272 AS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR- II 



the University of Virginia, which Thomas Jefferson had 

 founded as a center of liberal thought, had fallen under 

 the direction of sectarians, and among the great majority 

 of the Northern colleges an unwritten law seemed to re- 

 quire that a university president should be a clergyman. 

 The instruction in the best of these institutions was, as I 

 have shown elsewhere, narrow, their methods outworn, 

 and the students, as a rule, confined to one simple, single, 

 cast-iron course, in which the great majority of them took 

 no interest. The University of Michigan had made a 

 beginning of something better. The president was Dr. 

 Henry Philip Tappan, formerly a Presbyterian clergy- 

 man, a writer of repute on philosophical subjects, a strong 

 thinker, an impressive orator, and a born leader of men, 

 who, during a visit to Europe, had been greatly impressed 

 by the large and liberal system of the German universi- 

 ties, and had devoted himself to urging a similar system 

 in our own country. On the Eastern institutions save, 

 possibly, Brown he made no impression. Each of them 

 was as stagnant as a Spanish convent, and as self-satisfied 

 as a Bourbon duchy; but in the West he attracted sup- 

 porters, and soon his ideas began to show themselves ef- 

 fective in the State university over which he had been 

 called to preside. 



The men he summoned about him were, in the main, 

 admirably fitted to aid him. Dearest of all to me, though 

 several years my senior, was Henry Simmons Frieze, pro- 

 fessor of Latin. I had first met him at the University of 

 Berlin, had then traveled with him through Germany and 

 Italy, and had found him one of the most charming men 

 I had ever met simple, modest, retiring to a fault, yet a 

 delightful companion and a most inspiring teacher. There 

 was in him a combination which at first seemed singular; 

 but experience has since shown me that it is by no means 

 unnatural, for he was not only an ideal professor of Latin, 

 but a gifted musician. The first revelation of this latter 

 quality was made to me in a manner which showed his 

 modesty. One evening during our student days at Berlin, 



