26 ENVIRONMENT AND EDUCATION-II 



through Hartford, and a day or two later I was entered 

 at Yale. 



It was a happy change. I respected the institution, for 

 its discipline, though at times harsh, was, on the whole, 

 just, and thereby came a great gain to my own self-respect. 

 But as to the education given, never was a man more 

 disappointed at first. The president and professors were 

 men of high character and attainments ; but to the lower 

 classes the instruction was given almost entirely by tutors, 

 who took up teaching for bread-winning while going 

 through the divinity school. Naturally most of the 

 work done under these was perfunctory. There was too 

 much reciting by rote and too little real intercourse be- 

 tween teacher and taught. The instructor sat in a box, 

 heard students' translations without indicating anything 

 better, and their answers to questions with very few sug- 

 gestions or remarks. The first text-book in Greek was 

 Xenophon's ' ' Memorabilia, ' ' and one of the first men 

 called up was my classmate Delano Goddard. He made an 

 excellent translation, clean, clear, in thoroughly good 

 English ; but he elicited no attention from the instructor, 

 and was then put through sundry grammatical puzzles, 

 among which he floundered until stopped by the word, 

 "Sufficient." Soon afterward another was called up who 

 rattled off glibly a translation without one particle of liter- 

 ary merit, and was then plied with the usual grammatical 

 questions. Being asked to "synopsize" the Greek verb, 

 he went through the various moods and tenses, in all sorts 

 of ways and in all possible combinations, his tongue rat- 

 tling like the clapper of a mill. When he sat down my 

 next neighbor said to me, "that man will be our valedic- 

 torian." This disgusted me. If that was the style of 

 classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was no- 

 thing in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That 

 glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but 

 stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness, 

 and was never heard of more. Goddard became the 

 editor of one of the most important metropolitan news- 



