opportunity to study on a higher level ; but we
still give our rank and our scholarship to those who stand
highest in the general competition ; and it is much easier to
stand high in a lower course than in a higher," To attain the
highest success the student has to reach the top in each one of
the sixteen courses through which he has passed in his four
years at College. Whether he has stood on the summit of
sixteen mole-hills or sixteen mountains matters not a whit.
These evils, great as they undoubtedly are, have happily
been lessened by the elective system. Real scholars would not
sacrifice rank to knowledge, but would choose the higher courses.
Thus by a natural process they would classify themselves. It is
in the Graduate School, however, firee as it is from all artificial
rewards, that the Professor who has the cause of learning deeply
at heart finds his greatest comfort and hope. In it, I am told,
there are students as good as the best in Oxford and Cambridge
— not perhaps so ready and versatile, for they have not passed
through a long and often harmful course of systematic training,
but nevertheless nowise inferior to them in knowledge and in
a love of learning.
In our ancient Universities, though of late years far greater
freedom has been given than of old, nevertheless, the battle of
*' elective studies " — to use the American term — is still going
on. At Oxford and at Cambridge no one can take his degree
k
xni. HARVARD COLLEGE. 243
who has not some knowledge of Greek and Latin. At Oxford
he can bid farewell to the classics when he has passed his first
examination ; ^ but without some Greek and Latin, enough to
be a worry, but scarcely enough to be an advantage, the Uni-
versity is barred even to the most ardent learner. It is but a
short while since, at Cambridge, the attempt to make Greek an
optional study was defeated by an overwhelming majority. In
neither University does the widest knowledge in one depart-
ment make up for total ignorance in another. A student
might write as good Latin as Erasmus ever wrote, and might
in Mathematics give the promise of a second Newton, or in
Natural Science of a second Darwin, — unless he knows his
Greek irregular verbs, Oxford and Cambridge will have none of
him. Many years ago I had a pupil who was painfully carried
on in Latin to the edge of the subjunctive mood. Over it he
could never advance one step without coming to the ground.
To attempt to force him to learn Greek would have been an
act of wanton cruelty. At the end of one summer holidays
his mother wrote to tell me that she had met the Honourable
Mr. W , who was astonished at finding that her son did not
learn Greek. "Every English gentleman," he said, "learnt
Greek." She wished, therefore, that her son should at once
begin. Most unwillingly I set the poor dullard to work at the
grammar. When he had struggled on as far as the end of the
nouns, I told him that he need go no further ; for that now,
quite as much as a great many of these English gentlemen, he
could say that he had learnt Greek. His mother was, I
believe, satisfied. At all events, I heard no more of the
Honourable Mr. W . It is much to be wished that our
universities, if they cannot make up their minds to altogether
^ Responsions, once vulgarly known as the little go^ but now as smalls.
244 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
abandoning compulsory Greek, should get over the difficulty
by some ingenious fiction. They might, for instance, decree,
that in the case of a student who shows unusual proficiency in
any great branch of learning, it shall be taken for granted that
he does know Greek, and that the examiners shall no more pre-
sume to test his knowledge of that language than Don Quixote
presumed to test the strength of his patched-up helmet.
The advantage of this system of elective studies, not only in
other branches of learning, but even in Greek, is set forth
by a man whose name on such a point carries great weight on
both sides of the Atlantic. The Professor of Greek Literature
in Harvard University, Dr. Goodwin, the man who, of all
others, should have mourned over the change, is loud in its
praise. It was in 1856 that he began to teach at Harvard.
" In that year, when Greek and Latin were both required until
the end of the Junior [third] year, all the work in them was
done by five teachers. Now [in 189 1], when both are entirely
elective from the beginning, eleven or twelve teachers are
fully employed. It need hardly be said that the standard of
scholarship in every department was at once raised by this
reform. It sprang up of itself the moment the old pressure
was taken off. . . . I cannot emphasize too strongly that the
chief merit of the present elective system is not that it lets
students study what they hke and avoid what they dislike, but
that it opens to all a higher and wider range of study in every
field ; in short, it has made really high scholarship possible." ^
President Eliot, speaking of the system generally, says that " it
gives every teacher the precious privilege of having no student
in his class who has not freely chosen to be there."* This
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 14.
3 Annual Reports, 1884-85, p. 46.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 245
privilege, as I have shown, is too often abused by the idlers
and the indolent, who at Harvard, just as it happens at Oxford,
as far as they can, follow those studies in which, with the least
trouble to themselves, they can take their degree. In Harvard
the degree is not won, as in the English Universities, by suc-
cess in three or four public examinations, conducted by Boards
of Examiners, but by the student satisfying his instructor in each
one of the eighteen courses through which he passes in his
four years. ^ The instructor, I was told, does not altogether go
by the answers in the examinations which he himself com-
monly holds, but he takes into consideration the difficulties
which may have arisen through such circumstances as illness or
the death of a near relative. He considers, moreover, a stu-
dent's habits — whether of idleness or industry. One of the
Professors whom I consulted thought the standard too low;
another said that the system works well if each Professor
examines his own class. He alone, who had taught them, was
competent to test the student's knowledge of what they had
been taught. At the end of each course " the standing of each
student is expressed, according to his proficiency, by one of
five grades." He who, at the close of his career, is found to
have attained the highest grade in fifteen courses, takes his
degree summa cum laude. The highest grade in nine courses,
or the highest or second in fifteen, confers a magna cum
laude ; and the highest or second in nine courses confers a
cum laude. The summa cum laude, moreover, is conferred
on any one who, in a special examination, conducted by a com-
mittee of the Faculty, near the close of the Senior year, has
shown great proficiency in any department. *
Such a system of examinations as I have described does not
^ Catalogue, p. 209. ^ lb, pp. 210-215.
246 HARVARD COLLEGE, ' chap.
put the students through that severe course through which the
highest students of Oxford and Cambridge pass — a course
which, so long as it has not strained the mind or weakened the
body, admirably fits a man for the severest toil of professional
life. He who, with health unimpaired, is placed at Oxford in
the First Class in the School of Literae Humaniores, or at
Cambridge high among the Wranglers, is not very likely in
after life to be daunted or baffled by any kind of work, how-
ever hard or dry it may be. It does to perfection that which
it was meant to do. It fits men for the great world — for suc-
cess at the Bar and in public life. It turns out great lawyers
and great statesmen. It keeps up a constant supply of lead-
ing-article writers — men who can rapidly make themselves
masters of facts and as rapidly set them forth in a clear and
able form. It confers infinite dexterity and readiness. On
the other hand, it breaks down a certain number — perhaps
not many — by the excessive strain it puts upon them, and it
unfits still more for the scholar's life. It is for success, not
for knowledge, that the struggle has been, and it is success
and not knowledge that far too often is its great reward. " Do
not spoil your careers," the late Master of BalHol used to say
to his undergraduates. He was the last man to have agreed
with Mr. Lowell's notion of a University, that it is " a place
where nothing useful is taught." ^ I have heard of a humorous
saying of the Master's that " Diogenes Laertius was a learned
man in the worst sense of the word." There are learned men
even worse than Diogenes Laertius — men gifted with great
powers, who, having by their learning won a high reputation,
then turn traders, and instead of increasing knowledge, traffic
in it. The Oxford and Cambridge scholars are far less likely
1 Harvard College ^ sjoth Anniversary, p. 216.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 247
than the scholars of a German University to spoil their careers
by giving themselves up to the noble, but ill-requited hfe of a
man of learning. It is not in the Schools of either of our
great Universities that is awakened that ardent spirit of research,
that love of knowledge for its own sake, which is the glory of
Germany. Finis coronat opus. The First Class, or the
Wranglership, is achieved, and the goal is won. In a way as
strange as it is absurd, these high distinctions sometimes chill
aspirations. I have heard a great Greek scholar at Oxford
pleasantly describe how a First Class man often becomes afraid
of his own reputation — the reputation which he gained before
his moustache was fully grown. Throughout life he will not
give to the world any piece of learned work, lest it should not
be found up to the high-water mark of his two and twentieth
year. In Harvard there is none of this blaze of glory that
comes at the end of a strain prolonged through many years.
It is no training-place for mental athletes. But while some-
thing thereby is lost, much is gained. There are no false
suns to dazzle the scholar's eyes. It is not the goal 'of . a
four years* course, with its shining pillars, that lies before
him, but the boundless horizon of the great ocean of truth
all undiscovered.
The Fellowships which the University offers to graduates are
not prizes for what they have already learnt, but means of sup-
port while they learn more. No young Bachelor of Arts is
splendidly rewarded for his success in examinations by an
annual allowance of two hundred pounds for the next seven
years. There is no Derby Scholarship that adds one hundred
and fifty-seven pounds to the youth who, in all probability,
has already won more money prizes than any man of his stand-
ing. There is no Tom Tiddler's ground where the " brilliant "
248 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
men ^ pick up gold and silver. All the money that is given, is
given not to reward students, but to support them in further
studies. They either go to work in some foreign university, or
far more commonly, they stay on to work in the Graduate School
— that School in which Ticknor's vision of the real imiversity
is fast taking a substantial and a noble form. It was founded
in 1872; but "for many years its development was retarded
by illiberal and artificial rules of admission. ... In the
meanwhile other universities, unhampered by inconvenient tra-
ditions, working on freer lines, and amply provided with fel-
lowships of considerable value, with free tuition added, in
many cases, to their stipend, outstripped us in the path we were
entering."* "The enthusiasm," writes Professor Gk>odwin,
" with which our best Universities are now organizing studies
for Bachelors of Arts, and the increasing resort of graduates to
these centres of learning, show the power of this movement
towards true university education, a power which is just begin-
ning to be felt. We owe special gratitude to the Johns Hop-
kins University at Baltimore, which called public attention to
the importance of this movement by its bold experiment of
establishing its Graduate School before any other department
was organized, and by devoting its chief energies to this from
the beginning. In these new Graduate Schools we see the
brightest hope for the future American University." *
It is in this school that the best of the students not only
1 At Oxford, and perhaps also at Cambridge, a ** brilliant " man is an
undergraduate who does " brilliant " work and writes " brilliant " essays.
It not unfrequently seems that brilliant must have much the same deriva-
«
tion as lucus — a non lucendo,
2 From a Circular of Ten of the Members of the Administrative Board
of the Graduate School^ dated November 20, 1893.
• The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 16.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 249
gather knowledge but help to increase it. Here it is that is
done " that work which is the highest duty of every university,
without which no institution has ever been called a university by
men who weigh their words with full intelligence, — the work of
advancing the boundaries of knowledge by the original researches
and the joint labours of its professors and its students." i
Graduates of other Universities are flocking to it from all sides ;
nay, even Professors, who, having obtained a year's leave of
absence, descend from their chairs to take their seats once more
on the scholars* bench. Among these ardent students I had the
pleasure of meeting the President of one of the smaller Western
Universities. Such a body of men as this gives a higher tone
and a more vigorous life to the whole University. It inspirits
the work of the Professors, who no longer have to travel year
after year the same round. It sets a higher standard before
the undergraduates, who have in their midst " men full of the
spirit of independent work, and of a sense of the value and
meaning of learning." It opens up to them other and nobler
fields of fame than the baseball and football grounds, and a
greatness immeasurably above the greatness of the mightiest
of athletes. The rapid growth of this school shows how much
it was needed and how excellent are its methods. In 1886 it
numbered but sixty-four resident students, and in 1889 ninety-
six. It can now boast of two hundred and forty-five. Besides
these it has eleven non-resident Fellows, of whom eight are
studying in Germany and two in France. " It is already larger
than Harvard College was fifty years ago." * One thing is want-
ing. It has none of that social life which not only throws a
charm over the years spent in a great University, but which
1 A Circular^ etc.
3 Annual Reports, 1892-93, pp. 28, no ; Catalogue, p. 287.
250 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
teaches a lesson which cannot be got out of books. "The
majority of the students in the Graduate School," writes an
Instructor in Philosophy, " are forlorn atoms, and their con-
course is too fortuitous ever to make a world. A man who has
been only at the Graduate School is not a Harvard man."*
This statement, I am told, is somewhat overdrawn. Groups
are formed of the men of each district of the country. The
Califomians, for instance, would hang together, and so would
the students from the maritime provinces. The day, it is to be
hoped, will come before long when, in some noble building,
they will all share in a common hfe.
It was not till 1886 that admission to the school was put on a
sound footing. It was in that year that the governing bodies
at last shook themselves free from the conviction that none must
come to study at a University but those who are candidates for
a degree — a conviction which still constrains Oxford. They
rose to the thought that at a University it is knowledge which
should be sold and not distinctions, and that for all who thirst
for it the gates of the fountains of learning should be opened
wide. Every one is freely admitted who can show that he has
already learnt enough to be able to follow the higher studies.
In this school he finds " perfect freedom both in teaching and
in learning. It has no degree in course for which all students
are candidates, and consequently no paternal supervision of each
student's daily work." * Many indeed aim at the higher degrees
of Master of Arts or of Doctor of Philosophy or Science, for no
longer are the higher degrees conferred without examination.
Up to 1872, as is still the case in Oxford and Cambridge, the
Master's degree had been given after a certain lapse of time
1 Educational Review^ April, 1894, p. 320.
* The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 23.
XIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 251
as a matter of course. Now it is only awarded after a further
study of one year at the College — a study which may be con-
fined to a single department.^ The Doctor's degree is given
'* on the ground of long study and high attainment in a special
branch of learning, manifested not only by examinations, but by
a thesis, which must be presented and accepted before the can-
didate is admitted to examination, and must show an original
treatment of a fitting subject, or give evidence of independent
research." ^
In America it has hitherto been more difficult even than in
England to give men the love of the scholar's life — the life of
" plain living and high thinking." On that vast continent the
great and rapid conquests of man over wild nature, with the
splendid rewards that followed in their train, tempt almost all
the ablest men away from the world of thought to the world of
action. Even some of the lately-founded universities seem
not unlikely, by the aid of their noble endowments, to bear
their part in corrupting pure learning. In their eagerness to
secure, perhaps not so much the ablest Professors as the fame
of having them, they offer needlessly high salaries. During
the academical year 1891-92, "seven universities and colleges
made ineffectual efforts to draw teachers of Harvard into their
service. Four Professors, four Assistant-Professors and six
Instructors declined offers of higher pay and higher titles at
other institutions." Among the causes " which bind its teach-
ers to the University," President Eliot reckons "the dignity
and stability of the institution ; the perfect liberty of opinion ;
the freedom in teaching — every teacher teaching as he thinks
best, except as the more experienced teachers may persuade
and inform the less experienced ; the great resources of the
^ Higher Education, etc., p. 160; Catalogue^ p. 297. "^ lb, p. 299.
252 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. xni.
University in books and collections, and the fact that any
teacher can at any time cause books desirable in his depart-
ment to be bought by the Library ; the separation of Cam-
bridge from the luxurious society of great cities, etc., . . .
and lastly, the consideration which learning and high character
traditionally enjoy in Eastern Massachusetts, independent of
pecuniary condition." ^
^ Annual Reports, 1891-92, p. 8.
CHAPTER XIV.
The Law School. — Nathan Dane. — Joseph Story. — Professor Langdell.
— The Law Library. — The Law Review.
OF her Law School Harvard can be prouder even than of
her Graduate School ; for, great as are the hopes given
by one, scarcely less great are the performances of the other.
In it is done that which in some happier day in our own coun-
try will be done, not in the Solicitor's office and in the Barris-
ter's chambers, but in Oxford and Cambridge. It is here that
the young American receives his legal training. No lawyer of
any standing, I was told, would admit into his office a pupil
who had not been through the regular course of a University
Law School. My legal friends were astonished when I spoke
of the fee of three hundred guineas paid in England to a
solicitor by his articled clerk, and of one hundred guineas paid
to a barrister by his pupil for leave to work in his chambers
for a year. In America, so far from there being a fee paid,
there is often from the first a salary given, however small. The
Harvard Law School, so President Eliot reported eight years
ago, " for several summers past has been imable to fill all the
places in lawyers' offices which have been offered it for its
third-year students just graduating. There have been more
places offered, with salaries sufficient to live on, than there
were graduates to take them."^ In these offices there is, of
course, none of that license allowed which is the ruin of so
^ Quoted in The Green Bag for January, 1889, p. 22.
253
254 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
many of our students of law at home. The same punctuality
and industry are required of the young lawyer as of the com-
mon clerks. Not a few graduates in law, on taking their
degree, at once begin to practise on their own account.
Those, however, who are going to settle outside New England
and New York, would have first to master the practice and
statute law of the State in which they intend to establish them-
selves. " Honour graduates are certain to receive invitations
to enter leading law offices in various parts of the country."*
"The citizens of the United States," writes Professor Dicey,
" are certainly neither pedants, nor, in general, theorists ; but
at the present moment English law is taught, and admirably
taught, in the colleges of America. . . . The practising counsel
of Massachusetts would undoubtedly tell you that the best
preparation for practice in court is study in the lecture-rooms
of Professor Langdell and his colleagues of Harvard Uni-
versity." '
The Law School was founded in 1817, but down to 1829 it
was little more than a shadow. In that year Nathan Dane
endowed a new professorship from the money which he had
made by his " once famous Abridgment of American Law.^*
Forty-two years earlier he had drafted that beneficent Ordi-
nance by which the whole of the great Northwest was kept
free from the taint of slavery. In his old age he not only
founded the professorship, but he founded it on the condition
that Judge Story first filled the chair. Even he, full of hope
though he was, could hardly have foreseen the full measure of
the benefit of this foundation and this condition, which were
1 Harvard University, by F. BoUes, p. 68.
^ Can English Law be Taught at the Universities f by A. V. Dicey,
Vinerian Professor of English Law in the University of Oxford, 1883, p. 28.
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 255
to turn an eihinent judge into a great jurist. If Story had
never filled a Professor's chair, in all likelihood we should never
have had his Conflict of Laws^ his Equity Jurisprudence^ and
his Law of Agency ^ — that " series of works which are the best
of their kind in the English language." ^ During the whole of
the year before his appointment " there had not been," I quote
Story himself, " a single student. There was no Law Library ;
but a few and imperfect books being there." One long vaca-
tion he wrote to the most brilliant of his pupils, Charles
Sumner : —
" I have given nearly the whole of last term, when not on
judicial duty, two lectures every day, and even broke in upon
the sanctity of the dies non juridicuSy Saturday." Of this
daring innovation we have an account from- the author of Two
Years before the Mast.. The judge used to make his " boys "
— "'my boys* he always called his pupils" — argue cases
before him. " To compel a recitation on Saturday afternoon,"
writes Dana, " would have caused a rebellion. If a Moot-court
had been forced upon the Law School, no one would have
attended. At the close of a term there was one more case than
there was an afternoon to hear it in, unless we took Saturday.
