Memorial Address—Charles Kendall Adams. 
675 
in February. “As I write at midday we are having the third 
concert tinder the window 1 —not the hand organ, which seems to 
be good enough only for America—but by a violin and a singer, 
both fit for the stage. There are tears and laughter and exulta¬ 
tion, all expressed with the fire of an operatic training. Of 
such concerts we must have about five a day, and, strangely 
enough, do not quite tire of them. There is a picturesqueness 
about the whole matter that is almost bewitching.” 
Some extracts from letters of that period illustrate one of 
President Adams’ abiding interests in matters of higher educa.- 
tion, i. e., classical studies. When urging me to come to Madi¬ 
son in 1894, he said that in a college' course one language at least 
was especially deserving of favor as embodying and represent¬ 
ing pure culture of the highest kind, and that language to his 
mind had always been the Greek. “I invite you to a larger 
field, and it is your duty to come,” he said with great emphasis; 
and I was practically won at once. Some time later 1 Dr. B. I. 
Wheeler wrote me: “President Adams will give the most ear¬ 
nest support. You will find him a loyal, sound, wise man.” 
During the eight years that followed I found his zeal for clas¬ 
sical studies always unabated. The last thing he did for the 
university was to organize the school of commerce and it might 
have seemed that he, too, was swamped by the wave of commer¬ 
cialism that was sweeping over the country. But he sent Dean 
Johnson of the college of engineering, his chief agent in the 
new venture, to consult with me, and called me to 1 his sick bed 
to say that “he did not want some of us who stood for ideal 
things to think that the university was to be wholly given over 
to the material and practical.” And a year later he wrote me 
from Italy (March 22, 1901) : “I note all you say in regard 
to its being a technical year. But I want the university not to 
be swamped by a spirit of commercialism!. Every interest 
should be encouraged. What men have accomplished is quite 
as important as what they are accomplishing.” 
In 1894 he had led me to> hope that we might have some day 
at the University of Wisconsin a classical museum, and this 
matter was much on his mind when he was abroad—without any 
urging from! me, it may be said, for I never found it necessary 
to remind him of promises. February 7, 1901, he said in a 
postscript to a letter: “I came within an inch of forgetting one 
of my errands in writing. -Before I left Madison I asked the 
