Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

I do not think Harvard College had changed very much when I entered it on my sixteenth birthday in the year 1842 either in manners, character of students or teachers, or the course of instruction, for nearly a century. There were some elementary lectures and recitations in astronomy and mechanics. There was a short course of lectures on chemistry, accompanied by exhibiting a few experiments. But the students had no opportunity for laboratory work. There was a delightful course of instruction from Dr. Walker in ethics and metaphysics. The college had rejected the old Calvinistic creed of New England and substituted in its stead the strict Unitarianism of Dr. Ware and Andrews Norton,—a creed in its substance hardly more tolerant or liberal than that which it had supplanted. There was also some instruction in modern languages,—German, French and Italian,—all of very slight value. But the substance of the instruction consisted in learning to translate rather easy Latin and Greek, writing Latin, and courses in algebra and geometry not very far advanced.

The conditions of admission were quite easy. They were such as a boy of fourteen of good capacity, who could read and write the English language and had gone through some simple book of arithmetic, could easily master in two years. There were three or four schools were the boys were pretty well fitted, so that they could translate Cicero and Virgil, Nepos and Sallust and Caesar and Xenophon and Homer. The Boston Latin School, the Roxbury Latin School, Phillips Academy at Exeter and Phillips Academy at Andover and Mrs. Ripley's school at Waltham were the best schools for this purpose. The boys from the Boston Latin School generally took their places at the head of the class when they entered. Next came the best scholars from the other schools I have named. But the bulk of the pupils were very poorly fitted.

There was, as it seems to me in looking back, little instruction of much value. The good scholars and the bad went to the recitation together. The good ones lost the hour, and the poor scholars got the benefit of hearing the good ones recite. Their mistakes were corrected by the professor. They handed in written exercises in Latin and Greek which were examined by the instructor and the faults corrected, and returned. There were, during the last three years, declamations once a month, where the boy recited some piece of prose or poetry in the presence of the class, but got very little instruction or criticism from the professor. Then, in the last three years, English themes were required. The subjects were given out by Professor Channing, himself a most accomplished and admirable scholar in his line. He seemed to choose his subjects with a view of taxing the ingenuity of the boy to find anything to say about them instead of taking something which the boy knew about and devoting himself to improve his English style in expressing his thought. Channing was a good critic. His published lectures on rhetoric and oratory, now almost wholly forgotten, remind one of Matthew Arnold in their delicate and discriminating touch. He had a face and figure something like that of Punch in the frontispiece of that magazine. His method was to take the themes which the boys handed in one week, look them over himself, then, a week after, meet the class, call the boys in succession to sit down in a chair by the side of his table, read out passages from the theme, and ridicule them before the others. It was a terrible ordeal for a bashful or awkward boy. Those of a more robust nature, or whose performance had nothing ridiculous in it, profited by the discipline. But it certainly took all the starch and courage out of me. I never sat down to write my theme without fancying that grinning and scornful countenance looking at my work. So I used to write as few sentences as I thought would answer so that I should not be punished for failure to bring in any theme at all, and never attempted to do my best.

But the Faculty themselves were certainly an assemblage of very able men. Making all the allowance for the point of view, and that I was then a youth looking at my elders who had become famous, and that I am now looking as an old man at young men, I still think there can be no comparison between the college administrators of fifty years ago and those of to-day. It was then the policy of the college to call into its service great men who had achieved eminent distinction in the world without. It is now its policy to select for its service promising youth, in the hope that they will become great. Perhaps the last method is the best where it succeeds. But the effect of failure is most mischievous. Presidents Quincy, Everett, Walker and Sparks administered in succession the office of President during my connection with the Academic Department and the Law School, although Dr. Walker's inauguration was not until later. Each of them in his own way was among the first men of his time. Quincy had been an eminent statesman, a famous orator, and a most successful mayor of Boston. Edward Everett had been in his early youth one of the most famous pulpit orators of the country, afterward a distinguished Member of Congress, Governor of the Commonwealth, Minister to England, and Senator of the United States. He was a consummate orator, on whose lips thousands and thousands of his countrymen had hung entranced. He was, what is less generally remembered now, perhaps the ablest and most accomplished diplomatist ever in the public service of the United States. Jared Sparks was a profound student of history, somewhat dull as a narrator, but of unerring historic judgment. I suppose he would be placed by all our writers of history with great unanimity at the head of American historic investigators. James Walker was a great preacher and a profound thinker. In the judgment of his hearers, young and old, he was probably deemed nearly or quite the foremost of American preachers.

That I may not be supposed to imply any disparagement of the present accomplished head of Harvard, let me say that while each of the men I have named had done a great work in life and achieved a great fame before he came to the Presidency, President Eliot has, in my opinion, achieved an equal fame and performed an equal work since he came to it.

