SAMUEL ELIOT, 649 



seem ; yet all agree in being at once private in form and public in scope. 

 Though the superintendence of the Boston Public Schools may technically 

 be held a public office, and surely is exposed to that ignoble kind of 

 attack which to-day makes public office most repugnant to sensitive 

 natures, it was in his hands as free from actual complication with politics 

 and the like as was Trinity College, or the Athenaeum, or St. Paul's 

 School. His true career, then, through all the riper years of a manhood 

 unbroken until the very end, was that of a faithful public servant, whose 

 service was done in the unofficial retirement of privacy. 



Professionally, so far as he can be held to have had a regular profes- 

 sion, he became a teacher, or perhaps one should rather say he devoted 

 himself to education. As a Professor at Trinity College and for a while 

 its President, as master of the Girls' High School in Boston and later 

 as Superintendent of the Public Schools there, and for years as a Trustee 

 of St. Paul's School at Concord, New Hampshire, he exerted a wide, 

 varied, and constantly thoughtful influence on the education of New 

 England. Precisely to define the nature of this influence and its result 

 is needless. One thing about it seems certain. Wherever it was felt, 

 and wherever it has persisted, it tended and it tends toward that sure 

 righteousness of spirit which must come from ardently and constantly 

 cherished ideals. In his public school work, to be sure, the condition of 

 our society forbade him actively to assert the ideal which with him was 

 doubtless the most profound. In his work at Trinity College, on the 

 other hand, and in his constant watchfulness over St. Paul's School, he 

 was able to care for this with all his heart and with all his power. For 

 these, college and school alike, are not only institutions of learning but 

 seminaries of religion, — and religion in that form which seemed to him 

 most true, the gentle and flexible dogmatism of the Protestant Episcopal 

 Church. 



Not professedly religious, any more than was his work in the public 

 schools, the other great range of his mature activity had in it something 

 akin to consecration. In our time it has generally joroved wisest to 

 separate charity from dogma, — -to serve the suffering and the wretched 

 with no question as to anything but their sufferings and their needs. To 

 charitable work, and especially such charitable work as should directly 

 alleviate suffering, he gave himself with all his heart. The Massachu- 

 setts General Hospital, the Perkins Institution for the Blind, and many 

 another admirable expression of the broadly humane benevolence which 

 has marked our passing New England, owe as much to him as to any 

 name in their history. In the coming time, to be sure, little distinct trace 