Judge Story said : " * (Gentlemen, the only time we can hear this
case is Saturday afternoon. This is dies non, and no one is
obliged or expected to attend. I am to hold Court in Boston
until two o'clock. I will ride directly out, take a hasty dinner,
and be here by half-past three o'clock, and hear the case, if you
are willing.' He looked round the school for a reply. We felt
ashamed, in our own business, where we were alone interested,
to be outdone in zeal and labour by this aged and distinguished
1 Can English Law be Taught at the Universities? by A. V. Dicey
Vinerian Professor of English Law in the University of Oxford, 1883, P* 29*
256 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
man, to whom the case was but child's play, a tale twice told,
and who was himself pressed down by almost incredible labours.
The proposal was unanimously accepted. The judge was on
the spot at the hour, the school was never more full, and he sat
until late in the evening, hardly a man leaving the room." ^
Among the pupils in 1838 was Lowell. " I am reading Black-
stone," he wrote, "with as good a grace and as few wry faces as I
may." Eight months later he could write more cheerfully. " I
begin to like the law. And therefore it is quite interesting. I am
determined that I will like it, and therefore I do,^' * On Story's
death, in 1845, the school numbered one hundred and sixty-
five students, who had flocked to his teaching not only from
New England, but from almost every State in the Union.
During the sixteen years in which he filled the chair he gave
to the world all his treatises on the law, filling no less than
thirteen volumes. He had hoped that his vacant chair would
be filled by Charles Sumner ; but that young orator had shown
far too radical a spirit to be acceptable to Harvard as it was in
those days.* Story's colleagues and successors were many of
them men of great eminence. Among them were Simon Green-
leaf, Joel Parker, Benjamin R. Curtis, Theophilus Parsons, and
Emory Washburn. Nevertheless, in 1869, twenty- four years
after Story's death, the number of students had fallen to one
hundred and fifteen. In January, 1870, a man was appointed
to the chair which Story had first filled, who has made as deep a
mark as the great jurist himself, not only on the Harvard Law
School, but on the theory and practice of legal education
generally. He was one of the great lawyers, who, either by the
"^Life of Joseph Story, II. 38, 299, 320, 554.
2 Litters of J, R, Lowell, I. 33, 45.
* Life of Charles Sumner^ III. 11.
k
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 257
unkindness of fortune or by the want of one or more of the
lower qualities of the mind, had never been a great advocate.
" At the bar of New York, of which for more than fifteen years
he had been a member, not many could be found who had even
heard of him ; he had rarely been seen in the Courts." ^ Presi-
dent Eliot, in his address on the Law School Day at the great
Commemoration in 1886, gives the following account of his
appointment : " I remembered that when I was a Junior in
College, in the year 1851-52, and used to go often in the early
evening to the room of a friend who was in the Divinity School,
I there heard a young man who was making the notes to
Parsons on Contracts talk about law. He was generally eating
his supper at the time, standing up in front of the fire and eating
with good appetite a bowl of brown bread and milk. I was a
mere boy, only eighteen years old ; but it was given to me to
imderstand that I was listening to a man of genius. In the
year 1870 I recalled the remarkable quality of that young man's
expositions, sought him in New York, and induced him to be-
come Dane Professor. So he became Professor Langdell. He
then told me, in 1870, a great many of the things he has told
you this afternoon. He told me that law was a science ; I was
quite prepared to believe it. He told me that the way.to study
a science was to go to the original sources. I knew that was
true, for I had been brought up in the science of chemistry
myself; and one of the first rules of a conscientious student of
science is never to take a fact or a principle out of second-hand
treatises, but to go to the original memoir of the discoverer of
that fact or principle. Out of these two fiindamental propo-
sitions — that law is a science, and that a science is to be
studied in its sources — there gradually grew, first, a new
1 The Green Bagt January, 1889, p. 17.
s
258 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
method of teaching law ; and, secondly, a reconstruction of the
curriculum of the school." ^
The method of construction pursued by Story and Greenleaf
and their successors had been "oral lectures illustrating and
explaining a previously prescribed text-reading, with more or
less examination thereon." No care had ever been taken at
any time to exclude those whose ignorance unfitted them for
the teaching of a university.^ There was only one course of
studies, and it lasted two years. The students, therefore, of
every second year entered on it when it was half-way through.
" This system," writes President Eliot, " was only justified by
poverty, and the convenient, though unsound, theory that there
is neither beginning nor end to the law, neither fundamental
principles nor natural development." ' The ignorant students
were henceforth to be excluded by an entrance examination in
Latin or French, in Blackstone's Commentaries (exclusive of
editor's notes) , and in English spelling and composition. Those,
however, who had taken the degree of Bachelor of Arts at any
recognized university were admitted without any test The
course of instruction was lengthened from eighteen months, first
to two years and later on to three. No one can enter on the
studies of the second year who has not passed his examinations
in the studies of the first year, or on the studies of the third
year who has not passed in the studies of the second year.
Nevertheless, the degree of Bachelor of Laws is conferred after
a two years* residence on those who pass in the entire course of
three years. Cum laude is added to the degree of all who
show " distinguished excellence." Twelve such distinctions are
1 Harvard University ^ 2^oth Anniversary^ p. 97.
2 The Green Bag, pp. 17, 18.
• Higher Education, etc., by G. G. Bush, p. 135.
^
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 259
on the average gained each year. In 1893, seventy- three
students in all graduated.^
Far beyond all the other changes which followed on Pro-
fessor LangdelPs appointment, was the revolution made in
the method of teaching. What this revolution was we have
described in his own words. In his address at the Commemo-
ration of 1886, he said : —
" It was indispensable to establish at least two things : first, that law is
a science; secondly, that all the available materials of that science are
contained in printed books. If law be not a science, a university will
best consult its own dignity in declining to teach it. If it be not a
science, it is a species of handicraft, and may best be learned by serving
an apprenticeship to one who practises it. If it be a science, it will
scarcely be disputed that it is one of the greatest and most difficult of
sciences, and that it needs all the light that the most enlightened seat of
learning can throw upon it. Again, law can only be learned and taught
in a university by means of printed books. If, therefore, there are other
and better means of teaching and learning law than printed books, or if
printed books can only be used to the best advantage in connection with
other means, — for instance, the work of a lawyer's office, or attendance
upon the proceedings of Courts of Justice, — it must be confessed that
such means cannot be provided by a university. But if printed books are
the ultimate sources of all legal knowledge; if every student who would
obtain any mastery of law as a science must resort to these ultimate
sources; and if the only assistance which it is possible for the learner to
receive, is such as can be afforded by teachers who have travelled the same
road before him — then a university, and a university alone, can furnish
every possible facility for teaching and learning law. I wish to emphasize
the fact that a teacher of law should be a person who accompanies his pupils
on a road which is new to them, but with which he is well acquainted from
having often travelled it before. What qualifies a person, therefore, to teach
law is not experience in the work of a lawyer's office, not experience in deal-
ing with men, not experience in the trial or argument of causes, — not ex-
perience, in short, in using law, but experience in learning law; not the
experience of the Roman advocate or of the Roman praetor, still less of the
Roman procurator, but the experience of the Roman juris-consult." ^
1 Catalogue, pp. 34^49f 5"-
* Harvard University^ 2joth Anniversary, p. 85.
260 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
From an article on the Harvard Law School, by Mr. Louis D.
Brandeis, one of the foremost among the younger lawyers of
Boston, I extract the following accoimt of the method by
which Professor Langdell " teaches the student to think in a
legal manner in accordance with the principles of the particu-
lar branch of the law." Mr. Brandeis begins by quoting the
following passage from the Professor's Select Cases on Con-
tracts^ the first of a series published for the use of the SchooL
'' Law, considered as a science, consists of certain principles or doc-
trines. To have such a mastery of these as to be able to apply them with
constant facility and certainty to the ever-tangled skein of human afifairSy
is what constitutes a true lawyer; and hence to acquire that mastery
should be the business of every earnest student of the law. Each of these
doctrines has arrived at its present state by slow degrees ; in other words,
it b a growth, extending in many cases through centuries. This growth is
to be traced in the main through a series of cases; and much the shortest
and best, if not the only way of mastering the doctrine effectually is by
studying the cases in which it is embodied. But the cases which are use-
ful and necessary for this purpose at the present day bear an exceedingly
small proportion to all that have been reported. The vast majority are
useless and worse than useless for any purpose of systematic study. More-
over, the number of fundamental legal doctrines is much less than is com-
monly supposed; the many different guises in which the same doctrine is
constantly making its appearance, and the great extent to which legal
treatises are a repetition of each other, being the cause of much misap-
prehension. If these doctrines could be so classified and arranged that
each should be found in its proper place, and nowhere else, they would
cease to be formidable from their number.''
" These books of cases," Mr. Brandeis goes on to say, ** are the tools
with which the student supplies himself as he enters upon his work.
Take, for instance, the subject of * Mutual Assent' in contracts. A score
of cases covering a century, contained in about one hundred and fifty
pages and selected from the English reports, the decisions of the Supreme
Court of the United States, and the highest courts of New York, Pennsyl-
vania, and Massachusetts, arranged in chronological order, show the devel-
opment of its leading principles. Before coming to the lecture-room, the
student, by way of preparation, has studied — he does not merely read —
say from two to six cases. In the selection of cases used as a text-book.
i
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 261
the head notes appearing in the regular reports are omitted, and the
student, besides mastering the facts, has endeavoured for himself to deduce
from the decision the principle involved. In the class-room some student
is called upon by the Professor to state the case, and then follows an
examination of the opinion of the court, an analysis of the arguments of
counsel, a criticism of the reasoning on which the decision is based, a
careful discrimination between what was decided and what is a dictum
merely. To use the expression of one of the Professors, the case is " evis-
cerated.'' Other students are either called upon for their opinions or
volunteer them, — the Professor throughout acting largely as moderator.
When the second case is taken up, material for comparison is furnished;
and with each additional authority that is examined, the opportunity for
comparison and for generalization grows. When the end of the chapter
of cases is reached, the student stands possessed of the principles in their
full development." ^
Mr. Brandeis describes "the ardour of the students. Pro-
fessor Ames, writing of the School ten years ago, said : * Indeed,
one speaks far within bounds in saying that the spirit of work
and enthusiasm which now prevails is without parallel in the
history of any department of the University.' What was true
then is at least equally true now. The students live in an
atmosphere of legal thought. Their interest is at fever heat."
One of the Professors informed me that nine out of ten of his
pupils study hard. If they had had a period of idleness at the
University, it was in their Arts course. The entrance into the
Law School they looked upon as the entrance into the real
work of life. The idlers are weeded out each year by an
examination ; but of these there are always very few.
There is the freest access to a noble Law Library of thirty-
three thousand volumes. On it in each year between 1870 and
1890 about three thousand dollars (;;^6i3) were spent. Great
as this annual expenditure was, it has not been found sufficient.
In the last three years it has been nearly doubled.* In 1892
1 The Green Bag, January, 1889, p. 19. * Catalogue, P« 35i«
262 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
it was thought needful to add ** another copy of every set of
English and American reports which is used to any consider-
able extent/' In the summer vacation of that year the Libra-
rian took a trip to England and piurchased nearly fourteen
himdred volumes of English reports. Before long "the Library
will have three copies of all the more important sets of English
and American reports, and of several sets it will have four
copies."^ "We have constantly inculcated the idea," said
Professor Langdell, " that the Library is the proper workshop
of Professors and students alike ; that it is to us all that the
Laboratories of the University are to the chemists and ph)rsi-
cists, all that the Museum of Natural History is to the zoolo-
gists, all that the Botanical Garden is to the botanists." *
In two different courts the students are trained both in law
and in arguing, — in Moot Courts held by the Professors, and
in Club Courts conducted entirely by the students. "The
Club Courts have generally two sets of members — the Junior
Court consisting of eight members selected from the first-year
Class, and the Senior Court consisting of nine members selected
from the second-year Class. At each sitting a case is argued
by two of the members as counsel, the rest sitting as judges.
In the Junior Court a member of the Senior Court sits as Chief
Justice. The cases are regularly presented upon the pleadings ;
briefs are prepared, arguments made, and opinions — some-
times in writing — delivered by each of the judges. The cases
are prepared with quite as much thoroughness as any work
that is done at the School."'
Nothing better shows the excellence of the teaching than the
1 Annual Reports f 1892-93, p. 143.
* Harvard University, 2^oth Anniversary^ p. 86.
• The Green Bag, p. 23.
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 263
position held by the Harvard Law Review, It is managed
wholly by the students ; their notes on legal topics are, I am
told, some of its best features. Among its contributors it
reckons not a few of the foremost legal thinkers both of Eng-
land and America. It is about to enter on its eighth volume ;
it has accumulated a reserve fund, and is in a perfectly soimd
financial condition.
The Faculty is composed of six Professors, two Assistant-
Professors, two Lecturers and one Instructor, by whom forty-
eight lectures are delivered every week. They are not men
engaged in other occupations, who dwell at a distance, and
hurry down from time to time to give one or two hasty lect-
ures. They all live close to the College, and "they almost
without exception devote their entire time to the work of the
School, and the personal needs of the students." "I have
seen," said President Eliot, "four Professors added to the
Faculty of Law since Professor LangdelPs accession ; if genius
be a remarkable capacity for work, they are all men of
genius." ^
It is the great desire, not only of the Governing Bodies in
general, but also of the Faculty of the Law School, that all
who study in it should first have graduated in Arts. In Oxford
so strongly is it felt by some of the Law Professors that the
School of Literae Humaniores best disciplines the mind, that,
if a man destined for the Bar has to choose between it and the
Law School, they always advise him to follow the wider instead
of the narrower course. He had better, they think, learn all
his law in a barrister's chambers than miss the best part of a
Uberal training. Professor Goodwin, with all his admiration
of the learning and the research of German universities, yet
1 Harvard University, 2^oth Anniversary, p. 98.
264 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
sees how in regard to " a purely liberal education " they are
surpassed by those of England and America. "A German,"
he writes, " passes by a single leap from the life of a school-
boy to that of a man who is (or ought to be) beginning the
serious work of Ufe. He knows no period of transition such
as is open to the English and American youth, when his ship is
loosed from shore but is still in harbour, when he is in the
world but not exactly of the world, when he has a right to
spend his time in becoming acquainted with the great heritage
which has been bequeathed him before he is called to admin-
ister it and improve it for his successors. To this habit of our
English race of taking a period of rest combined with most
active work, of active work free from the responsibilites of real
life, between boyhood and manhood, we owe much that gives
the English and American college-bred man his distinct char-
acter, which often makes him a more cultivated man than one
of a different stamp with perhaps far greater learning." ^
True as this is, unless our students who are intended for the
Bar or the Solicitor's Office stay on at our universities and
study law as a science, their education will always be maimed
and imperfect. We must follow in Professor LangdelPs steps,
and establish a School in which that natural impatience which
comes over the best minds, by the end of their imdergraduates*
course, to enter on the real work of life, shall be satisfied. To
do this, our short terms and frequent vacations must come to
an end. The real work of life is not carried on in twenty-five
weeks of each year divided into three periods, separated by
vacations, the shortest of which lasts at least a month. There
must be, as at Harvard, the long sweep of work from the end
of September to the end of Jime, broken only by a few days'
1 The Present and Future of Harvard College, p. 33.
i
XIV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 265
rest at Christmas and Easter. The gain will be twofold — a
gain in the steadiness of work and in its amount. By the end
of his three years* course the student will have had, not
seventy-two weeks of study broken up into nine periods, but
one hundred and eleven weeks divided into three. When
once we have a well-organized School and a large staff of Pro-
fessors all inspired with that spirit which animates these New
England teachers, and all gifted with that genius which consists
in a remarkable capacity for work, we shall soon have a body
of students equally inspired and equally gifted. The School
will grow with the rapidity of which Harvard boasts ; in the
ten years between 1882 and 1892, it saw its students of law
increase in number from one hundred and thirty-one to three
hundred and ninety-four. Stricter measures which were taken
two years ago to exclude incompetent men have, for a time,
caused a slight check ; in the present year there are but three
hundred and fifty-three on the list. Of these rather more than
seven in every ten have taken a degree in Arts. In 1891-92,
for the first time, the Harvard graduates were outnumbered
by the graduates of all the other universities combined. Yale
sent twenty-one. The average age at entrance was a few weeks
under twenty-three.^ In America, as in England, youths at the
present day make too long a stay at school, entering upon
their university life at least a year too late.
Daniel Webster, in one of his speeches, looks forward to the
time when America shall repay to Europe the great debt of
learning which she owes her. The repayment to England has
already begun ; all that we have to do is to stretch out our
hands and to gather in the fiiiits of Harvard's experience in
the method of teaching law.
1 Harvard University^ by F. Bollet, p. 69.
CHAPTER XV.
The Lawrence Scientific School — Special Students.
THE growth of the Scientific School has been more rapid
even than that of the Law School. "It has to-day
twenty times as many students as it had seven years ago." In
1886 they were but fourteen in number; now they are two
hundred and eighty.^ It was founded in 1847 by a noble gift
of Mr. Abbott Lawrence, but it was long in taking root. It
was in the department of Natural History that it made its first
great start. "Nothing," says Professor Goodwin, "rouses a
stronger opposition to any scheme for university reform than
the charge that it is foreign."' Happily there is not appa-
rently the same jealousy of foreigners; for it was the Swiss
Agassiz, who had been trained in the best methods of the great
German universities, who by his genius, his ardent love of
knowledge and his persuasive eloquence, stirred up the citizens
of Boston and the Legislature of the Commonwealth to found
the University Museum. It would have been in itself a noble
monument to his memory, but to render it still worthier his son,
Professor Alexander Agassiz, has laid out on it at his own cost
more than a quarter of a million of dollars. " There is," says
President EUot, " no institution in the world which offers richer
and more varied opportunities for the study of Natural History
1 Annual Reports f 1892-93, p. 7.
^ The Present and Future of Harvard College^ p. 21.
266
THE nr" YorK
PUBLIC ;. ?^ARY
ASTOR, LEr^ ^N
TILDEN FOU- -/
• J J-
1
Kl
CHAP. XV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 267
than the Lawrence Scientific School."^ Nevertheless, owing
apparently to defects in organization, the number of students
had of late years fallen away. Up to 1890 it had been "as
distinct a professional school as the Law School or the Medical
School. Since its consolidation with the other two depart-
ments under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it has grown
with great rapidity. Its students work side by side under one
Faculty, play on the same teams, row in the same boats, and
mingle freely in the same societies."* Of the two hundred
and eighty students, one hundred and forty-two entered with
the intention of tabng the degree of Bachelor of Science,
while the rest either resorted to the School for the sake of
pursuing some particular study, or did not propose to go
through the four years' course.* The entrance examination is
easier for the young students of Science than for one who
intends to take his degree in Arts. On the other hand, when
he is once in, more work is required of him, and more is freely
done. " As a rule," says the President, " there is more of the
spirit of hard work in the Scientific Schools or Courses than
in the Colleges or College Departments of Universities. The
motive of earning a livelihood presses more constantly, and
the students feel more distinctly that they are beginning their
life work."* The candidates for a degree work at one of
" seven compactly arranged groups of subjects." All either at
entrance or, if they prefer, at the end of their course must
pass an examination in English. Those taking their degree
this year have to satisfy the examiners that they have "read
1 History of Higher Education, etc., by G. G. Bush, pp. 117-1S.
. 2 Harvard University^ by F. BoUes, p. 59.
