WILLIAM WATSON (iOODWIX. 807 



were spent in unremitting and unobtrusive labor for the welfare of 

 Harvard in a period fruitful in far-reaching changes, a period that 

 witnessed the decline of the old type of American college and the rise 

 of the American university. He was clear-sighted in his judgment and 

 temperate in his reasoning alike when he ad\ocatctl, or when he op- 

 posed, the policies that shaped the conduct of Harvard University 

 to its present estate. 



The controlling motive that directed him during the revolutionary 

 changes that transformed the Harvard of his youth was the welfare 

 of scholarship, not merely in the Classics, but in every other discipline 

 as well. He opposed the reduction of the college course from four 

 years to three years because he believed that any reduction should be 

 made at the beginning, not at the end; and he never changed his 

 opinion as to the importance of classical study as a basis of literary 

 culture. He Avas ingenuously dismayed at the failure of some of his 

 contemporaries to see the value of Greek for modern education; and 

 he witnessed with regret a generation of youth invited, as it were, to 

 aim at literary culture without a knowledge of the language of Homer, 

 Sophocles, and Plato. But if he could not view untroubled the dis- 

 solution of all the old ideas as to the value of a "liberal" education, 

 he never wished for the return of the system of required studies 

 prevalent in his undergraduate days and still in force until 1867-68; 

 he advocated the abandoning of obligatory Greek in the Sophomore 

 year; he welcomed the advent of the more fully developed elective 

 system, though he foresaw some of the defects it has disclosed. He 

 was not a blind worshipper of the classical literature of the ancients; 

 he saw in it, not an agent for the discipline of the intellect of all youth, 

 but an instrument, imperative for the understanding of the develop- 

 ment of European letters, and salutary for those who would win a 

 true appreciation of English literature. In him the intellectual spirit 

 of scientific research in the field of grammar did not blunt the literary 

 and artistic sense, which, as has well been said, is partly also moral. 

 The old-time humanities translated themselves in him into the spirit 

 of just and refined living. He did not confine his sympathies to the 

 ancient world that was his by the association of daily work; but he 

 realized, in the words of Renan, that "progress will eternally consist 

 in developing what Greece conceived"; and from Greece he gathered, 

 what many of the noblest and best have gathered thence, a large part 

 of that wisdom of life which is more precious and more enduring than 

 mere learning. 



As a teacher, as I recall him in the late seventies, Goodwin insisted 



