834 THOMAS RAYNESFORD LOUNSBURY. 



must sadly know. The independence of Professor Lounsbury's 

 nature kept him .apart from the rigid curriculum which persisted at 

 Yale College during the greater part of his teaching years. In the 

 Scientific School he was more free to deal with his still new and some- 

 what suspected subject of English than he could have been in the 

 college itself; but this very freedom brought its penalties. Students 

 of science, at least in his time, have been so largely because they would 

 not take the trouble to make themselves students of the humanities; 

 and students of English, as a class, have been so largely for the reason 

 that they could thus dispense with the vexatious need of learning any 

 other language than their own. Until very late in Professor Louns- 

 bury's career as a teacher, there was little graduate study of English 

 at Yale: even now, your graduate student of English anywhere is 

 seldom inspiring. So perhaps only men who have had to teach English . 

 at a Yankee college can fully enjoy two of his remembered comments 

 on this task. The first is in his life of Cooper (p. 7), who was for a 

 while an undergraduate at Yale. "We need not feel any distrust," 

 writes Lounsbury, " of his declaration that little learning of any kind 

 forced its way into his head. Least of all will he be inclined to doubt 

 it whom extended experience in the class-room has taught to view with 

 profoundest respect the infinite capability of the human mind to 

 resist the introduction of knowledge." The second of his comments 

 on pupils, though perhaps legendary, is at once equally characteristic 

 and more familiar. Towards the close of an unusually restless hour, 

 he is said to have admonished his class in some such words as these: 

 " You must stay with me a little longer. I have a few more pearls to 

 cast before you." 



And pearls they were, those words of his, whether they concerned 

 learning or sport, reminiscence or what a less robust nature would have 

 found the benumbing chill of college conservatism. He was a Yale 

 man to the core, and lived to be in his later years among the most 

 secure of Yale worthies in the hearts of men that loved Yale. The 

 way in which he instinctively combined simplicity with distinction 

 breathed the best spirit of the college which was his from boyhood 

 to the last. He was a born and a trained lover of literature. Above 

 all, though, he was a pitiless enemy of literary cant; he never forgot 

 the supreme truth of fact; Jind no one ever sought or asserted fact 

 with more sturdy common-sense. Before his time, the teaching of 

 English at Yale had been mostly concerned with formal rhetoric and 

 oratory. His own first teaching directed the attention of his pupils 

 straight to the texts of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Dryden, and of 