* Catalogue, p. 246; Annual Reports, 1892-93, p. 104.
* Annual Reports, 1891-92, p. 22; lb, 1892-93, p. II*
268 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
intelligently Shakespeare's Julius Casar and Merchant of
Venice^ Scott's Lady of the Lake, Arnold's Sohrab and RustufHy
the " Sir Roger de Coverley Papers " in TTie Spectator^ Macau-
lay's Second Essay on the Earl of Chatham, Emerson's Ameri-
can Scholar, Irving's Sketch-Book, Scott's Abbot, Dickens's
David Copperfieldr ^
This School is open to undergraduates in general ; some of
the courses counting for the degree, either of Bachelor of Arts
or of Bachelor of Medicine. Dr. Goodale, Professor of
Natural History, told me that last year two hundred students
in all attended his classes on Botany. His lecture-room is
admirably fitted up. In one part of the Museum he showed
me long cases full of wonderful imitations of plants in glass,
so perfect that they stand the test of the microscope. They
are the productions of a father and son named Blaschka, who
belong to a family long settled in Germany, which for many
generations has produced skilful workers in glass. I was told
that when the son paid a visit to America, and saw in the Har-
vard Museum these flowers thus displayed, and his name and
his father's inscribed on the walls, the tears came into his eyes.
One of the Professor's pupils had lately made a minute exami-
nation of the weeds on a small plot of ground. Scarcely a
single one of nearly seventy varieties was of American origin.
The European seeds get as great a mastery over the native
seeds as the white men got over the red.
For the last twenty years, during six weeks of the Long
Vacation, the College has been open to students, whether they
are members of the University or outsiders. The Summer
Courses, as they are called, include instruction in German,
French, English, Anglo-Saxon, engineering, physics, chemistry,
1 Harvard University^ by F. Bolles, p. 58; Catalogue, p. 247.
\
XV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 269
botany, geology, mathematics, and physical training. In the
Medical School, moreover, "courses in many branches of
practical and scientific medicine are given." Last year three
hundred and forty-six students in all attended, of whom a large
proportion were teachers. The summer school vacation, it
must be remembered, is much longer in the United States than
in England. Of these three hundred and forty-six, two hun-
dred and forty-three were men and one hundred and three
were women.^ I doubt whether at Oxford, in the Long Vaca-
tion Extension Lectures, the men form a tenth part of the
whole number. The work done at Harvard spreads over a
much longer time and is more serious. There is nothing of a
literary picnic about these Summer Courses. The teaching is
mainly done by "the younger instructors and assistants who
have become familiar with the ground covered during their
regular labours in term-time under the guidance of the older
teachers in the same department. A few Assistant- Professors
take part in the work ; but no Professors — except perhaps by
giving a few lectures during the progress of some course in which
they are interested." Some of the instruction given is of a
high order. Thus in history this year one of the Courses " is
open only to experienced teachers and students already well
prepared in American History. They will do daily work in
the Library on a special subject under the direction of the In-
structor." The ordinary fee for each Course is twenty dollars
{£^. 1. 8.), but for one or two of the subjects so much as thirty
or even thirty-five dollars {jQ6. 2. 6. ; £t. 3. o.) is charged.*
1 Of the 354 names in the Catalogue^ 249 are those of men and 105 of
women. Eight are inserted in more than one list. I have assumed that
of these eight six were men and two women. Catalogue^ pp. 446, 538.
2 Annual Reports^ 1891-^2, p. 39 ; CataU^gue^ pp. 118, 401, 445.
270 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Harvard, in her eagerness to promote learning, freely receives
students who for want of means or time cannot go through the
ordinary four years' course, but who, nevertheless, wish to pursue
some particular study at a university. These men are known
as Special Students. Before admittance they must give proof
that they have learning enough to profit by the teaching. In
their work they are under the control of the Committee of
Advisers, and in respect to discipline they are on the same
footing as the ordinary undergraduates. A watchful eye has to
be kept over this department lest it should be used by those
who look upon a university as a great and glorious play-ground.
Idlers are sent away. To those who do well Certificates of
Proficiency are given on Commencement Day. This year there
are one hundred and sixty-two of these students.^ I hope that
the day will shortly come when in our English Universities also
we shall freely admit in every department the eager learner,
however great may be his ignorance of certain subjects. When
I consider the scores and scores of young men who throng the
Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, who are no more fit to be
in a university than a cow is fit to be in a garden, I am amazed
at the care which is taken to bar out many a promising student.
This barrier is raised by those who have never looked upon a
university but as a place where a degree is earned, and on a
degree but as a distinction inseparably connected with some
knowledge of Greek and Latin. In their eyes education is
nothing but a narrow and well-beaten track which all men have
followed or ought to have followed. Those who have travelled
along it, whether freely or cudgelled at every step, are alone fit
for the liberal studies of a university. They may be dull, gross,
lazy, haters of knowledge, scorners of learned men ; their chief
1 Catalogue, pp. 187, 207; Annual Reports, 1891-92, p. 75.
XV. HARVARD COLLEGE. 271
delight may be in the strength of their own or of other men's
legs ; they may, unless under compulsion, read nothing but the
sporting newspapers ; they may be ever startling the studious
cloisters by their boisterous ignorance ; " flown with insolence
and wine," they may do shameful wrong to ancient seats of
learning, nevertheless before them the barriers have been
rightly lowered, because in the ten long years spent at school
they have been birched into Greek and Latin enough to carry
them, with the help of the " crammer," through their examina-
tions. While such men not only disgrace the university but
lower the general standard, others are shut out who would have
brought to it new interests and modes of life and fresh thoughts.
How often does it happen that a young man who, like Gold-
smith, flowers late, suddenly wakens up to all the delight and
hopefulness of knowledge ! Some one study above all he longs
to pursue. He seeks such aid as he can get, and learns all that
he can from books and chance instructors. The time comes
when he feels the need of all the means of learning which a
great university alone can give. He strives to enter, but he is
coldly repulsed. He is told that if in his ignorance of Greek or
Latin, or perchance of our English arithmetic with its ridiculous
tables of weight and measures, he were let in, a blow would be
struck at the whole system of public education, over which the
University presumes to watch with all the conceit of a hen over
a brood of ducklings. Surely it will be time enough to exclude
those who only wish to learn something and not everything
when all have been excluded who so far from wishing to learn
everything learn nothing. Let every one who wishes to enter
the University satisfy the Faculty of any single department that
he has knowledge and capacity enough to profit by the teaching,
the door should at once be flung open to him. If he shows him-
272 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap. xv.
self unworthy of his great opportunities, let him be quickly sent
packing. When once he is inside, mixing with men of great
and varied knowledge, he will see his sky widening on all sides
and will find fresh longings for knowledge springing up in him.
He should be placed on the same footing as the other under-
graduates — entitled to enjoy the same privileges and advant-
ages, and subject to the same discipline. If the course of
studies that he pursues is too narrow, let no degree be con-
ferred upon him. Nevertheless, as at Harvard, he should re-
ceive a certificate of proficiency, which should testify, not only
that he has acquired a certain amount of knowledge, but
— which is of scarcely less importance — that he has acquired
it during his residence in a learned society.
k
CHAPTER XVI.
Radcliffe College. — The Harvard Annex.
ON April 23, 1849, Longfellow recorded in his Journal:
" We have had at Faculty meeting an application from
a young lady to enter College as a regular student." ^ Who
she was, and what answer was sent to her request, we are not
told. In some remote day the antiquary will search the
archives of the College in the hope of discovering her applica-
tion, and of making known to the world the name of the girl,
who, a full half century in advance of her time, took this
daring step. Even now, much as has been done, no woman
can enter Harvard as a regular student. This young lady will
be looked on as the Pilgrim Mother of RadcUffe College, or
rather, perhaps, as one of the daring adventurers from Norway,
who first tried to settle on the inhospitable shores of New Eng-
land. Nearly thirty years later a second young lady came to
Cambridge, and was fortunate enough to get instruction in
Greek, Latin, and English from three sound scholars. Professors
Goodwin, Greenough, and Child. '* By her abiHty and enthusi-
asm for learning, she aroused in her teachers great interest in
the whole subject of woman's education."* By Mr. Arthur
Gilman, neither a teacher nor a graduate of Harvard, the sug-
1 Life ofH. W, Lon^eUow, II. 138.
2 See an article on ** Radcliffe College " in the Harvard Graduated
Magazine for March, 1894, of which I have made much use in writing
this chapter.
T 373
274 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
gestion was thereupon made " that instruction should be s)rs-
tematically and publicly, though unofficially, offered to women
by the College teachers." He was supported in his proposal
by the example which had been recently set in England by the
foundation of Girton College. To the English Cambridge
the New England Cambridge once more turned her eyes.
"The proposition," we are told, "might well have seemed
impracticable, but it was not without the countenance of foreign
example." A second College for women was soon founded on
the banks of the Cam, and Oxford quickly followed with her
two Halls. Not to be left behind in the race, a few ladies of
the New England Cambridge published a circular in which
they unfolded their plan for the " Private Collegiate Instruction
of Women." A sum of fifteen thousand dollars (;£3o66),
far too small to found a College, but large enough to try a
great experiment in education, was subscribed by a few friends.
The instruction that was offered was not to be " of a lower
grade than that given to the College," and the entrance exami-
nation was to be the same as that through which the imder-
graduates had to pass. The teaching of the two sexes was
to be kept apart. "Thirty-seven Professors and Instructors
offered courses, and among them many of the most distin-
guished teachers of the University." In September, 1879,
twenty-seven students began their work in rooms hired in a
dwelling-house on the Appian Way. " An extra room was pro-
vided where students could spend the intervals between reci-
tations, and in that room some of the Instructors left books
of reference for their use."
In the second year the number of students rose to forty-
seven; by the third year the Managers felt that they were
strong enough to form themselves into a Corporation under
XVI. HARVARD COLLEGE. IIS
the title of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women.
Mr. Oilman was appointed Secretary, and Mrs. Agassiz, the
widow of the great naturalist, President. To their wise zeal,
kept at the same even height from year to year, the success of
this great cause is largely due. It was not by the long name
which the Society had chosen for itself that the institution was
to be known. A nickname sprang up, as nicknames always do
spring up where brevity has been neglected. The Society for
the Collegiate Instruction of Women, and the building in
which its work is done, have long been everywhere known as
the Harvard Annex, or more briefly as the Annex. By the
end of the first four years three of the students had finished
the complete undergraduate course "parallel to that of the
College, directed by the same teachers, and tested by identical
examinations. They received, instead of degrees, the certifi-
cates of the Society, which stated that the holder * has pur-
sued a course of study equivalent in amount and quality to
that for which the degree of Bachelor of Arts is conferred in
Harvard College, and has passed in a satisfactory manner
examinations on that course, corresponding to the College
examinations.' The graduate certificate has ever since been
in that form."
By this time the Society had successfully gone through its
first period of probation, and could now appeal for support to
the country at large. The appeal should have met with a
liberal reply, for the need of a higher education of women
ought to be more strongly felt in the United States than per-
haps in any other country of the world. The great majority
of American teachers are women ; in the larger cities, in every
hundred scarcely ten are men. It is, no doubt, not a little
owing to this fact, and to the imperfect education which
276 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
women have hitherto received, that the American schoolboy is
behind the schoolboys of England, France, and Germany in
book-learning. In answer to the appeal, not more than sixty-
seven thousand dollars (;£i3,70o) was raised — a small sum
compared with the splendid donations made year after year to
Harvard for the education of men. Donors and bequeathers
follow the general fashion and move in one long rut ; giving
and bequeathing where gifts and bequests have always been
made. May some millionaire, for once, be touched with orig-
inality, and make his great gift to this College for Women !
The students soon became too numerous for the few hired
rooms in which their work was done. In 1885 an old mansion
was bought, facing the pleasant Common and close to the
Washington Elm. Washington's Birthday had been the date of
the first circular issued six years earlier by the Managers. In
one of the rooms of this house the poet of the two hundredth
anniversary of the College had written his Fair Harvard.
Hitherto the students had had no life in common ; they had
come together to be taught, and had separated when once the
lesson was over. In their new home, with the great additions
which before long were made, they were to have an accommo-
dation not unworthy of a small college. They were still, how-
ever, to lodge as before, scattered about in private families.
Their number has grown in fifteen years from twenty-seven to
two hundred and fifty ; of whom one hundred are taking the
full undergraduate course of four years. The Academic Board
is composed of eight of the principal Professors of Harvard,
together with the President and Secretary of the Society. The
work of instruction is done by sixty-nine of the Harvard
teachers, of whom twenty-one are fiiU Professors and fifteen
Assistant-Professors.
k
XVI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 277
Much as the University has done^ it is a pity that it has not
had the courage to do still more. From all the lecture-rooms,
from almost all the Laboratories, and from the Medical School
the women are still excluded. The exclusion from the lecture-
rooms tells not only against the pupil but against the teacher,
who has felt the weariness of repeating before a class of young
women the lecture which perhaps that same morning he had
delivered before a class of young men. Harvard has not even
the timid courage which the Managers of our Oxford Halls
showed from the first. They allowed their girls to enter the
lecture-rooms of the University Professors and of the College
Tutors, so long as each set was accompanied by a chaperon.
It was not the University of Oxford which made this regulation,
though it is still sometimes enforced by nervous Professors.
The University, as such, had no fear of its young men as the
Corporation and Overseers of Harvard apparently have of theirs.
It was the young women who were watched over, and watched
mainly by the anxious Boards of their own Halls. To the
Laboratories in the Oxford Museum they have gone unat-
tended. This indulgence, I conjecture, was granted because
no chaperon could be found for love or any reasonable sum of
money, who would sit patiently in unbroken silence for three or
four hours together by the side of a young enthusiast, while
under a microscope she examined the leg of a frog. In the
last two years there has been a relaxation in these rules, at all
events in one of the Halls. Two girls or more can now attend
a lecture without a chaperon. It is only for solitary students
that a companion must be provided. The need of such com-
panionship is far greater in Oxford where the lecture-room often
opens out of the same staircase as the rooms of undergraduates.
In University College, London, the girls go unchaperoned to the
278 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
ordinary classes. Three years ago I attended a few of the
lectures in the University of Geneva, and found the young men
and women studying together and sitting on the same benches.
I did not notice the slightest indication of giddiness on the part
of a single student. What is refused at Harvard with one hand
is often given with the other. To the College Library the
women have no admittance ; nevertheless, they have brought
to the Annex any book which they may need. From the work
of the Graduate School they are too much cut off; in some
departments, however, provision has been made for them.
" The attitude of the students of Harvard College towards the
Annex students, and of the latter towards the former, appears,"
we are told, " to be that of unconcern." Whatever unconcern
there may be in the attitude of the young people, and however
admirable this unconcern may be, I trust that the unconcern of
the Overseers and Corporation and of every member of the
Faculty will before long entirely disappear, and that [the whole
of the noble foundation will be thrown open to men and women
alike. Above all, may the women be admitted to the Medical
School, from which, by an illiberality unworthy of the age, they
seem to be entirely shut out I
A great advance has this year been made — an advance
which before long must sweep away all these idle distinctions.
Hitherto the Annex has in no way been officially recognized by
the University. No mention of it is made in the Catalogue ;
none even in those two pamphlets on life at Harvard by the
late Secretary to the University, from which I have frequently
quoted. The President and the Deans of the Faculties know
nothing of it in their Reports. The good they do, they do by
stealth and blush to have it fame. Henceforth the Annex is
openly and avowedly to be attached to the University, though
k
XVI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 279
by a bond somewhat loose in appearance, but which will most
certainly gradually tighten and be made indissoluble. It will
be a corporation in itself, thus holding the same position as one
of our Oxford or Cambridge Colleges. It will have the entire
control of its funds and of the discipline of its students. The
instruction, the examinations, and the conferring of degrees will
be in the hands of the President and Fellows of the University.
They will be " the Visitors of the Corporation. No instructor
or examiner will be appointed, employed, or retained with-
out their approval." The diplomas of the degrees that are
conferred will be the diplomas of the Corporation, approved of
by the Corporation of Harvard, countersigned by the President
with the seal of the University affixed. It is not avowedly the
University degree that the Corporation and Overseers are yet
prepared to offer. They have not been able to screw their
courage up to that point ; but they are much more than half-
way across the stream, and onwards they must go. There is
fear, we are told, that the full Harvard degree would attract so
large a number of women that the new College would be over-
whelmed. I am reminded how nearly sixty years ago our
Postmaster-General opposed the scheme of penny postage be-
cause the number of letters would be so large that the walls
of the Post-Office would burst. The letters, he seemed to think,
should be kept down to the size of the building, and not the
building enlarged to the number of the letters. In the present
case where can the danger lie? These young women whom
the fearful eye of authority sees flocking in from every State in
the Union would have no power to force admittance. A moder-
ate increase in the difficulty of the entrance examination would,
as effectually even as a pestilence, thin their ranks. No more
need be received each year than the buildings can conveniently
280 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
hold. A second objection is raised that 'Ho make anything
like an impartial sharing of the resources of the University
would cripple the present work for men." The mere act of
conferring the full Harvard degree would not cripple the
resources, neither would they be crippled if the women were
to attend the lectures. Whenever there is not room for them,
in those few cases the lecture would have to be repeated, as
indeed it is repeated for them now. Generally, however, they
would only help to fill empty benches. In the Laboratories
there might be greater difficulties, but in 1892, of which year I
have the Report of the Society, there were but four students in
Chemistry and three in Advanced Zoology. The third objec-
tion has far more force. " It is not clear that the opinion of the
graduates and friends of the University is yet so settled as to
justify this departure from the established constitution of the
University." The Corporation and the Overseers cannot safely
move much faster than is approved of by the general sense of
that part of the community which is most highly educated. If
the country is not yet ripe for the change, the sure course of
events must be patiently awaited. At the same time, in hasten-
ing in the coming of this good time the University should take
the lead. This hitherto she has not done. She is behind many
of the leading American Universities. She is far behind almost
all the countries of the Old World. Even Oxford and Cam-
bridge, weighted as they are with the conservatism of six centu-
ries, have outstripped her. Germany alone is surpassed by her
in her unwillingness to let women enjoy the same opportunities
as men, not only in the great race of life, but in the far nobler
but uncontentious struggle to win that knowledge and those
qualities of the mind which give life its fulness and perfection.
