GEORGE FRISBIK HOAR. 703 



when I was a member of it."* He leaves us glad to have the knowledge 

 from high authority, but rather grateful that each one of his three hun- 

 dred fellow members did not write his own biography in a thousand pages 

 to impose on us the duty of reading them all. It rather reminds us of 

 the young singer in the play who, after making her debut, says with un- 

 doubted sincerity that she "and the orchestra" were very much 

 applauded. 



Those of us who were contemporaries of Senator IToar in Harvard 

 College turn naturally to the chapters in his book relating to that period, 

 and find at the very outset some of this hasty generalization to which 

 biography tempts. In tho very first line of the chapter called " Harvard 

 Sixty Years Ago " is a statement that Harvard had not changed much 

 for nearly a century before he entered it. I graduated the same year that 

 he entered, and can testify, on the other hand, that the basis of the whole 

 transformation from the old prescribed system to the present elective sys- 

 tem had been laid during those two or three years, in making mathe- 

 matics an elective study, with the intention of making almost all other 

 studies elective also, as they now are. His farther judgment in the 

 matter can be estimated from the fact that the one department which 

 he selects for censure and ridicule is that department of English which 

 under Prof. Edward Tyrrel Chauning — grand uncle of the present 

 Ivlward Channiiig, Professor of History — gave Harvard the lead among 

 all the academic rivals in America in the production of literary men. 

 Channiog's list of pupils, beginning with Emerson, included also Win- 

 throp, Hillard, Holmes, Dana, Hildreth, Hedge, James Freeman Clarke, 

 "William Henry Channing, Rev. S. F. Smith, Sumner, Motley, the 

 Adamses, the Lowells, the Peabodys, the Hales, the Quincys, President 

 Hill, Francis Parkman, William Story, Fitzedward Hall, and finally Pro- 

 fessor Norton ; and yet this is the summary of it made by Senator Hoar. 

 I myself, as one of Professor Channing's pupils, have been a literary man 

 by profession for half a century, and it has sometimes seemed to me that 

 forty-eight hours have never passed without there occurring to me, as a 

 piece of second nature, some maxim of that teacher. I do not believe 

 that there has occurred in American educational history a teacher so 

 remarkable, all things considered. It was true, as Mr. Hoar cruelly re- 

 marks, that he had a figure somewhat like Punch, though I should say 

 with a noble head above it. 



The explanation of Senator Hoar's errors is comparatively simple. 



* Hoar's Autobiography, I. 163, 



