WILLIAM AUGUSTUS STEARNS. 291 



legal arrangements, greatly pleased him. But he did not much care 

 for Bentham's systematic works : it was rather his horde of pamphlets, 

 raiding like Cossacks into the legal realm, which delighted him. So, 

 of political economists, he most admired Jean Baptiste Say, perhaps 

 because he was a great pamphleteer. 



" Green carried the same keen scent for sensible facts and contempt 

 for every thing else into his affections and his tastes. He was a most 

 warm-hearted man, with an abounding sympathy for all sorts of people, 

 a great fondness for children, and a love for animals. He had also a 

 fine taste for poetry, of which he had read a great deal. But one did 

 not at first so much note his delicate ajipreciation of what was real, as 

 his scorn for all that was unreal. He had a quality, which was cer- 

 tainly not roughness, but which, for want of a better appellation, 

 might be called a Socratic coarseness. It was well fitted to be the 

 sturdy support of his realism, and gave one a positive pleasure when 

 one knew him, as if it had been an artistic study. He had an over- 

 flowing spirit of good-fellowship, and a Rabelaisian humor, without the 

 Rabelaisian cynicism. I see him now, as he draws back from a game 

 of whist, his genial nature shining through the merry twinkle of his 

 eye. But, as he speaks, one perceives that it is not pure mirth that 

 moves him, but sympathetic amusement ; for his talk is generally of 

 some fine observation of human or animal nature. . . . He was wont 

 to take up prostrate or hopeless causes with a zeal, unwise and Quix- 

 otic from a worldly point of view, but which exemplified some of his 

 highest traits." 



o 



WILLIAM AUGUSTUS STEARNS. 



The Reverend Williasi Augustus Stearns, D.D., LL.D., 

 President of Amherst College, died at Amherst, June 8, 1876, in the 

 seventy-second year of his age. The genealogy of Dr. Stearns would 

 add another proof, were such necessary, to the truth of the doctrine of the 

 transmission of.moral and intellectual qualities, and even of tendencies 

 towards particular pursuits, by hereditary descent. He came by the side 

 both of his father and his mother of lon^ lines of Conorre^ational min- 

 isters, devout and learned men, not inexperienced in the ways of mankind 

 and the management of worldly business, from the part taken by the 

 ministers of the old Congregational Establishment in the administra- 

 tion of the affairs of their parishes and often of their parishioners. 

 The Triennial Catalogue of Harvard College contains the names of 

 graduates, nomina Uteris italicis exarata, scattered along the ranks of 

 the eighteenth century and reaching back into those of the seven- 