Who can wonder that this new constitution, when it was
XVI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 281
promulgated, met with strong opposition? All those who will
not allow that half a loaf is better than no bread, were in arms.
Petitions were presented to the Legislature of the Common-
wealth of Massachusetts against the bill, by which the new
powers were to be conferred. In the State House, on February
28 of this year, both parties appeared before the Committee on
Education. Happily, in the interval, much had been done by
discussion in the newspapers to show that, though not a little
was left to do, a great advance had been made. The way to
conciliation was opened. Some concession was made, and the
opposition was withdrawn. Woman's reason triumphed over
woman's rights; with time the rights will be granted to the
last jot. Let those who are still doubtful and unsatisfied,
take courage from the words spoken at the great Harvard Com-
memoration, nearly seven years ago, by a graceful writer, the
late George William Curtis : " Whoever is happy enough to be
here to-day, must acknowledge that to all other good fortunes
must now be added, not only the felicity of coming here to
salute the Mother upon her two hundred and fifHeth anni-
versary, but of finding her two hundred and fifty times fairer
and stronger and more beloved than ever before. Still more,
while he walks about this Zion, telling her towers, marking her
bulwarks, and counting her palaces, if he catches a glimpse of
the modest Annex, he is still happier in knowing that as his
ever-young Mother starts to complete her third century, the
spell of old tradition which commanded her to bring forth
men-children only, is broken forever." ^
For the new College a name had to be sought. The full
title was far too long and the Annex was without dignity. A
friend of mine overheard an argument carried on in a train by
* Harvard University, 2^oth Anniversary, p. 309.
282 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
two girls about the merits of Wellesley College and the Annex.
Wellesley College stands in a park of three hundred acres on the
edge of a small lake. When it was opened, its generous founder,
Mr. H. F. Durant, a New England lawyer, said that his three
hundred women students should each one have an acre of
ground to herself to dance on. So rapidly has the College
grown, that with much less than half an acre they would now
have to be content. With all its great superiority of grounds
and buildings, it is at present behind the humble Annex in the
instruction which it imparts. Its teachers, with scarcely an
exception, are women, few of whom can have had the full
advantages of a University education, while the students at
Cambridge are taught by a body of University Professors, who,
for ability, learning, and zeal, are unsurpassed by any in
America. It was not, however, in these matters that the
champion of Wellesley in the train tried to strike the balance.
It was the name of the Annex, that by its lightness turned the
scales as she held them up. She was not going to be " Nico-
demused into nothing." She thought, no doubt, of the
Wellesley " Yell." An Annex " Yell " would be an absurdity.
It would die away in the throat and mock the young enthusiast
who should try to raise it
Some of the friends of the infant College that was awaiting its
christening would have called it Martha Washington, after the
great Washington's wife. But to a "Yell," Martha Washing-
ton is not easily harmonized. Moreover, the very name
Martha does not come with the right association of ideas. It
does not awaken the right thoughts and recall the right
memories. It raises before the mind the picture of a College
of Housewifery ; it tells nothing of that good part which the
real student chooses, which shall never be taken away. What
k
XVI. HARVARD COLLEGE. 283
had Martha Washington to do with learning ? Her skill in
making a goose-pie was, I dare say, as indisputable as the skill
of the wife of the Vicar of Wakefield ; but education, like
argument, she left to others. While all the "gossips" were
ransacking their heads for a suitable name, it fortunately hap-
pened that an antiquary, Mr. A. M. Davis, in his researches
into the beginnings of Harvard, discovered that one of the
earliest benefactors of the infant College was Lady Mowlson,
the widow of Sir Thomas Mowlson, Lord Mayor of London
in 1634. Her maiden name was Ann Radcliffe. About the
year 1643, "out of Christian desire to advance good learning,
she gave one hundred pounds to be improved in New England,
in the best way for the help of some poor scholar or scholars in
the College, and to be settled for that use." ^ How staunch a
Puritan she was, is shown by her subscribing in May of the fol-
lowing year no less than six hundred pounds towards the sum
of twenty thousand pounds sent to the Scottish army which
had marched into England in support of the Parliamentary
forces. * It is after this woman, animated as she was by a love
of liberty and of learning, that the College for Women is to be
called. Like the names of Harvard and Cambridge, it binds
the great New England University to the old country by a
fresh link. To the Oxonian it comes with a peculiarly pleasant
sound, recaUing, as it does, his own Radcliffe Library.
Radcliffe College is far from being even now on a perfect
equality with Harvard. She is not as yet one of the members
of the great University. She no longer indeed gathers up the
1 Quoted from a letter by the Rev. Thomas Weld, dated Gates Head,
Jan. 2, 1649, given in Ann Radcliffe — Lady Mowlson, by A. M. Davis.
Reprinted from the New England Magazine, February, 1894, p. 773.
3 lb. p. 780.
284 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP. xvi.
crumbs that are thrown to her. She has her seat at the well-
fumished table, but it is below the salt. She has time on her
side. Her full day will come when she is ripe for it Mean-
while she must turn to the old foundation, as Portia turned to
her Lord Bassanio, and with her say that she
" Is an unlesson'd girl, unschoord, unpractised;
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn; happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her Lord, her Governor, her King."
^
-1-
•L
I <«*'*^ \ -- '".
\
CHAPTER XVII.
The Library. — Gifts from England.— The Fire of 1764. —Gore Hall. —
The Bequests of Prescott, Sumner, and Carlyle. — J. L. Sibley. — Dr.
Justin Winsor.
THE Library of Harvard College, of which the foundation
had been laid in the bequest of John Harvard's books,
grew slowly but steadily during the seventeenth century, mainly
by gifts from England. It was largely increased by the Tar-
gums, Talmuds, and Rabbins of Dr. John Lightfoot, the Orient-
alist ; of whom Gibbon wrote that " by constant reading of the
Rabbies he was almost become a Rabbin himself." ^ It was more
than doubled by the bequest of the books of Dr. Theophilus
Gale. On April 4, 1689, Samuel Sewall, when on a visit to
Oxford, recorded in his Diary: "Was shew'd the Library and
Chapel of Corpus Christi CoUedge and the Cellar by Mr. Holland
a Fellow. Library may be ab* the bigness of Harvard. . . .
Said Holland treated me very civilly though told him was a
N[ew] E[ngland] man."^ The books, whether acquired by
gift or by purchase, were of a solid and serious kind. They
had mostly been written by theologians who, like Armado, were
" for whole volumes in folio." Among the donors were such
men as the Rev. Mr. Rogers, the founder of Rowley, Massa-
chusetts, who in his last will professed himself " to have lived
1 The Harvard University Library ^ by C. K. Bolton, p. 435; Gibbon's
Misc, WorkSf ed. 1796, II. 56.
2 SewaU's Diary^ I. 304, 307.
285
286 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
and to die an unfeigned hater of all the base opinions of the
Anabaptists and Antinomians, and of all other frantic dotages
of the times that spring from them." In the same solemn
document he "protested against the general disguisement of
long, ruffian-like hair." ^ The age of the Restoration and of
Queen Anne came and went by without affecting the Library.
In 1723 "it contained no volume from Addison, or his fellows,
nothing of Locke, Dryden, South, or Tillotson; Shakespeare
and Milton had been recently acquired." * In the same year
Cotton Mather recorded that " the scholars' studies are filled
with books which may truly be called Satan's library." ' Per-
haps among them were some of Dryden's Plays and Tillotson's
Sermons, — equally detestable in the eyes of a rigid Puritan.
Seventy years later, when Channing entered College, "the
young men," we are told, "were passionately given up to the
study of Shakespeare." * What an outcry must Mather have
raised if he saw the letter which one of the greatest of Har-
vard's early benefactors, Thomas HoUis, sent with a parcel of
books from England. "If," he wrote, "there happen to be
some books not quite orthodox, in search after truth with an
honest design don't be afraid of them. A public library ought
to be furnished, if it can, with con as well as pro, that students
may read, try, judge. * Thus saith Aristotle,' ' Thus saith Cal-
vin,' will not now pass for proof in our London disputations." *
Bishop Berkeley sent books — Berkeley, to whom belonged
"every virtue under Heaven"; Bishop Sherlock, "whose
style," said Johnson, " is very elegant, though he has not made
1 Quincy's Harvard^ I. 426.
3 The Harvard University Library^ by C. K. Bolton, p. 436.
* Quincy's Harvard^ I. 341.
* Life of W. E. Channingt I. 66.
fi Quincy's Harvard^ I. 433.
XVII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 287
it his principal study," and the physician, Dr. Mead, "who
lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man."
In January, 1 764, the Library was destroyed by fire. Dur-
ing the vacation the small-pox had broken out in Boston, and
the General Court of the Colony had fled to Cambridge, just
as in earlier years in England the Parliament had fled to St.
Albans and Oxford. The Governor and Council met in the
Library, while the House of Representatives sat in the room
beneath. The weather was very cold, and too large a fire, it
seems likely, was kept up. " In the middle of a very tem-
pestuous night," writes an eye-witness, " a severe cold storm of
snow, attended with high wind, we were awaked by the alarm
of fire. Harvard Hall, the only one of our ancient buildings
which still remained, was seen in flames. In a very short time
this venerable monument of the piety of our ancestors was
turned into a heap of ruins." ^ Of five thousand volumes only
a hundred were saved, and of John Harvard's books but a
single one. It bears the title of The Christian Warfare
against the Deuill^ Worlds and Flesh. It was printed in Lon-
don in 1634.* There was grief in the Colony but no despair.
Two days after the fire the House of Representatives " resolved
unanimously that Harvard Hall be built at the expense of the
Province, and granted two thousand pounds to begin the new
edifice." Subscriptions were made both in America and Eng-
land. " The Archbishops of Canterbury and York subscribed
and used their influence in favour of the College." From the
King and Court there came nothing. Benjamin Franklin gave
" valuable instruments for the apparatus ; also a bust of Lord
Chatham"; Langhome's Plutarch was sent by Boswell's
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 112, 480.
2 The Harvard University Library^ pp. 433, 437.
288 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
" worthy booksellers and friends," the Messrs. Dilly, at whose
house Johnson " owned that he always found a good dinner."
From Barlow Trecothick, the London Alderman, about whom,
despising him as a Whig, he asked, " where did he learn Eng-
lish?" came books and thirty pounds in money. Whitefield
did not forget the day when he had preached beneath the elm
on the Common, for by his own gifts and those of his friends
he was a large benefactor. Dr. Heberden sent three guineas ^
— Cowper*s "virtuous and faithful Heberden," '* uitimus
Romanorum^ the last of the learned physicians."
The Library grew rapidly, and by 1 790 could boast of twelve
thousand volumes. During the Revolutionary War, by a gift of
the Legislature, it had received four hundred volumes confis-
cated from Tory refugees.' Most of these unfortunate men, it
is to be hoped, had had time to carry off their books with
them ; otherwise the King*s friends would seem to have been
but an illiterate set. Eighty years after the great fire, in
August, 1834, an alarm was raised of a second conflagration.
A Protestant mob had burnt down a Roman Catholic Chapel
in a suburb of Boston ; in checking their lawlessness the Gov-
ernment had shown almost as much laxness as if it had been
an Anti-Slavery Hall that was attacked. Rumours of retaliation
spread, for Papists have never been so meek under wrong as
Abolitionists. On a certain night a bonfire, it was said, was to
be made of the Library of the College. A body of students
and graduates was secretly brought together to defend it. "At
dusk sentinels were stationed at the windows, muskets in hand,
ready to renew the sounds of war which had not been heard
within its peaceful walls since the days of 1775. They sent
1 Quincy*s Harvard^ II. 113, 491.
^ lb. II. 399; Higher Education, etc., by G. G. Bush, p. 63.
^
XVII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 289
out a waiter to reconnoitre towards Charlestown. He returned,
saying that he could hear nothing but frogs. At another time
a horseman came at full speed to announce that one thousand
Irishmen were on their way to Cambridge."^ The thousand
Irishmen were as insubstantial as the four hundred Jesuits
who, at the time of the Popish Plot, crossed the Straits of
Dover on dromedaries and exercised every night on Hamp-
stead Heath.
The bequest of one hundred thousand dollars (;^ 20,450)
made to his old College by an eminent Boston lawyer, Christo-
pher Gore, came at a time when the collection of books had out-
grown the building in which it was lodged. In 1838 the foun-
dation was laid of Gore Hall, the present home of the Library.
Frequent gifts in money, books, and autographs have greatly
enriched it of late years, while the Corporation of the Univer-
sity has given it the most liberal support. On it and on its
branches in the different Schools little less than fifty thousand
dollars (;^ 10,225) is spent every year,^ two thousand pounds
more than was spent on the Bodleian in 1893.^ American
scholars have not been unmindful of the debt they owe to their
Aima Mater, Prescott bequeathed to the Library his books
and manuscripts relating to the reign of Ferdinand and
Isabella. Sumner sent it more than fifteen thousand pam-
phlets. " He used to say that he preferred having them at the
Library rather than at his residence, because at the Library he
could find at once any particular pamphlet he wished to see."
1 The Harvard University Library^ by C. K. Bolton, p. 441.
^ Higher Education^ etc., by G. G. Bush, p. 106.
' Under the Copyright Act the Bodleian can claim a copy of every new
book free of charge. Nearly forty thousand volumes were thus received
last year.
u
290 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
On his death he left it many rare books; among them an
Album in which Milton had inscribed at Geneva : —
" — if Vertue feeble were,
Heaven it selfe would stoope to her.
Coelum non animu muto du trans mare
Curro
Joannes Miltonius
Angltts
Juny io° 1639." 1
Lowell, when he was American Minister to Spain, wrote from
Madrid: "I buy books mainly with a view to the College
Library, whither they will go when I am in Mount Auburn,
with so much undone that I might have done." *
Nay, even from our side of the Atlantic there came a
scholarly bequest. Carlyle left it a part of his "poor and
indeed almost pathetic collection of books," to quote the
words of his will. He adds: —
" Having with good reason, ever since my first appearance in Literature,
a variety of kind feelings, obligations, and regards towards New England,
and indeed long before that a hearty good will, real and steady, which
still continues, to America at large, and recognizing with gratitude how
much of friendliness, of actually credible human love, I have had from
that country, and what immensities of worth and capability I believe and
partly know to be lodged, especially in the silent classes there, I have now,
after due consultation as to the feasibilities, the excusabilities of it, decided
to fulfil a fond notion that has been hovering in my mind these many
years; and I do therefore hereby bequeath the books (whatever of them
I could not borrow, but had to buy and gather, that is, in general whatever
of them are still here) which I used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich
and which shall be accurately searched for, and parted from my other books,
to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, City of Cambridge, State
of Massachusetts, as a poor testimony of my respect for that Alma Mater of
so many of my transatlantic friends, and a token of the feelings above indi-
cated towards the Great Country of which Harvard is the Chief School."
•
1 The Harvard University Library^ by C. K. Bolton, pp. 441-43.
2 Letters of J, R, Lowell, II. 242.
xvn. HARVARD COLLEGE. 291
As a marginal note " to Walker's Anarchia anglicana (Vol.
II. p. 139), where mention is made of the Eikon basilike of
Charles I., Carlyle has written in pencil : * Shewing him (had
it been he^ which palpably it was not) to have been the most
perfect Pharisee, inane Canter, and shovel-hatted Quack that
ever went about in clear-starched surplice and formula ! — Do
but read it.* " ^
One remarkable gift has lately been made by Longfellow's
heirs — five hundred and eighty-six volumes of American
Poetry, mainly presentation copies.^ Who is so hard-hearted
as not to be touched with pity when he reflects on the five
hundred and odd letters which the unhappy recipient had to
write in acknowledgment of these cruel presents from his
brother bards? Compared with such toil as this the Village
Blacksmith's was a mere trifle.
Mr. J. L. Sibley, who was Librarian from 1856 to 1877, by
his constant importunities, added greatly to the collection
which he loved so well. " He begged from his friends the old
books and pamphlets which lay unused in their garrets. At
last, he says, ' I acquired the name of being a sturdy beggar,
and received a gentle hint from the College Treasurer to desist
from begging, which I as gently disregarded.' " * Some twenty
years ago he published a book entitled Harvard Graduates.
His researches ended with the men who took their degrees in
1689. "There are," wrote Lowell, "ninety-seven of them by
tale, and as he fishes them out of those dismal oubliettes they
come up dripping with the ooze of Lethe, like Curll from his
dive in the Thames, like him also gallant competitors for the
* Bibliographical Contributions ^ ed. Justin Winsor, No. 26, p. 6.
* Reports^ 1892-93, p. 174.
* The Harvard University Library ^ p. 443.
292 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
crown of Dulness.^ It is the very balm of authorship. No
matter how far you may be gone under, if you are a graduate
of Harvard College you are sure of being dredged up again
and handsomely buried, with a catalogue of your works to keep
you down. I do not know when the provincialism of New
England has been thrust upon me with so ineradicable a barb.
Not one of their works which stands in any appreciable rela-
tion with the controUing currents of human thought or history,
not one of them that has now the smallest interest for any liv-
ing soul ! And yet, somehow, I make myself a picture of the
past out of this arid waste, just as the mirage rises out of the
dry desert. Dear old Sibley ! I would read even a sermon of
his writing, so really noble and beautiful is the soul under that
commonplace hull ! " ' In his last Report the old Librarian
wrote : " The Library has been during more than half of a
long life the chief object of my interest, and I have given to it
the best of my ability and attainments, and now my eyes have
become so dimmed that I am unable to read this Report." *
Under this good old scholar's successor. Dr. Justin Winsor,
the Library has grown with extraordinary rapidity. In the last
fourteen years the number of books has increased by one
hundred and fifty-nine thousand, and of pamphlets by one
hundred and eleven thousand.* He is a born Librarian. To
extensive learning, a love of books, and the scholar's kindly
gentle nature, he adds common sense and enthusiasm — a rare
combination — and great powers of organization. " I try
never to forget," he wrote, " that the prime purpose of a book
^ Lowell quoted from memory. It was into Reet Ditch that the dives
were made, and Curll was not one of the divers.
« Letters of J. R. Lowell, II. 147.
' The Harvard University Library, p. 443.
* Harvard University, by F. Bolles, p. 12.