A like policy prevailed in those days in the choice of instructors in the Law School. Judge Story, the senior professor, died just before I graduated from the College. His fame as a jurist was known throughout Europe. He was undoubtedly the most learned judge in the United States. Chief Justice Marshall and Chief Justice Shaw of Massachusetts doubtless excelled him in intellectual vigor. Chancellor Kent rivalled him as a writer upon law. But he had no other rival among judges or commentators in this country,—few anywhere. He was unquestionably, at the time of his death, the most famous teacher of law in the civilized world. His associate professor, Greenleaf, was an admirable lawyer, who, before he went to Harvard, had had a great practice in Maine, and made some good arguments in the Supreme Court of the United States. Judge Story was succeeded by Chief Justice Joel Parker of New Hampshire, a very eminent jurist, who was saturated with the old learning of special pleading and real property. He would have been a fit associate for Coke or Saunders, and would have held his own anywhere with either.

There was nothing in the teaching of Latin or Greek to inspire the student with any love of Greek or Latin literature. The professor never pointed out its beauties or illustrated the text in any way. The students, in succession, were called upon to construe a few lines, reading one or two Greek words and then giving their English equivalents. The time of the good scholar was taken up in hearing the recitation of the poor scholar and so very largely wasted. I had four or five persons in my class who became afterward eminent classical scholars. I do not believe that when we graduated there were more than four men in the class who could write a decent Latin sentence without the laborious use of grammar and dictionary. I doubt whether there was more than one, certainly there were not more than three, who could do the same thing in Greek. I do not suppose there was a man in the class who could have spoken either language with ease.

Yet, somehow, the graduates of Harvard got a good intellectual training from the University. The rough country boy, if he had it in him, came out at his graduation a gentleman in behavior and in character. He was able to take hold of life with great vigor. The average age of graduation I suppose was twenty. Not more than three years were spent in studying a profession. In some few cases, the graduate got a little money by teaching for a year. But the graduates of Harvard College and Harvard Law School were apt to take quite rapidly the high places of the profession. That was true then much more than it is now.

There were many persons who graduated before my time or shortly afterward whose high place in the public life of the Commonwealth and of the country was assured before they were thirty years old. Edward Everett was called to the pulpit of Brattle Street Church at the age of nineteen. He succeeded in that pulpit Joseph Stevens Buckminster, who was himself settled over that important parish at the age of twenty-one and was a wonderful pulpit orator. Edward Everett preached a sermon when he was twenty-four years old before a large audience in the Representatives Chamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence. Rufus King said it was the best sermon he ever heard, and Harrison Gray Otis was affected to tears. Benjamin R. Curtis was admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two years old and shortly after was retained in a very important case. It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heard Curtis's opening argument, was met in the street and asked if anything was going on in court. "Going on?" was the reply. "There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just opened a case so that all Hell can't close it." I suppose Edward Everett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famous in the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six years old as they ever were afterward. I might extend the catalogue indefinitely. Where is there to be found to-day at the New England bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirty of whom it can be said that his place among the great men of his profession is assured? It will not do to say in answer to this that it takes a greater man in this generation to fill such a place than it took in other days. That is not true. The men of those generations have left their work behind them. It does not suffer in comparison with that of their successors. There was something in the college training of that day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender as were its resources, from which more intellectual strength in the pupil was begotten than there is in the college training of the present generation. I will not undertake to account for it. But I think it was due in large part to the personality of the instructors. A youth who contemplated with a near and intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy; who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard his expositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics; or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forth the lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustible stream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the very soul of the pupil.

Josiah Quincy, "old Quin" as we loved to call him, was a very simple and a very high character. He was born in Boston, February 4, 1772, just before the Revolutionary War. It was said, I have no doubt truly, that the nurse who attended his mother at his birth went from that house to the wife of Copley, the painter, when her son, Lord Lyndhurst, was born. Copley was a Tory, though a patriot and an ardent lover of his country. His departure from Boston made Lord Lyndhurst an Englishman. Quincy entered early into politics. He was a candidate for Congress in the last century before he was twenty-five years old. I heard him say once that the Democrats called for a cradle to rock the Federal candidate. He was a good type of the old Massachusetts Federalist,—brave, manly, sincere, of a broad and courageous statesmanship, but distrustful of the people and not understanding their temper. He made some very powerful speeches in the House of Representatives, attacking the greed and office-seeking of that time. His eloquence was something of the style of the famous Irish orators. One of his passages describing the office-seekers tumbling over each other like pigs to a trough will be long remembered. He hated Jefferson and moved his impeachment in the House of Representatives,—a motion for which he got no vote but his own. He retired disgusted from National public life, became Mayor of Boston, an office which he filled with much distinction, and then was called to the Presidency of Harvard, mainly because of his business capacity. The finances of the University were then in a sad condition. He put them on an excellent footing. He was very fond of the boys and they of him, although he was rough and hasty in his manners. While I was in college (although I happened to be at home that day and did not see the affair) some of the boys had got into some serious rows in Boston one Saturday. They had undertaken to wear the Oxford cap and gown. They were ridiculed by the populace in Boston, and a good many fights were the consequence. They were driven from the streets, and in the afternoon a lot of roughs took hold of a long rope, as if they belonged to an engine company, ran out to Cambridge across the bridge, and proposed to attack the college buildings. Old Quin gathered the students together at the gate and told the boys to keep within the yard and not to attack anybody unless they were attacked, but to permit none of those men to come within the gate. The old fellow was ready to head the students and a fight was expected. But the police gathered, and finally the Boston roughs were persuaded to depart in peace.