OBITUABY NOTICES. 
489 
he relinquished in the following year to accept the presi¬ 
dency of St. John’s College, at Annapolis, Maryland. His 
entry upon his duties there was at a critical time in the 
history of the college. An organized attempt had been 
made to withdraw certain grants that had been regarded as 
perpetual, and in the resulting uncertainties as to definite 
policies the attendance had fallen to ninety students. How¬ 
ever, the new president brought fresh life and vigor to the 
institution and he had as his reward the pleasure of seeing 
the roll contain two hundred and fifty names. While here 
Columbian College conferred upon him the degree of LL. D. 
Princeton College had not lost sight of her gifted alumnus, 
and when an opening was found in the curriculum for a 
course in belles-lettres he w r as, in 1870, called to conduct that 
department. Upon the occasion of his installation he deliv¬ 
ered an address on “ The True Sources of Literary Inspira¬ 
tion.” It was full of the ripest wisdom and glowed with the 
best thoughts of the ablest men of all times. The theme 
running through this address was that the science of the 
rhetorician can only regulate and direct, chasten and subdue. 
It cannot create, for it finds the very conditions of its exist¬ 
ence, as also the form and substance of its contents, in those 
antecedent creations for which it undertakes to account on 
logical and rational grounds. The science of rhetoric may 
analyze and explain the nature of human discourse, the 
sources of its power, and the number and quality of its 
different effects, but it cannot impart the energizing forces 
which shall set the mind of a Milton or a Burke in motion. 
Science may explain to the literary artist the function and 
names of the tools with which he is to work, but all the 
rules of all the rhetoricians cannot give him dexterity in the 
use of them. This must come, the favor of Minerva being pre¬ 
supposed, from long and patient practice in the actual exer¬ 
cise of literary or oratorical art. A literary taste which shall 
be at once delicate and correct can come only from a felicity 
of nature which has been trained by culture, fed by long 
meditation on the ideal forms of beauty in the soul of man, 
64—Bull. Phil. Soc., Wash., Vol. 12. 