^
XVII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 293
is to be much read ; though it is equally true that we are under
obligations to posterity to preserve books whose loss might be
irrecoverable." ^ In this view of the Librarian's duties he has
the President on his side, who says in his last report : " How-
ever troublesome and costly it may be to teach thousands of
students the abundant use of books, it is the most important
lesson that can be given them during their student life." ^ In
the Harvard Statutes it is written: "The Library is for the
use of the whole University." * It is open for readers even on
Sunday afternoons during term-time. On only six week-days
in the whole year is it closed — Christmas Day and the five
great holidays of the Commonwealth, the Twenty-second of
February (Washington's Birthday), Fast Day (no longer kept
as a fast), Memorial Day (the Commemoration of the soldiers
who fell in the war between the North and the South), the
Fourth of July (Declaration of Independence), and Thanks-
giving Day (the general thanksgiving for the blessings of the
year at the end of November). "Twenty years ago only
fifty-seven per cent of the students in College used it, now
over ninety per cent of the upper classmen are borrowers.
The elective system deserves a part of the credit for this
increased use of original authorities. The mere note-taking
or text- book studying student is now the exception where he
used to be the rule." * Undergraduates not only are allowed
to read in the Library, but those " who have given bonds may
take out books, three volumes at a time, and may keep them
one month."* To outsiders these privileges are extended.
* The Harvard University Library, p. 446.
^ Reports f 1892-93, p. 36.
8 Catalogue, p. 33.
* Harvard University^ by F. Bolles, p. 87.
^ Catalogue^ p. 483.
294 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Last year nearly two thousand five hundred persons in all were
registered as borrowers, of whom three hundred and sixty-two
did not belong to the University.^ " Books have been sent to
scholars as far south as New Orleans, and as far west as
Wisconsin and New Mexico. A very general use is made of
the Library by scholars in all parts of New England." * It is
surprising, with such an extensive circulation as this, how small
is the loss. In his last Report the Librarian says : " Of
books reported missing since 1883 there are still four hundred
and fifty-nine unaccounted for" — not fifty volumes a year.
Almost all of these have disappeared from the shelves contain-
ing works of reference and certain other collections to which
all readers have free access.
While the Library is thus turned into a great school where
the young student is taught the use of books, learning and
scholarship are well cared for. From Professor Child I learnt
of the readiness of the University to provide even at a great
cost all the works which a scholar needs. For one rare book,
which he himself required for his English and Scottish Popular
Ballads^ no less than a thousand dollars {jQ20^) was given.
The Professor of the newly-founded Chair of Economic His-
tory, visiting England before he entered on his post, was
directed to order for the Library many rare and costly works
and documents which he needed. Every quarter the Harvard
University Bulletin is issued by the Librarian, in which is given
a classified list of the principal accessions. Under his direc-
tion, moreover, is published from time to time a scholarly series
entitled Bibliographical Contributions, Fifty numbers have
been already issued, among them Principal Books relating to the
1 Reports, 1892-93, p. 173.
* The Harvard University Library, p. 447.
%
XVII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 295
Life and Works of MichaehngelOy with Notes y by C. E. Norton ;
The Bibliography of Ptolemy's Geography ^ by Justin Winsor j
The Dante Collections in the Harvard College and Boston
Public Libraries^ by W. C. Lane ; A Bibliography of Persius^
by M. H. Morgan. How good a thing it would be if at
Oxford some of the money, too often wasted so far as learning
is concerned on scholarships and prize fellowships, were spent
in training young scholars in an exact knowledge of literature !
What excellent work might be done by them in the Bodleian in
preparing, imder the guidance of learned men, a series of
bibUographies such as these; or in gathering and arranging
material for the use of the editor of our great English Dic-
tionary !
In the course of fifty years the collection of books has again
outgrown the building in which it is lodged, in spite of the
addition of a wing and of the creation of several Departmental
Libraries. The number of readers, moreover, has so largely
increased, that sitting room can scarcely be found for the
undergraduates, while for men of learning a quiet place of
study is greatly needed. He who has been used to work in
one of the alcoves in Bodley, where he was never crowded and
where his tired eyes could get rested as they looked down on
the pleasant lawn of Exeter College far below, would study
with reluctance in Gore Hall. However, with the abundant
liberty which is given to a scholar of borrowing books, almost all
the learned work is done outside the building in private houses;
The Librarian, in a Report written in November, 1892, spoke
strongly of the need of enlargement. "I have in earlier
Reports," he said, " exhausted the language of warning and
anxiety in representing the totally inadequate accommodations
for books and readers which Gore Hall affords. Each twelve
296 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap, xvil
months brings us nearer to a chaotic condition."* These
warnings, I conjecture, were addressed not to the Corporation,
but to the rich citizens of the Commonwealth in general It
was for them to add to the permanent foundations of Harvard.
The warnings this time did not fall on deaf ears, and for a brief
space the brightest prospect was opened. In Frederick Loth-
rop Ames, one of the Fellows of the College, the generous
benefactor presented himself. Taking into his counsels the
Librarian and an architect, he planned a noble addition to the
building. When I was at Harvard Dr. Winsor was full of
happiness at the glorious prospect which opened before him
and his beloved Library. " In a moment it was night." The
warm heart was chilled and the generous hand closed by the
sudden stroke of death. Out of the ample fortune which he
left may his heirs soon raise to him that monument which, had
his life been lengthened by a few brief months, he would have
raised to himself.
1 Reports, 1891-92, p. 1 61.
k
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Government of Harvard. — The Charter. — The Overseers. — The
Corporation, Church, and State. — The Faculty. — The President. — The
Professors. — Oxford and Harvard.
" 'T^HE management of Harvard College is in the hands of
X three separate bodies; the first of these being the
Faculty, or immediate government, having the entire discipline
of the students in its hands ; the second being the Corporation,
having the management of the funds and revenues of the College,
and the appointment of instructors, with other duties exercised
under the supervision of the third body, the Overseers, repre-
senting the interests of the graduates and of the public at large." ^
Of these three bodies the oldest is the Board of Overseers and
the youngest the Faculty. The President of the College is ex
officio an Overseer, and President of the Corporation and of
the Faculty. It was in 1642, six years after the resolution was
passed to found the College, that the General Court of the
Colony of Massachusetts Bay placed its government under a
Board composed of " the Governor and Deputy-Governor, and
all the magistrates of this jurisdiction, together with the teach-
ing elders of the six next adjoining towns." These towns were
Boston and four places which are now reckoned as its suburbs,
together with Cambridge. The "teaching elders" were the
ministers of the Church. To them was given the entire control
of the College property and full powers " to establish all such
1 Life of George Ticknor, I. 355.
297
298 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
orders, statutes, and constitutions " as should promote " piety,
morality, and learning."
This Body must have been found too large and too much
scattered " to have the immediate direction of the College," for
in 1650 the General Court by a Charter " enacted that the
College shall be a Corporation consisting of a President, five
Fellows, and a Treasurer or Bursar, who shall have perpetual
succession, and shall be called by the name of President and
Fellows of Harvard College." In this they followed the model
of an EngUsh College, where, whenever a Fellowship becomes
vacant, it is filled up by the votes of the surviving members of
the Corporate Body, and where, with very few exceptions, the
President, under whatever title he is known, is elected by the
Fellows. The Harvard President and Fellows have never had
that freehold right in their posts which was enjoyed by their
brethren in England ; neither had they the absolute power of
appointment, for they had in each case " to procure the presence
of the Overseers and by their counsel and consent to elect."
They were entitled to appoint and dismiss the officers and
servants of the College, and to make orders and by-laws, pro-
vided the said orders and by-laws were allowed by the Overseers.
By an Appendix to the Charter in 1657 their powers were in-
creased. The orders and by-laws which they should henceforth
make were at once to come into effect, though they "were
alterable by the Overseers."
" The Charter of Harvard College," said President Eliot at
the Commemoration of 1886, " granted in 1650 is in force to-
day in every line, having survived in perfect integrity the pro-
digious political, social, and commercial changes of more than
two centuries." ^ It is preserved in the Library of the College
1 Harvard University^ 2joth Anniversary^ p. 262,
^
XVIII.
HARVARD COLLEGE. 299
— surely one of the most venerable of documents on the face
of the earth ; for it is the Charter of the first University founded
by the money of the people voted in their popular Assembly.
The first President was Henry Dunster, a graduate of Mag-
dalen College, Cambridge, and a clergyman of the Church of
England, " one of the greatest masters of the Oriental languages
that hath been known in these ends of the earth." Of the five
Fellows two were Masters of Arts and three Bachelors. Their
Christian names — there were three Samuels, one Jonathan, and
one Comfort — seem to indicate that they were Puritans, not
only by conviction but by birth.
No important change was made in the government of the
University till the Rebellion of the Colonies. In 1780, four
years after the Declaration of Independence, by the Constitu-
tion which was framed by the new Commonwealth of Massa-
chusetts, the Governor, Lieutenant-Governor, Council and
Senate of the Commonwealth were made successors to the
Governor, Deputy-Governor, and Magistrates on the Board of
Overseers, the President and the ministers of the six churches
still retaining their seats. By an Act passed in 1810 and modi-
fied in 18 14 there were added to the Board fifteen laymen;
while, instead of six ministers there were to be fifteen, no longer
confined to particular parishes, but chosen from among the
Congregational churches of the district generally. Both laymen
and ministers were elected by the Overseers. In 1843 the
clerical seats were thrown open to ministers of all denomina-
tions. By the Act of 185 1 the Senators ceased to be ex officio
members of the Board, and seats were no longer reserved for
the clergy. Thirty members were to be elected by the Senators
and Representatives assembled in one room. They were divided
into three classes, one of which was to go out of office every
300 HARVARD COLLEGE. CHAP.
year. Party politics soon cast a taint over the election and
through it over the University. In 1865 a great measure of
reform was carried. Henceforth the President and Treasurer
were to be the sole ex officio members, while the thirty Over-
seers were no longer to be elected by the Legislature but by the
Bachelors of Arts of five years standing, the Masters of Arts, and
the holders of honorary degrees. By a provision in the Act,
the wisdom of which seems more than doubtful, " no officer of
government or instruction in the College is entitled to vote."
The men, that is to say, who have the interests of the Univer-
sity most at heart, and who know best how to promote them,
have no voice in the election of this important Board. The
poll is taken at Cambridge on Commencement Day. Every
voter must attend in person ; there is no voting by proxy papers,
as in the election of Members of Parliament in our Universities.^
The thirty Overseers are divided into six equal classes, one of
which goes out of office every year. By a final reform carried
in 1880, ''persons not inhabitants of the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts were made eligible." In the present year six
Overseers are citizens of outside States. Thus in the coiurse of
two centuries and a half the fetters of Church and State have
been first gradually loosened and at last wholly cast away. Not
a single member of the Corporation or of the Board of Over-
seers holds a theological degree. " A few years ago five of the
Overseers were clergymen j of these, three were Unitarians, one
Episcopalian, and one Orthodox Congregationalist." ' At the
^ The Universities of England, Scotland, and Ireland return nine repre-
sentatives to Parliament, who, as might be expected from the nature of
Universities, all vote with the Tory party.
^ History of Higher Education^ etc., by G. G. Bush, p. 92. Bishop
Lawrence, as I am informed while I am correcting the proofs, was elected
to the Board of Overseers last Commencement (1894).
%
XVIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 301
present time fifteen are graduates in Arts, twelve in Law, and
three in Medicine.^ The President is a layman, and on the
Corporation not a single minister has a seat. In both lists are
conspicuous the names of the great New England families.
There is an Endicott to take us back to the very foundation of
the College, to the days of the first Governor of the Colony,
that stem Puritan who cut the red cross of St. George out of
the royal colours; and a Saltonstall whose two ancestors, Sir
Richard Saltonstall and his son, in the beginning of the Com-
monwealth stood boldly for civil and religious liberty. In John
Quincy Adams and Charles Francis Adams we have brought
back to our memory the second and sixth Presidents of the
United States, and the accomplished Minister to England dur-
ing the War between the North and the South. In Samuel
Hoar we have the representative of " that true New England
Roman," of whom Emerson so finely said : —
" With beams December planets dart
His cold eye truth and conduct scanned;
July was in his sunny heart,
October in his liberal hand.'* ^
In Bancroft the name of the historian and in Peabody the
name of the philanthropist live again. There is one man who
figures strangely on this list. Among the descendants of the
men who crossed the seas to escape the tyranny of the Stuarts
is found a Bonaparte ! *
The Overseers appoint forty committees, formed partly from
their own body, partly from outsiders. Of some of these Com-
1 Eight of the twelve who have degrees in Law and the three who have
degrees in Medicine graduated also in Arts.
* R, W. Emerson, by O. W. Holmes, p. 214.
' He is a grand-nephew of the first Napoleon.
302 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
mittees the duties are " to visit " the diflferent Departments of
the University; others report on the Courses of Instruction.
I cannot learn that these "visitations " ever take place. There
is a tradition, I am told, that an Overseer could now and then
drop in at a lecture, but at the present day the professional
mind is never thus rudely agitated. The Board has five "stated
meetings" every year, besides one "annual meeting." The
Corporation meets on the second and on the last Monday of
every month.
The Fellows, even in the early days of Harvard, were not
necessarily tutors, neither were the tutors necessarily Fellows ;
in this respect also the founders had modelled their institution
on the English Colleges. It rarely happened indeed in the
American Cambridge that the majority of the Fellows were
engaged in tuition. Whether they were at first required to be
resident is not clear. At all events, before the end of the
seventeenth century the obligation had ceased. Thus ^ere
shortly grew up side by side two rival authorities, the Corpora-
tion and the tutors. The President presided over both bodies,
siding, it would seem probable, sometimes with one and some-
times with the other. " Not until after 1725 did the President
and tutors assume the authority of an independent Board on all
subjects of discipline." Even so late as 1785 "the Professors
were required to exhibit to the Corporation the text-books used
in the College and give an account of their method of instruc-
tion." At the beginning of the present century on the Cor-
poration for the first time there was not a single resident
Fellow. In 1824 eleven of the tutors, in a memorial, main-
tained that by the Charter, " the Fellows are necessarily resi-
dent instructors." Their claim was not allowed by either the
Corporation or the Overseers; but to meet the difficulties
XVIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 303
which had arisen, " the immediate government " was authorized
to assume the name of the Faculty of the University.^ The
powers which they had gradually acquired they not only
retained but extended. By the increase in their number and
in their dignity through the rapid foundation of Professorships
in the early part of this century, they had become too strong a
body to be sUghted. At the present time there are six Facul-
ties over the eight Schools which constitute the University;
the College proper, the Scientific School, and the Graduate
School being all placed under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
"Each Faculty is composed of all the Professors, Assistant-
Professors, and Tutors, and of all the Instructors appointed for
a term longer than one year, who teach in the department or
departments under the charge of that Faculty." It has full
power of discipline, and by a vote of two-thirds of its mem-
bers can punish a student not only with rustication but with
expulsion. The President is a member of each Faculty, but
its chief executive officer is its Dean, " who is appointed by
the Corporation, with the consent of the Overseers. He is
responsible for the proper preparation and conduct of its
business, and makes an annual Report to the President."
These Reports are published every year, together with one
by the President, in which he deals with the information and
recommendations contained in them and with the general con-
dition of the University. '* Each Faculty may delegate any of
its powers relating to ordinary matters of administration and
discipline to Administrative Boards, nominated from among
its members by the President, and appointed by the Corpo-
ration with the consent of the Overseers." Three such Boards
have been established, all under the Faculty of Arts and
* Higher Education^ etc., pp. 42, 73, 89.
304 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Sciences, one for the College, the second for the Scientific
School, and the third for the Graduate School. This Faculty is
also divided into twelve Divisions ; and of these Divisions some
are sub-divided into Departments. For each Division and for
each Department there is a separate Committee. Thus the
Division of Ancient Languages, of which the Professor of Greek
Literature is Chairman, is composed of the Departments of
Indo-Iranian Languages, presided over by the Professor of
Sanskrit ; and of the Department of The Classics (Greek and
Latin), presided over by the Professor of Latin. ''E^h of
these Committees practically decides all questions of instruc-
tion and honours in its province." * There are, moreover^ in
the same Faculty fourteen Standing Committees, which deal
with such subjects as Admission Examinations, Admission from
other Colleges, and Fellowships and other Aids for Graduates.
The discipline of the College outside the Lecture Rooms is
maintained by the Parietal Board, composed of *' the Proctors
and the Officers of Instruction who reside in University build-
ings, or in buildings to which the superintendence of the Uni-
versity extends." On it there are forty-six members. They
are under the direction of a Regent, " a University officer who
exercises a general supervision over the conduct and welfare of
the students." "It is a tradition of the College that no teacher
is commanded to do anything ; his work is only suggested to
him by his superior officers. The controlling Boards, the
Faculties, the Corporation, and the Board of Overseers never
assume a mandatory relation to each other, or to the individu-
als who compose them." ^
The Governing Bodies of all the Schools are xmited in a
1 Catalogue f pp. 31, 60; Educational Review, April, 1894, p. 315.
3 Catalogue^ pp. 32, 62; Higher Education, etc, by G. G. Bush, p. 92.
xvra. HARVARD COLLEGE. 305
University Council, whose function is '' to consider questions
which concern more than one Faculty and questions of Univer-
sity policy."
"In all Departments of the University, Professorships are
held without express limitation of time. All officers of instruc-
tion and government are subject to removal for inadequate
performance of duty, or for misconduct." It seems neverthe-
less to have been "generally assumed " till the beginning of the
present year, that " the tenure of office of Professors was a
life-tenure." ^ Happily, the course recently taken by the Cor-
poration in requesting the resignation of two Professors has
scattered this assumption to the winds. Our great Universities
have surely suffered enough from these life-tenure men to be
a warning to the younger countries. At Harvard, so long as
there is zealous discharge of duty, the Professor's tenure is as
sure as any tenure can be in this world. Should there be a
failure through old age, an ample pension will before long, it is
hoped, be provided. " An alumnus," said the President at the
Commencement Day Dinner in June, 1889, "has recently
offered a gift of peculiar acceptability of two hundred thousand
dollars (;^40,899) towards the retiring allowance fund, than
which no other purpose could be happier."' "Assistant-Pro-
fessorships are held for five years, and tutorships for not more
than three years. At the end of the term of an Assistant-
Professor or Tutor his connection with the University ceases,
unless he be reappointed. Lecturers are appointed for not
1 Catalogue^ p. 30; Harvard Graduated Magazine, March, 1894,
P.443-
* H^icr Education, etc., p. 104. Dr. George M. Lane, Pope Professor
of Latin, who resigned his office last spring, has received " a retiring aUow-
ance of three thousand doUars (;£^6i3) a year." Harvard Graduated
Magazine, March, 1894, p. 530.
306 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
more than one year. Instructors are appointed for such terms
as convenience may require." There is great merit in this
system. In any case where incompetency is shown, far less
moral courage is required in the Governing Body to let an
appointment lapse by course of time than to bring it to an
end by dismissal.
