Famous leaders among men

by Sarah Knowles Bolton

At eight years of age, Phillips and his brother William Gray, a year and a half older, were at the Adams School in Mason Street, and entered the Latin School, then on Bedford Street, in 1846, when Phillips was eleven years old. Here he was a quiet, good scholar, excelling in the languages, and all unconscious of his great future. His teacher, Francis Gardner, was a sad, earnest man, whom Phillips Brooks described nearly forty years later, when he spoke, April 23, 1885, at the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Latin School, the oldest school in America.

"Tall, gaunt, muscular ... impressing every boy with the strong sense of vigor, now lovely and now hateful, but never for a moment tame or dull or false; indignant, passionate, an athlete both in body and mind.... He was not always easy for the boys to get along with. Probably it was not always easy for him to get along with himself. But it has left a strength of truth and honor and devoted manliness which will always be a treasure in the school he loved."

In this school young Brooks learned his fondness for and advocacy of the public school system. He said in his anniversary address, "The German statesman, if you talk with him, will tell you that, with every evil of his great military system, which makes every citizen a soldier for some portion of his life, it yet has one redeeming good. It brings each young man of the land once in his life directly into the country's service; lets him directly feel its touch of dignity and power; makes him proud of it as his personal commander, and so insures a more definite and vivid loyalty through all his life.

"More graciously, more healthily, more Christianly, the American public school does what the barracks and the drill-room try to do. Would that its blessing might be made absolutely universal! Would that it might be so arranged that once in the life of every Boston boy, if only for three months, he might be a pupil of a public school; might see his city sitting in the teacher's chair; might find himself, along with boys of all degrees and classes, simply recognized by his community as one of her children! It would put an element into his character and life which he would never lose. It would insure the unity and public spirit of our citizens."

These words of Phillips Brooks. Mr. Edwin D. Mead thinks, should "be printed in letters of gold, and hung up in every home where parents are thinking of sending their children into private schools, thereby condemning them to a narrower and less sturdy education than that given by the State, while also thus withdrawing their own personal interest from the public schools, which need the personal interest and love of every earnest citizen to-day as they have never needed them before."

From the Boston Latin School young Brooks went to Harvard College when he was about fifteen and a half years old. "The college attracted him with its promises," writes the Rev. Dr. Alexander McKenzie, in the May, 1893, New England Magazine. "Even the Triennial Catalogue was stimulating as he read there of twenty-five men named Phillips and twenty named Brooks, who had graduated from this university. The place for his own name which should join the two lines was inviting."

And yet Phillips Brooks in no way distinguished himself in college, save, perhaps, in composition. His professors were such men as Agassiz, Longfellow, Asa Gray, Lowell, and others. During his junior year he roomed in Massachusetts Hall, and his senior year in Stoughton.

One of Brooks's class writes, "He was a general favorite, always hearty and kindly, with an abounding sense of humor, which he carried with him through life.... No one could have surmised what profession he would choose, and almost any calling would have seemed appropriate."

Mr. Robert Treat Paine, his classmate, says, "At college he cared little for sport, but preferred to read omniverously almost everything and anything that came in his way." Tennyson was an especial favorite.

After graduation Brooks returned to the Boston Latin School, and became a tutor. Here he failed. He could not or would not be a strict disciplinarian, and he left the position.