" A visitor from Europe," writes Mr. Bryce, " is struck by
the prominence of the President in an American University
or College, and the almost monarchical position which he
sometimes occupies towards the Professors as well as towards
the students. Far more authority seems to be vested in him,
far more to turn upon his individual talents and character,
than in the Universities of Eiurope. Neither the German Pro-
Rector, nor the Vice-Chancellor in Oxford and Cambridge,
nor the Principal in a Scottish University, nor the Provost of
Trinity College in Dublin, nor the head in one of the Colleges
in Oxford or Cambridge is anything like so important a per-
sonage in respect of his office, whatever influence his individ-
ual gifts may give him, as an American College President. In
this, as in not a few other respects, America is less republican
than England. ... No University dignitaries in Great Britain
are so well known to the public, or have their opinions quoted
with so much respect, as the heads of the seven or eight lead-
ing Universities of the United States." ^ Among the seven or
eight heads President Eliot undoubtedly holds the first place.
He holds it, not only as the President of the first University
on the American continent, but also by reason of his own
great qualities. He is a bom ruler of men. A distinguished
American historian, speaking to me of the powers which he
has shown during his five and twenty years of office, both in
1 The American Commonwealth, 2d ed., II. 548-49.
XVIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 307
governing and in organizing, said ; " He would have made an
admirable President of a great Railway Company or of the
United States." Six months after he was appointed Lowell
wrote of him : " Our new President of the College is winning
praise of everybody, 1 take the inmost satisfaction in him, and
think him just the best man that could have been chosen.
We have a real Captain at last." ^ His father for eleven years
had been Treasurer of the College. His grandfather had
founded the Chair of Greek Literature. His uncle, on his
mother's side, the father of Professor Charles Eliot Norton,
that graceful and accomplished scholar, the editor of LoweWs
Letters^ had held the Chair of Sacred Literature. He him-
self graduated at Harvard, and was for some time Assist-
ant-Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry. Later on he
was placed at the head of the Department of Chemistry in
the Scientific School. Resigning this post, ten years after
graduation he went to Europe, where " he spent two years in
the study of Chemistry, and in acquainting himself with the
organization of public institutions in France, Germany, and
England."' He returned to America to fill the Chair of
Chemistry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not
having yet had his fill of learning, he once more returned as a
student to Europe. In September, 1868, the President of Har-
vard retired, and Mr. Eliot, who was in his thirty-fifth year,
was appointed his successor by the Corporation. Among the
Fellows there was, I was told, one man of great insight and
great influence, who had discovered the young Professor's
extraordinary powers, and who convinced his colleagues of his
pre-eminent fitness for the post. The Overseers apparently
wished to follow in the old course, and to have the choice fall
1 LetUri of J, R, Lowell, II. 58. * Higher Education, etc., p. 220.
306 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
on some elderly man, distinguished rather by his learning
than by his strength of character and all the high and rare
qualities of a ruler. At all events they refused their " consent."
The Corporation elected him a second time, and a second time
the Overseers vetoed the election. After an interregnum last-
ing more than seven months they at last yielded. On May 19,
1869, Mr. Eliot became President of Harvard College, and
the College was at once launched on its great and rapid course
of the most glorious prosperity.
How different is his position from that held seventy years
ago by his predecessor, Dr. Kirkland, whose office, according
to Lowell, "combined, with its purely scholastic functions,
those of accountant and chief of police 1 For keeping books
he was incompetent (unless it were those he borrowed), and
the only discipline he exercised was by the unobtrusive pres-
sure of a gentlemanliness which rendered insubordination to
him impossible."^ The President of our days is a great
power ; he surveys the whole machine of the rapidly growing
University, and adjusts it to the needs and changes of the
times and to the advances of scholarship and science. " He
has to preside at the meetings of the Corporation and to act
as the ordinary medium of communication between the Cor-
poration and the Overseers, and between the Corporation and
the Faculties. He has to make an annual report to the Over-
seers on the general condition of the University. He has to
preside on public academic days ; to preside over the several
Faculties; to direct the official correspondence of the Uni-
versity ; to acquaint himself with the state, interests, and wants
of the whole institution ; and to exercise a general superin-
tendence over all its concerns."* How admirably President
1 Literary Essays^ 1890, 1. 84. * Catalogue, p. 29.
xviii. HARVARD COLLEGE, 309
Eliot has done his work is shown by the extraordinary growth
of Harvard in the last twenty-five years. Part of this growth
is due to that great reform which, three years before he entered
on office, established a government of the University, by the
University, for the University. Part is due to the sound
scholars and ardent workers among the senior Professors, who,
even longer than he, have been steadily advancing the highest
interests of Harvard. Much is due to the younger men whom
he helped to choose, and who have so well supported him in
all his great measures. But when all is deducted there still
remains a noble balance. Much will be forgotten ; but in far
distant years Harvard men will still talk of the Age of the
Great President. In the quarter of a century in which he has
held office, the number of students under the Faculty of Arts
and Science has increased from six hundred and thirty-four
to two thousand one hundred and eighty-eight, and of students
in the whole University from eleven hundred and twelve to
three thousand one hundred and fifty-six.^
The revenue, which at the beginning of the period was two
hundred and seventy thousand dollars (;^ 55,2 13) is now one
million and forty-seven thousand (;^ 2 14, 108) ; while the aid
given every year in money to poor students has grown from
twenty-five thousand dollars (;^5iii) to eighty-nine thousand
(;^ 18,199). Twenty- four new buildings have been erected
at a cost of two million two hundred and fourteen thousand
dollars (;^452,757), and as I am writing fresh piles are rapidly
rising.* Romam taterHiam invenit^ marmoream reliquit
^ I do not include the three hundred and forty-six students who attend
the Summer School — a school which has been called into existence in this
period.
^Harvard University ^ by F. Bolles, pp. 12, 98-101 ; Catalogue^
p. 536.
310 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Such a constitution as this where, according to the strict
letter, the Overseers in so many matters have an absolute veto
over the votes of the Corporation, where the Corporation has
an imUmited control over the Faculty, and where the power of
the President is so small would seem unworkable in a great
University. Like the English constitution, it moves easily by
the combined forces of wise custom and common sense. The
Overseers, who are the stronghold of academic conservatism,
never push their rights to the point of obstinacy, and the Cor-
poration has long worked in harmony with the Faculty. It is
only in matters of general policy that the Overseers make their
power felt ; and even in these they never long oppose the Cor-
poration and a united Faculty. When the Faculty is divided,
then they have been known to side with the minority. A few
years ago, for instance, a proposal to institute a " Three Years'
Course," which was supported by a considerable majority of
the Faculty, was vetoed by the Overseers, mainly, I believe,
under the influence of a few of the ablest Professors. They
have been described at Harvard as "our House of Lords,
whose main business it is to act as a drag on progress." They
are perhaps chiefly useful as a means of getting money. They
are generally chosen from among the most influential and
wealthy New England families. Their official position increases
the interest in the University which they would naturally feel as
graduates, and they not only themselves often make splendid
donations, but they stir up the liberality of their friends. They
everywhere preach the gospel of endowment. Though the
appointment of the Professors and other teachers nominally
belongs to the Corporation, under the approval of the Over-
seers, it is by the Faculty in each branch and the President
acting together that every vacancy is filled up. The name that
xviu. HARVARD COLLEGE. 311
he in concurrence with them submits to the Corporation, and
through them to the Overseers, is always accepted. No better
mode of appointment could be devised. With the men most
competent to judge of a teacher's merits and who have most at
heart the welfare of their own School, acting with the Presi-
dent, the choice lies. Jobbing and favouritism seem unknown.
Not a breath of suspicion ever reached me.
By the side, therefore, of the two powers recognized by the
Charter, two others have gradually grown into great importance
— the President and the Faculty. The President, it is true,
from the first belonged to both the original Governing Bodies,
being a member of the Overseers and presiding over the Cor-
poration ; but he has, as it were, two persons, one in which he
is a member of these bodies, and one in which he is an inde-
pendent power. In this second position he has no absolute
authority, but he rules like a wise constitutional monarch of the
earHer type, who, keeping within the lines of the constitution,
nevertheless was a real and strong governor. In every measure
theoretically the President can be overruled first by the Corpo-
ration and next by the Overseers, but practically in almost every
measure connected with discipline and instruction he has his
own way, so long as he is supported by the Faculty. If he
may justly be compared to a King or a President of a RepubHc,
it is to a King like William III., or to a President like Lincoln,
each of whom was his own Prime Minister. The Faculty
exists by the vote of the Corporation and the Overseers, and
by their vote could theoretically be abolished. Nevertheless,
as I have shown, it has gained a position of great authority
and stability. With the management of the property of the
University, the Faculty has nothing directly to do, that falling
within the province of the Corporation. They leave it mainly
J
312 HARVARD COLLEGE. caiAP.
to the Treasurer, who by virtue of his office is a member of
the Board.
In nothing does Harvard differ more thoroughly from Oxford
than in the perfect organization which exists in her army of
teachers. In Oxford the teachers are divided into two main
bodies, entirely independent of each other and under no central
government — the University Professors and the College Tutors.
Over the Professors scarcely any control exists ; they rival the
Cyclopes in their independence. The tutors are governed each
by the Corporation of his own College. Of this Corporation he
is commonly a member. The Colleges are twenty in number.^
To the Professors and Tutors must be added the University
Readers,' who are under a special Board ; the Assistants and the
Demonstrators in the Museum who are under the control of
their Professors ; and the teachers of the Unattached Students
— the students, that is to say, who are undergraduates of the
University, but are not members of any College. In all the
confusion of such a system as this, if system it can be called,
there is a great waste of labour and of money, and an unfair
inequality of payment. There are, or there have been till lately.
Professors of great learning who have lectured to empty benches
— I might say to empty chairs ; for, unable to face the forlorn
look of the lecture- rooms, they have given their instruction in
their own studies. Even there there has been an appearance
of vacancy. On the other hand, there are Tutors who, never
failing to draw together a large number of students, are never-
^ I exclude Keble, for it is not a College in the sense in which the word
has always been used at Oxford. It is governed by a Board of outsiders.
Neither do I reckon the two Halls.
^They, roughly speaking, answer to the Assistant-Professors, but they
are independent of the Professors. In some departments indeed there is
only a Reader and no Professor.
i
xvm. HARVARD COLLEGE. 313
theless miserably paid for their work, and see no sure opening
before them of advancement. In our army of learning there
is no Field-Marshal's baton in every soldier's knapsack.
There is no clear and well-marked path of promotion, on which
a young man can with confidence set his foot, sure that high
merit will in time bring him to a high position. However able
he may be, he has chance fighting heavily against him. The
learned author who is at present throwing a stream of light on
the reign of the first two Stuarts and of the Commonwealth,
skilled though he is as a teacher, has never been made a Tutor
in the College, or a Professor in the University, which he so
greatly adorns. From the College at the beginning of his career
he was shut out by religious intolerance, just as from the same
College another distinguished student and teacher, many years
later, was thrust forth. From a University Chair he has been
excluded mainly through the absence of organization in the staff
of teachers. He is by no means a solitary example. Mr. Free-
man was not made Professor of History until he was too old to
learn the teacher's art ; Mr. Froude, when he succeeded him,
had passed the Psalmist's limit of three-score years and ten.
The two distinguished scholars who have recently been raised
to the Chairs of Greek and Latin, in a wealthy and properly
organized University would have been made Professors twenty
years earlier. So often does it happen in Oxford that men are
not promoted till they are past their prime, that not uncommonly
a Professor's salary is looked upon, not as wages, but a reward.
Little surprise is caused by the nomination of a man from whom
fresh work can hardly be expected. That he has done good
work is, with many, a full justification of his appointment. It
is his claims, and not the claims of the students, that are
examined. His well-earned pension as a hard and successful
314 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
worker in the field of learning is to be provided at their expense.
Through the whole of the University far too much is spent in
rewards and far too little in wages. Were the wealth of the
foundations more wisely used, teachers would be more fairly
remunerated, and learned men and students of nature, who
may have no gift for teaching, would be able to count on a
decent maintenance whilst they laboriously advanced the boun-
daries of knowledge. In Harvard, provision for such men as
these is as yet but very imperfectly made. The millionaire
who shall endow research has not as yet appeared on the stage
of the New England Cambridge. Perhaps he is within the
prompter's call.
It is in the organization of the great body of teachers that
Harvard excels. An undergraduate who greatly distinguishes
himself, after taking his degree, with the help of a scholarship,
if he is a poor man, will continue his studies in the Graduate
School or in some foreign university. In due time he joins the
staff of teachers as a Lecturer, Demonstrator, or Assistant His
appointment is but for one year. In all likelihood it will be
continued if he shows his fitness for the post. If he does not,
he is weeded out while he is still young enough to seek his living
elsewhere. The University is not saddled with an incompetent
teacher, who, as sometimes happens in our Oxford Colleges, is
kept on through pity, to the great injury of the students. He,
however, who successfully passes through this period of proba-
tion may hope before long to become an Instructor or a Tutor
with a longer engagement ; and, later on, an Assistant-Professor
with much higher pay and an engagement for five years. At
last he arrives at the full Professorship. He can rise no higher,
unless he is made President ; but with length of service and with
merit his salary increases up to a certain limit. The average
XVIII. HARVARD COLLEGE. 315
age at which a man becomes full Professor is thirty-five years.
If in any of these grades of advancement there is no vacancy
in Harvard, an able teacher may count on receiving a " call "
from some other University. Should he there greatly distinguish
himself, he is scarcely less sure, when a vacancy does occur, to
be recalled to his old College. The chance of promotion has
greatly increased of late years, not only by the foundation of
other seats of learning, for each of which a whole staff of Pro-
fessors is needed, but moreover by the rapid growth in all
the chief departments of the University. This has indeed gone
on by leaps and by bounds. In the last twenty-five years the
number of students, as I have said, has increased by more than
two thousand. Instead of forty-eight Professors and Assistant-
Professors there are now one hundred and eighteen, and instead
of thirty-three Tutors, Instructors, Demonstrators, and Assistants
there are now two hundred and four. Twenty-five years ago
there were in all eighty-one teachers ; they now number three
hundred and twenty-two. This augmentation is still going on.
This year there are eighteen more Professors and Assistant-
Professors than there were two years ago, while the lower ranks
of teachers have in the same short time been increased by fifty-
one.^
In the method which is followed when a vacant Chair has to
be filled up or a new Chair is created. Harvard, in common, I
believe, with American universities in general, sets us an excel-
lent example. No application is made for the post by a crowd
of eager candidates ; no testimonials are sent in — testimonials
in which one side of the shield only is shown, in which truth so
often is divided from falsehood by the thinnest of partitions.
1 Harvard University, by F. BoUes, p. 12; Catalogue, 1891-92, p. 454;
lb, 1893-94, p. 536.
316 HARVARD COLLEGE, CHAP. xvin.
The members of each Faculty have made themselves acquainted
with the merits of the most eminent teachers in other seats of
learning ; should Harvard herself not furnish the right man,
they know where he is to be found. He is offered the post ;
he is not exposed to the loss of dignity which invests a suitor.
One man is honoured by the selection which is made of him ;
none are wounded in their feelings by being passed over. The
selection is not confined to citizens of the United States. Two
years ago two new Chairs were founded at Harvard, one of
Economic History, the other of Experimental Psychology. To
fill them an invitation was sent across the Canadian border to
an Oxford Master of Arts, a Professor in the University of
Toronto, and across the Atlantic to a German Doctor of Phi-
losophy, a teacher in the University of Freiburg.
How happy would a University be where, with a perfect sys-
tem of subordination by which merit is sure of recognition,
should be combined the social life and the friendly intercourse
and all the opportunities for the interchange of thought and
knowledge which are found in every one of our Oxford Col-
leges. Each one of them is the gathering-place, the home, of
a small knot of learned men. Each of the Common-Rooms
is a centre of kindly feeling and hospitality. Of these we have
twenty ; Harvard has not one. It will be easier for Oxford to
take to herself all the good that there is in the Harvard system,
than for Harvard to add to her vigorous and admirable organi-
zation all that charm and pleasantness of life which make an
Oxford man's College scarcely less dear to him than Oxford
herself. By an Act of Parliament the one reform can be
in great part effected; the other could only come about by
the slow changes of long years.
k
CHAPTER XIX.
Graduate Schools in Oxford and Cambridge. — Respublica Literatorum. —
American Students in English Universities. — The Old Home.
THE Senate of our English Cambridge, I read, has issued
a report in favour of graduate study. It is proposed
" to establish two new degrees, those of Bachelor of Letters
and Bachelor of Science, open to graduates either of Cam-
bridge or of other ' recognized * universities, who shall have
given evidence that they have pursued at Cambridge, for at
least one year, a course of advanced study or research, and
shall also have presented an original dissertation for approval
by the board of studies." I hope that this scheme will be not
only adopted but greatly enlarged, and that in an amended
form it will be transferred to Oxford. The Schools of Arts,
Natural Science, History, Law, Medicine, and Theology, in
fact, of all that is taught, should be equally opened to these
graduates, and the higher degrees in each Faculty should be
conferred on those who deserve them. The day perhaps is
far distant when at Oxford and Cambridge the Master's degree
shall no longer be given as a matter of course, after a certain
lapse of time, and on the payment of a certain sum of money.
In Oxford a beginning has been made with the degrees in Law.
I have the satisfaction of knowing that no one possessed of
an Ignorance equal in amount to that which I had when I
took the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor would have the least
chance of gaining these distinctions now. With these graduate
317
318 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
Students the first step in reforming the Master's degree might
very properly be made. Their fitness for it should be tested
either by examination, or — which is far better — by some
piece of original work. The residence which is proposed of
one year — of five and twenty weeks, that is to say — seems
much too short. Among the " recognized universities " all
should be recognized which are worthy of recognition, whether
they belong to one of our colonies, or to a foreign land. That
Respublica Ltteratorum, that great Commonwealth of Scholars
to which Bodley dedicated his noble Library, should not be
bounded and divided by seas, rivers, and mountains, and all
the limits which part nation from nation. For its citizens no
passports should be needed, and no letters of naturalization
should be required. In every university the scholar should
find his home ; in every seat of learning he should have his
right of domicile. Like the Roman State, this commonwealth
should extend over the whole civilized world, and its citizen-
ship should be obtained, not by birth, but with a great sum —
the toil of years. Wherever the standard of learning is on a
level with ours, the graduates of that university, when they
come to study with us, should hold the same rank as they had
held at home. The Bachelor of Arts from Harvard or Yale
should at Oxford or Cambridge wear the Bachelor's gown. If
he disgraced it by idleness or misconduct, he should at once
have it stripped from his shoulders. He should wear it on
sufferance, but on a noble and generous sufferance. The gra-
duates who came from the inferior seats of learning, whether
English or foreign, might very properly be placed in an inferior
position till they had gone through a certain amount of study.
This is done at Harvard. I was told of a young Bachelor of
Arts from one of the Canadian universities who would have
XIX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 319
had to enter as a Senior had he not appealed to the high
honours which he had taken in his final examination. Even the
undergraduates, who, at the rate of about fifty a year, flock in
there from other universities, do not, by any means, altogether
lose whatever standing they had already acquired. They go
before the Committee on Admission, who, measuring the work
which they had hitherto done and the position which they had
held " by Harvard standards," determine in which of the four
Classes they shall each be placed.^ Almost all of them, I was
told, would be admitted " a year short." A Senior, that is to
say, would be reckoned as a Junior, a Junior as a Sophomore,
and a Sophomore as a Freshman. Those, however, who come
from Yale, and perhaps from one or two other Universities, are
not thus degraded.
I hope that the day is not far distant when the never-failing
stream of American students which, like the Gulf Stream, sets
eastwards, shall be diverted from Germany and flow towards
England ; when the graduate of Harvard and Yale and of many
another University shall wear the gown in the Colleges of Oxford
and Cambridge, and tread the cloisters which were trodden by
their forefathers. Towards England, the mother-coimtry, the
Old Home, the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, whose towns,
streets, rivers, fields, hedge-rows, lanes have by poetry, history,
biography and fiction been made scarcely less dear and scarcely
less familiar to the gentle reader than his own New England,
this stream would surely naturally set. How their scholars
have loved " this little world, this precious stone set in the sil-
ver sea, " this dear, dear land," in spite of our coldness, in spite
of our unkindness, in spite of our arrogance, in spite of all the
sufferings of the War of Independence, in spite of the insolence
1 Harvard University, by F. Bolles, p. 53.
320 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
which brought on the War of 1812, in spite of the loud applause
given by the classes, though not by the people, to the Southern
slaveholders in their cruel struggle against liberty and the
Union, in spite of the insults offered to the Northern patriots,
to a man like Lowell with his warm and generous heart, as if
the army in which fell his three nephews ("the hope of our
race ") and his three cousins were " an army officered by tai-
lors* apprentices and butcher boys." * The wrong, I know, has
not been all on one side ; arrogance has of old been met with
arrogance, insolence with insolence, and wrong-doing with
wrong- doing. The blundering selfishness of the American
nation has brought, and is still bringing, misery to many a poor
English home, by destroying that twice-blessed freedom of
trade which blesseth him that gives and him that takes ; that
freedom which everywhere alike gives the poor man his bread,
not only in greater abundance but all "the sweeter because it is
no longer leavened with a sense of injustice." The ungenerous
treatment of our authors, men who have spread knowledge
and happiness broadcast through their land and have been
robbed of their reward, though not so bad as it had so long
been, still goes on. Nevertheless the balance of wrong-doing
— if the balance of the last hundred and twenty years should
now be struck — lies heavily against us. Yet in spite of all
this, how dear England is to many and many an American !
Though they never seem to forget that they are with foreigners
when in our company, while we so easily forget that we are
with foreigners when in theirs, nevertheless in New England,
among people of any education, there is a far more friendly
feeling towards England and the English than there exists
among us towards America and the Americans. How can they
1 Letters of J, R. Lowell, II. 11, 159.
MX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 321
help loving the land not only of their forefathers, but of their
own day-dreams and their imagination ; the land peopled for
them by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Clarendon, Pepys, Addison,
Goldsmith, Boswell, Jane Austen, Scott, Macaulay, Dickens,
and by many another famous writer with that strange host,
some the children of fancy, others once real men and women,
but now, having passed through a great author's hands, little
more than the children of fancy ; some so odd, some so full of
humour, some so tender and pitiful, some so rough and master-
ful, some so wise and lovable, some so foolish and no less lova-
ble ? This is the land of the Temple Garden, where Somerset
and Richard Plantagenet plucked the red rose and the white,
and of Brick Court hard by where, bewailed by the poor and
the outcast, Oliver Goldsmith died ; of Clement's Inn, where
Falstaff and Shallow heard the chimes at midnight ; of West-
minster Abbey, where the Spectator looking upon the tombs of
the great felt every motion of envy die in him ; of Westminster
Bridge, where Wordsworth saw " a sight so touching in -its
majesty " ; of the little Chapel in the Tower ; of Fleet Street,
" the most delightful scene in the world," more delightful, John-
son and Boswell thought, than Tempe, and of Charing Cross
" with its full tide of human existence." It is the land of the
cathedrals and castles ; of the old-fashioned inns which still
help to form " the felicity of England " ; of Addison's Walk
and the Bodleian ; of the silver Thames and the sedgy Severn ;
of the beautiful country life, the parks, the lawns, the ivy-
mantled towers each with its peal of bells, the green fields, the
winding lanes. "The country," wrote Ticknor, "is much more
beautiful than I thought any country could be." ^ A New
England minister has recorded how eighty years ago he was
1 Life of George Ticknor, I. 56.
Y
322 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
gazing at a print-shop, when two men who were passing along
stopped to look at a picture in the window. " ' Do you not
recognize it?' said one of them to his companion. 'Oh yes,*
was the reply ; ' it is Guildhall.* I had some feeling akin to
sublimity in the thought that I was standing so near two gentle-
men at once who had travelled to London and seen Guild-
hall." ^ "What shall I say of London,** wrote Longfellow;
"of my pilgrimage to Temple Bar, Eastcheap, and Little
Britain? Indeed, I know not what to say.*** "My heart
bounded when I caught the first sight of England,** an ancient
dame said to me. " I love every inch of it,** said another lady.
I asked a distinguished scholar, a man sprung of the best New
England stock, whether an American was touched by Shake-
speare's glorious praise of England. "Your forefathers,** I said,
"would have felt it as Englishmen.'* With his gentle and
thoughtful smile, he replied that there were roots in him which
went down deeper in England than even in his own country. An
old country lawyer who had never crossed the Atlantic despised
all mankind but the English stock. We were talking one day
of the Southern States. "It was not unlikely," I said, "that
in some of them the negroes by enduring the climate better
might in the end supplant the descendants of the English."
He scornfully replied : " I don't know anything but God
Almighty that can kill an Anglo-Saxon." The great-grand-
fathers of these New Englanders before the fatal shot was
fired at Concord Bridge would have felt the proud boast, —
*' That Chatham's language was their mother tongue,
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with their own."
^ Life of Benjamin SiUiman^ II. 150.
a Life of H, W. LongfeWm, I. 170.
^
XIX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 323
Their children now say with Wordsworth : —
** We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. — In everything we are sprung
Of earth's first blood, have titles manifold."
" They are islanders," wrote Prescott of us, with all the gene-
rous enthusiasm of a scholar and, I would fain believe, with
all the pride of kinship, " they are islanders cut off from the
great world. But their island is indeed a world of its own.
With all their faults, never has the sun shone — if one may use
the expression in reference to England — on a more noble
race; or one that has done more for the great interests of
humanity."^ "They have the proudest history in the world,"
wrote Emerson. " Would to God," said Judge Story, " that I
could see Westminster Hall, and the Abbey, and the Houses
of Parliament. A cluster of recollections belongs to them,
almost imexampled in the history of the world." * Lowell, in
all " the bitterness (half resentment and half regret) " which
he felt towards England at the close of the Slaveholders* War,
could still say : " I know what the land we sprung from, and
which we have not disgraced, is worth to freedom and civiliza-
tion." * He added : " We have not a thought nor a hope
that is not American." But here in his anger he deceived him-
self. He was never one of those who held that " the felicity
of the American colonists consisted in their escape from the
past." * The past was too much for him ; except, indeed, in
the very heat of the great war it was always with him. Even
1 Life of W. H. Prescott, p. 320.
« Life of Joseph Slory, II. 445.
» Letters of J. R, Lowell, I. 402.
* Works of Daniel Webster^ I. lOl.
32+ HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
American spelling he would not tolerate. " Why do you give
in to these absurdities? " he wrote to a brother-author who had
spelt mouldered moldered, " Why abscond into this petty creek
from the great English main of orthography?"^ Except in
his own pleasant home in Cambridge, nowhere in his old age
was he so happy as in England. He returned to it again and
again. " This is my ninth year at Whitby," he wrote, " and
the place loses none of its charm for me." * " There is not a
corner of England that has not its special charm," he had
written three years earlier.* But in earlier days, long before
his fame, his great position, and his beautiful character and
scholarly mind had won for him a place among us so high that
it would have softened even the surliest Yankee and made him
fond of England, he loved the island for itself. To a friend
he wrote nearly forty years ago: "I will envy you a little
your delightful two months in England — and a picture rises
before me of long slopes washed with a cool lustre of watery
sunshine — a swan-silenced reach of sallow-fringed river —
great humps of foliage contrasting taper spires — cathedral
domes, gray Gothic fronts elbowed by red-brick deaneries —
broad downs clouded with cumulous sheep."* "Hereditary
instincts," he told Mr. Leslie Stephen, " enabled him to appre-
ciate our English scenery."* He was meditating one more
visit to us when the illness came upon him, from which he
never recovered. Had he died among us, surely his last
resting-place would have been in Westminster Abbey.
What a hold should we get on men of the noblest minds in
the United States, and through them on their countr3niien, did
we open wide our universities ! What's Germany to them or
1 Letters of J, R. Lowell, II. 294.
a lb, II. 421. 8 Jb, 11. 356. * lb, I. 300. » n. II. 501.
\
xa. HARVARD COLLEGE. 325
they to Germany? To England the young students could not
help coming if a welcome were given them, and if in every
one of the Arts and Sciences, teaching and opportunities for
original work were provided worthy of a great university.
When Oxford and Cambridge have each their great Graduate
School, a School of men indifferent to honours and unworried
by examinations, then that blessed time will not be far distant.
If once we get hold of these young Americans, we will defy
them to pass through Balliol or Magdalen or New College, and
not love Oxford and England. Prescott, the evening before
his death, said of us to a friend : '' What a hearty and noble
people they are, and how an American's heart warms towards
them after he has been in England once, and found them out
in their hospitable homes ! " ^ " Each traveller makes his own
England," writes Dr. Holmes.* Not altogether so, most gentle
of Autocrats. We Englishmen can do something towards
making it for him. We can make him feel that it is not among
a strange people that he has come; that it is by no waters
of Babylon that he sitteth himself down. Few men can any-
where feel more strongly the sense of loneliness than the
American scholar who knowing nobody wanders through
England. Those who
" At the purple dawn of day
Tadmor's marble waste survey ''
are scarcely more solitary than the young New Englander
without a friend in the land of his forefathers, and in the land
of his books. The very words Old Home, which had so plea-
sant a sound far off, add to his desolation. He is like a man
1 Life of fV, J/. Prescott^ p. 442.
* R, W, Emerson^ p. 218.
326 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
who after the lapse of years comes back to his old College and
finds nobody who knows him. He sees the new names above
the doors. Many a New Englander visits the English village
in which his forefathers lived two centuries and a half ago.
He wanders about it, thinking how once to those of his name
there was not a house that would not have been open ; he goes
into the old church and sits where his ancestors sat ; in his old
home he is utterly a stranger. He passes through England,
seeing all its beauties, visiting like a pilgrim many a spot of
which he had dreamt since the day when books first took hold
of him, but living in inns and knowing nobody but landlords
and waiters. Those fiiends, once so real and still so dear,
with whom so often in his New England parlour he had laughed
and wept, in their own homes are for the first time found to be
shadows. They all "are melted into air, into thin air." Where
he could love so much he finds no one even to give him a
hand. "England," said an American to me, "is a country
where a foreigner meets with the greatest hospitality and the
greatest neglect. There is no people so hospitable as the
English, if you have an introduction to them. If there is the
tiniest little tag on which to hang hospitality, no one can be
more hospitable than an Englishman ; but if there is no intro-
duction, no one can stand more aloof." Our ancient univer-
sities could so easily provide a noble "tag" indeed. What
ever- widening circles of friendship would in them be formed —
circles which would in time include hundreds and thousands of
gentle spirits and cordial hearts on both sides of the wide
Atlantic ! In Boston, on the walls of the Massachusetts His-
torical Society, hang two swords crossed. They once hung
above the books in Prescott's library. One of them had been
worn by his father's father on Bunker Hill, the other by his
XIX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 327
mother's father on an English sloop-of-war which^ from the
river below, cannonaded the patriots. For fifty years and more
they have been crossed in peace in the gentle seats of learning
— a s)rmbol, I trust, of that unruffled harmony, that perfect
good-will, which some day by the help of books, scholars, and
universities, shall be established between the great and kindred
nations.
Before many years have passed by. Harvard in every one of
her Schools will supply her students with that higher learning
in search of which they have so long resorted to Europe.
"Our day of dependence," said Emerson nearly sixty years
ago, " our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands,
draws to a close." ^ Nevertheless, her young scholars will still
cross the Atlantic in the same noble quest. It is not only the
Libraries, the Museums, the Art Collections, the ancient sites
and monuments of the Old World which will bring them. More
than for all these, they will come to live for a while in the midst
of those great floating traditions of learning and mental refine-
ment, that priceless possession handed down from far distant
centuries, and ever growing as it passed from one generation to
another. These traditions well-nigh perished in the severity of
the Puritans* character and in the prolonged struggle with a
barren soil and a stem climate. In later years their growth has
been checked by the swift and victorious march westward over
a country so rich and fruitful that by the restless ambition which
it exerted it destroyed that repose in which learning and refine-
ment are best nurtured.
While their students must spend some time in Europe, I
trust that before long many a scholar fresh from Oxford and
Cambridge will cross the Atlantic to finish his studies in Har-
1 Works, 1884, 1. 65.
328 HARVARD COLLEGE. chap.
vard. More than one hundred years ago that generous bene-
factor of the College, the old London merchant, Thomas
HoUis, seeing Oxford and Cambridge closed to the Noncon-
formists, turned his eyes towards Harvard as the place where
English ministers might be educated. ''To train them up
in arts and sciences," he wrote, "would be a method to
correct mean and ignorant explications and applications of
Scripture, attended with a little enthusiasm ^ too often, which
narrows that catholic charity among all Christians, recommended
by the apostles of our Lord Jesus. I should rejoice to hear
your College was well furnished with Professors in every science
that young students might be completely instructed in the
ministry, and our ministers at London might encourage the
sending such like youth to Harvard College, instead of Leyden
and Utrpcht, our present practice."* Happily one part of
HoUis's wish has at last been fulfilled. In every science the
University is well furnished with Professors, while there are
departments in the Graduate School where our best men might
study with profit. But the greatest profit of all would be the
residence among a people so like and yet so imlike. Here
the student of history, political science, and political economy
might study, as it were, in a great Life-School. Nowhere
could a man get more quickly or more thoroughly cured of
what Lowell calls "the English genius for thinking all the
rest of mankind unreasonable." "There is one thing," he
adds, " Englishmen always take for granted, namely, that an
American must see the superiority of England."* At Harvard
^ Enthusiasm he uses in the sense which it commonly bore through the
greater part of last century : '' a vain belief of private revelation."
2 Quincy's Harvard^ I. 434,
• Letters of J, R, Lowell, II. 405.
k
MX. HARVARD COLLEGE. 329
" the freshening western blast " would sweep away that and a
few other insular prejudices besides. Here, too, the young
student of Oxford or Cambridge would see a great university
greatly ruled. He would return home loving his own College
and his own University more than ever, but resolved that so far
as it in him lay, they shall be still worthier of the love and
reverence felt for them by their children.
I i
■I
n
' .■* I
.
:.
li:
INDEX.
Adams, Charles Francis, 301.
Adams, President John Quincy, 109,
114, 211.
Adams, John Quincy, 301.
Adams, Samuel, 51.
Addison, Joseph, 73.
Adler, Felix, 48.
Admission, Committee on, 319.
Advisers, Committee of, 232.
Agassiz, Professor Louis, 82, 138, 218,
266.
Agassiz, Mrs., 275.
Agassiz, Professor Alexander, 266.
Agriculture, School of, 160.
Alcoholic liquors, 83, 89, 121, 174.
Alexander, Emperor of Russia, 179.
Allen, Rev. W., 9.
Ames, Professor James Barr, 261,
Ames, Frederick Lothrop, 296.
Amherst College, 41.
Ancient Customs of Harvard College, 57.
Andrew, John Albion, 17.
Association of Alumni, 98.
Athleticism, 117, 136, 143, 149, 152.
Auld Lang Syne, 123.
Bancroft, George, 301.
Bancroft, , 151,
Baseball, 138.
Baths, 175.
Bemis, George, 19.
Bequests. See Endowments.
Berkeley, Bishop, 286.
Bismarck, Prince, 223.
Blaschka, Messrs., 268.
Bloody Monday, 63.
Boarding-houses, 168.
Boat-races, 147, 151.
Bodley, Sir Thomas, 318.
Bolles, Frank, 164.
Bonaparte, Jerome, 210.
Bonaparte, Charles Joseph, 301.
Boston, " the Literary Emporium," 211,
Boston Sunday Globe, 203.
Boys, 136, 187.
Brandeis, Louis D., 260.
Brattle, Major, 81.
Brattle, Thomas, 81.
Brewster, " Sir," 7.
Bright, John, 182, 235.
Brilliants, 248.
Brooks, Bishop Phillips, 48, 53.
Brooks, Preston S., 41.
Bryce, Right Hon, James, 306.
Bulkeley, " Sir," 7.
Burgoyne, General, 34.
Burlingame, Anson, 179.
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward, iii, 171.
Bumey, Dr. Charles, 184.
Butler, Bishop, 184.
Butler, General, 97,
Cambridge University, endowments,
21; Emmanuel College, 23, 27;
founders of Harvard, 23, 159; ex-
aminations, 243, 246; Colleges for
Women, 274 ; graduate study, 317.
Campus, 57.
Caps and gowns, 59, 154.
Carlyle, Dr. Alexander, 11,
Carlyle, Thomas, 105, 113, 29a
Carter, Mrs., 13.
331
332
INDEX.
Catalogue, Triennial, 09.
Centenary of 1836, 23, 37.
Channing, Professor Edward Tjrrrel,
75.
Channing, Dr. William Ellery, 33, x88,
286.
Chapel, 46, 167.
Charles I., 991.
Charles II., 43.
Charter of Harvard College, 159, 998.
Charter of Massachusetts, 43.
Chauncy, President, 7, 57.
Chesterfield, Earl of, 99, 191.
Child, Professor Francis James, Z15,
125, 273, 294.
Chores, 193.
Christmas, 182.
Chumming, 162, Z7Z.
Class Day, 120.
Classes, 100.
Clay, Henry, 108.
Cleveland, President, 180.
Clubs, 63, 176 ; Democratic Campaign
Club, 180; Dickey Club, 178; Fox-
croft Club, 173, 204; Harvard Re-
publican Club, 180 ; Medical Faculty
Club, 179 ; Musical Clubs, 182.
Cobden, Richard, 235.
Commemoration of 1886, 27.
Commencement, 31, 82, 120, 155.
Common, Cambridge, 30, 85.
Commons, 166.
Concord, 33, 122.
Conington, Professor, 220,
Corporal punishment, 55.
Corporation, 298.
Council, 305.
Courses of study, 231.
Crammers, 201.
Cranmer, Archbishop, 53.
Creighton, Bishop, 27.
Cromwell, Oliver, 23.
Currency, 14, 84.
Curtis, Benjamin R., 223, 224, 256.
Curtis, George William, 115, 28Z.
Cushing, Caleb, 29, 121.
Dana, Richard, 9.
Dana, Richard H., 9, 40, 8a, 103, 1x5^
i38» 255.
Dane, Nathan, 254.
Dartmouth College, axa
Darwin, Charles Robert, zo6, zxz.
Davis, A. M., 283.
Davy, Sir Humphry, 214.
De Quincey, Thomas, 168.
Dean of the Collie, 303.
Degrees, 94, 250, 317.
Depots 169.
Derby, Earl of, 27, 194, 221.
Dicey, Professor Albert Venn, 254.
Dickens, Charles, 183.
Dilly, Messrs., 288.
Diogenes Laertius, 246.
Divinity School, 44, 225.
Donations. See Endowments.
Dormitories, 161, 171.
Douglass, Frederick, X26.
Downing, Sir George, 7.
Draper, George, 19.
Dress, 31, 64, 198.
Drummond, Professor, 48.
Dudley, Joseph, 48.
Dunster, President, 7, 999.
Durant, H. F., 282.
Elective studies, 228, 293.
Elementary education, 335.
Eleutheria, 10.
Eliot, President Charles WiUiam, Di-
vinity School, 45: speech at Com-
mencement, 105; Phi Beta day, 117;
Class Day, 130; hours for lectures,
145 ; athleticism, 149, 152; rich young
men, 206; elective system, 228, 232,
244; secondary school studies, 236,
238 ; Harvard and her teachers, 251 ;
Law School, 253, 257, 258, 263 ; Sci-
entific School, 266; Charter, 298;
retiring allowance fimd, 305; Presi-
dency, 306.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, singing, 3;
Fugitive Slave Law, 40; Saturday
Club, 82, 138; Phi Beta Poet, X12;
Phi Beta President, 1x5; class en-
thusiasm, 137 ; chumming, 162 ; lines
INDEX,
333
on duty, 169; portrait in Memorial
Hall, 170; elected to a club, 179;
first sermon, 192 ; President's Fresh-
man, 193; Everett's coming from
Germany, 216 ; ideal university, 229 ;
lines on Samuel Hoar, 301 ; English
history, 323; America's apprentice-
ship, 327.
Employment Bureau, 200.
Endicott, Governor, 301.
Endowments, bequests, and gifts, 8-20,
169, 207, 254, 266, 285, 287, 289, 309.
Everett, Edward, 25, 40, 73, 75, 87, 88,
114, 211, 216.
Everett, William, 78.
Examinations, 79, 230, 239, 245.
Exeter Academy, 236.
Excuses, 162, 172, 191, 207.
Faculties, 303.
Fagging, 57.
Fair Harvard, 26, 129, 276.
Fellows, 8, 43, 52, 298, 302.
Felton, Professor Cornelius C, 40, 1x4.
Fines, 50, 56.
Football, 147.
Franklin, Benjamin, 287.
Free Masonry, 108.
Freeman, Edward Augustus, z6o, 214,
313.
Freshmen, 57, 176, 232.
Froude, James Anthony, 2x4, 313.
Furniture, 165.
Gale, Dr. Theophilus, 9, 285.
Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 313.
Garfield, President, 73, 203.
Garrison, William Lloyd, 37, 41, loi.
Gateing, 161.
Geneva, University of, 278.
George HI., 30, 35.
German books, 210, 219.
German universities, 161, 210, 225, 227,
263.
Gibbon, Edward, 161.
Gilman, Arthur, 275.
Gladstone, Rig^t Hon. William Ewart,
184.
Glee Club, 3.
Goethe, 213.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 188, 191, 194.
Goodale,Professor George Lincoln, 268.
Goodwin, Professor William Watson,
benefactors of Harvard, 15; future
of Harvard, 46; Dr. Popkin, 78;
Phi Beta Society, 109; College and
University, 157; Harvard modelled
on an English college, but assimi-
lated to a German university, 160,
225, 227; examinations and the
elective sjrstem, 189, 230, 244 ; school
education, 235, 238, 239 ; graduate
school, 248, 250; German univer-
sities, 263; foreign schemes, 266;
College for Women, 273.
Gore, Christopher, 289.
Gdttingen, 210, 223.
Gould, Jay, 19.
Government, 297,
Governor of Massachusetts, 93, 96.
Grace, Dr., 149.
Graduate School, z6o, 242, 248, 25a
Grammar Schools, 237.
Greek, 5, 210, 230, 243.
Greenleaf, Simon, 256, 258.
Greenough, Professor James Brad-
street, 273,
Grouping, 71,
Hale, Dr. Edward Everett, 53, 93.
Hancock, Governor, 32, 35, zo8.
Hancock, Thomas, 19.
Harrison, General, 180.
Harte, Bret, 115.
Harvard, John, statue, 4; bequest, 8;
library, 9, 285, 287 ; Master of Arts of
Emmanuel College, 23, 28 ; house,
104.
Harvard College and University, 157,
Harvard Graduates^ 291.
Harvard indifference, 188.
Harvard Law Review, 263.
Harvard spirit, 142, 190.
Harvard Stories, 153.
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology ^
103.
334
INDEX.
Harvard yell, 93, 141.
Harwood, Dr. Edward, 54.
Hastings Dormitory, 174.
Hawkins, Provost, 50, 68.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, ia8, 138, 215.
Hazing, 60.
Heame, Thomas, 73.
Heberden, Dr. William, 288.
Hedge, Professor, 78.
Herford, Dr. Brooke, 47.
Higginson, Colonel Thomas W., Z2Z.
Hoar, Samuel, 301.
Holden Chapel, 12.
Holland, Mr., 285.
Hollis family, 12.
Hollis, Thomas, 12, 286, 328.
Holmes, John, 102.
Holmes, Dr. Oliver Wendell, the
wealth of the New World, 18 ; Cen-
tenary, 27; the Brattle House, 81;
Saturday Club, 82; lines on the
Cambridge churches, 86; Class of
1829, 102; Emerson's oration, 112;
Phi Beta, 115 ; Class Day Poet, 125 ;
athleticism, 137; Emeritus Profes-
sor, 158 ; England, 325.
Holworthy, Sir Matthew, 12.
Holworthy Hall, 12.
Holyoke, President, 74.
Hughes, Thomas, 147.
Huxley, Professor, 106, 119.
Ices, 172.
Instructors, 306.
James II., 72.
Jeffreys, Judge, 43.
Jena Professors, 212.
Johns Hopkins University, 248,
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, note on Sir, 7 ;
Thomas Hollis, 13; letter to Chester-
field, 29 ; " ground dignified by wis-
dom," 30 ; Taxation no Tyranny, 35 ;
" yelps for liberty," 38 ; Dr. Harwood,
54 ; inscriptions in English, 86 ; lem-
onade, 90 ; chapel at Oxford, 167 ;
Pilgrim's Progress, 184 ; Goldsmith's
saying, 191 ; servitors, 193 ; dinner
at Messrs. Dilly, 288.
Jowett, Professor Benjamin, 220, 246.
Keane, Bishop, 49.
Ken, Bishop, 53.
Kent, Chancellor, zzz.
Kirkland, President, 78, 88, az6, 308.
La£Eiyette, General, 87.
Landor, Walter Savage, zzi.
Lane, W. C, 295.
Lane, Professor George Martin, 305.
Langdell, Professor Christopher Co
lumbus, 254, 257, 262.
Latham, Rev. Mr., 9.
Latin, 5, 237.
Laud, Archbishop, IZ9.
Law School, 225, 253.
Lawrence Scientific School, z6o, 966.
Lawrence, Abbott, 266.
Lawrence, Bishop, 127, Z29, 300.
Lecturers, 305.
Liberties and Orders of Harvard Col%
^^^. 5-
Liberty Tree, 74, I2Z.
Library, 8, zo, 285 ; Law Library, 26Z.
Liddell, Dean, 194.
Lightfoot, Dr. John, 285.
Lincoln, President, 26, zo6, ZZ7, 3ZZ«
Lincoln, Robert, 105.
Little, Brown & Co., za
Loan-fiind, 206.
Loan-Furniture Association, Z64.
London University, 43.
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, house,
30; Sumner's speech in Z848, 40;
Emerson hooted, 4Z; Professor, 46,
2Z5, 226; College dining-room, 73;
rebellion in College, 76; Dr. Popkin,
78; Brattle Street, 80; Saturday
Club, 82; Emerson as a lecturer,
113 ; Class Day, 122, Z25 ; portrait in
Memorial Hall, Z70 ; River Charles,
175; Christmas, Z82; Jared Sparks,
227 ; women students, 273 ; American
poets, 291 ; London, 322,
Lotteries, Z5.
^
INDEX,
335
Lovejqy, Elijah, 38.
Lowell, Charles Russell, 170.
Lowell, James Russell, centenary, 27 ;
Emmanuel College tercentenary, 28 ;
Triennial Catalogue, 29 ; Washington
Elm, 30 ; Burgoyne's army, 34 ; Ab-
olitionists, 38; Fugitive Slave Law,
40; Dr. Popkin, 78; President
Kirkland, 79, 216, 308; Professors'
Row, 80; changing names, 81;
Saturday Club, 82, 138 ; Commence-
ment, 84 ; John Holmes, 102 ; Emer-
son's oration, 112; Phi Beta, 1x5;
Class Day, 121, 125; Professor
Child's Popular Ballads, 126; boat-
race, 147; Professor, 155; portrait
in Memorial Hall, 170; Charles
River, 175; rusticated, 189; Law
School, 256 ; Harvard Library, 290 ;
Harvard Graduates, 291; England,
323. 328.
Macaulay, Lord, 193.
Mansell, Dean, 220.
Mason, Jeremiah, 112.
Mather, Cotton, 286.
Matthews Dormitory, 183.
May, Rev. Samuel, loi.
Maynard, Sir John, 9.
Mead, Dr., 287.
Meals, 10, 34, 166, 172.
Medical School, 99, 160, 225.
Memorial Hall, 169, 172.
Milman, Dean, 160.
Milton, John, 4, 23, 168, 29a
Money-aids, 206.
Moore, Archbishop, 193.
Morgan, Professor Morris Hicky, 295.
Morris, William, iii.
Motley, John Lothrop, Fugitive Slave
Law, 40 ; Brattle House, 81 ; Satur-
day Club, 82, 138; Phi Beta, no;
portrait in Memorial Hall, 170;
on novels, 189 ; G&ttingen, 223.
Mowlson, Lady, 283.
Names, change of, 80.
Negro students, 17, 126.
Nonconformists, English, 11.
North, Lord, 35.
Norton, Professor Charles Eliot, 28, 29,
158, 395, 307.
Overseers, 298, 310.
Oxford, " makes an American unhap-
py," i; Earl of Derby, chancellor,
27; Anglicanism, 43; attendance
at chapel, 49; matriculation, 55;
external respect, 58 ; caps and gowns,
59. 157. 187; riots, 61, 71; dress, 64;
social life, 66, 72, 316 ; Commemora-
tion, 85, 94, 97, 124, 129 ; representa-
tives in Parliament, 105; Professor
Huxley's lecture, 106; undergrad-
uates, 134; cricket-matches, 143;
" 'Varsity," 143 ; hours of lectures,
144; boat-race, 147; government,
157, 160, 312; "gateing," 161;
chumming', 162; furniture, 164;
licensed lodgings, 165; baths, 175;
boat-club subscriptions, 179; servi-
tors, 193; scholarships, 206; ex-
penses, 207 ; examinations, 209, 229,
239, 242, 246, 250, 314; Professors,
214, 220; Natural Science School,
221 ; Glasgow students, 223 ; elective
studies, 242; men afraid of their
reputation, 247; Law School, 263;
Extension Lectures, 269; students
excluded, 250, 270 ; Radcliffe Library,
283 ; Bodleian, 289, 295, 318 ; prizes,
247, 295 ; students from abroad, 318 ;
Colleges — All Souls', 97; Balliol,
II, 59, 77; Christ Church, 51, 62,
194; Corpus Christi, 285; Eixeter,
194, 295; Oriel, 50, 68; Pembroke,
49, 66, 145, 162, 163, 193, 219;
Queen's, 59; University, 34; Halls
for Women, 274, 277.
Palmer, Professor George Herbert, 63,
234.
Parietal Board, 65, 304.
Parker, Theodore, 103.
Parkman, Francis, 4a
Parmele, Elisha, 107.
336
INDEX.
Parsons, Theophilus, 256.
Peabody, George, 301.
Peabody, Professor, hazing, 60 ; tutors
and students, 70 ; college rebellions,
75; Dr. Popkin, 77; President
Quincy, 81; the Common, 85; life
in College, 163, 166; instruction, 218.
Pepys, Samuel, 7.
Percy, Bishop, 184.
Perkins Hall, 19.
Phi Beta Kappa Society, 65, 87, 107,
177.
Phillips, Wendell, 29, 39, 103, 116, zga
Pierce, Rev. John, 89, 103.
Plate, 168.
Policemen, 140.
Poor students, 164, 191.
Popkin, Professor, 77.
Porter's flip, 79.
Potter, Right Rev. H. C, 48.
Prescott, William Hickling, matricula-
tion, 79; Phi Beta, no; Carlyle*s
French Revolution, 113; Harvard
degree, 124; Saturday Club, 138;
Oxford degree, 156; eyesight in-
jured, 168; portrait in Memorial
Hall, 170; mathematics, 228; be-
quest to Library, 289 ; England, 323,
325 ; ancestors' swords, 326,
President, The, 298, 302, 306, 311,
Probation, 139.
Proctors, 166,
Professors, 69, 226, 302, 305, 314.
Quincy, President, popularity in repub-
lics, 36 ; discipline, 60 ; odd charac-
ter, 81 ; Commencement Day, 85 ;
Class Day, 121 ; College plate, 168 ;
attendance at chapel, 225.
Quincy, Josiah, 47, 88, 121.
Radcliffe College, 159, 273.
Ragging, 176.
Rebellions, 32, 74,
Research, 314, 317.
Reveille, 114.
Revenue, 8, 10, 13, 15, 309.
Reviews, 202.
Rhode Island, 4a.
Ripley, Rev. Samuel, 19a.
Rogers, Rev. Mr., 285.
Roman Catholics, 48.
Room rents, 16a.
Ruskin, John, in.
Russia, z8a
Russian naval officeis, 93, 97*
Saltonstall, Sir Richard, 9, 50Z.
Saturday Club, 82, 138.
Scarborough, Maine, 9.
Schools, Secondary, 236.
Schultze, Dr., 211.
Sedgwick, Professor Adam, 314.
Sewall, Samuel, 90, Z04, 183, 285.
Shakespeare, William, 286.
Sheridan, General, 170.
Sherlock, Bishop, 386.
Shingles, 176.
Shire, 9.
Sibley, J. L., 991.
Silliman, Professor Benjamin, 51, 89,
213.
Slavery, 37, 85.
Smith, Adam, 11, 223.
Smith, Samuel Francis, zos.
Snaps, 233.
South Carolina, 37.
Southampton, Earl of, 307.
Southey, Robert, z.
Sparks, Jared, 40, 327.
Special Students, 370.
Spelling, 324.
Spreads, 122, 13a
State aids, 15.
Stephen, Leslie, 324.
Story, Joseph, Centenary of Z836, 33 ;
War of Independence, 25 ; Unitarian,
44 ; &gging, 60 ; tutors and students,
7Z; Association of Alumni, 97;
Classes, zoo; Commencement, i€>3;
Phi Beta, 109, iii ; Class Day Poet,
Z25 ; portrait, 170 ; foreign countries,
311; Ticknor's reforms, 217; Pro-
fessor, 254, 258; Westminster Hall,
323-
Story, W. W., 131.
\
INDEX.
337
Summer School, 268, 309.
Sumner, Charles, hooted at Cambridge,
39; assaulted by Brooks, 41; buff
waistcoat, 65; Saturday Club, 82;
Phi Beta, iii, 113, 115; College
bills, 207 ; mathematics, 229 ; Story's
pupil, 255, 256 ; pamphlets, 289.
Suspension, 122.
Swift, Dean, 175.
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, zzz.
Tea, 32.
Thacher, Professor, 51.
Thayer, W. R., 158.
Thompson, Maurice, 117.
Ticknor, George, Fugitive Slave Law,
40; Phi Beta, III, 114; Oxford de-
STce, 155; Vacations, 198; student
of G&ttingen, 210; Professor, 213;
reforms, 215; Prescott and mathe-
matics, 228 ; England, 321.
Tory Refugees, 288.
Treasurer, 298.
Trecothick, Barlow, 288.
Turnpikes^ 33.
Unitarianism, 44, 224.
University College, London, 277,
Vacations, 198.
Vane, Sir Henry, 4.
Vassall, Colonel, 81.
Vincent, Bishop, 48.
Wadham, Nicholas, 4.
Wadsworth, President, 86.
Walker, General, 1x7.
Walpole, Horace, 13,
Ware, Professor, 80,
Warren, General, 24.
Warren, Dr. John, 24.
Washburn, Emory, 256.
Washington, 25.
Washington, George, 30, 34, 86,
Washington, Martha, 282.
Washington Elm, 36, 276.
Watson, Bishop, 207, 214.
Weather, 127.
Webb, Henry, la
Webster, Daniel, oratory, 26, 112;
Abolitionists, 37 ; Speech of March
7, 1850, 40; Lafayette, 87; Com-
mencement dinner, 90; Phi Beta
dinner, 11 1; Dartmouth College,
210; America's debt to Europe, 265.
Weeds, 268.
Wellesley College, 142, 282.
White, D. A., 223.
Whitefield, Rev. George, 30, 193, 195.
288.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 82.
William HL, 9, 3".
William and Mary College, 107.
Williams, Roger, 42.
Winsor, Dr. Justin, 292.
Wordsworth, William, iii.
Yale College, orthodox, 43; chapel,
51 ; fondness for noise, 57 ; baseball,
138; baths, 17s; toughs, 190; poor
students, 191, 196; Professor Silli-
man, 213 ; students at Harvard. 265.
Yard, The, 2.
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