Ai a; o; 0: 0: 0: 5^ 3 4 5 6 d Fifi California jgional .cility ^ c^5^ /<^>o rix-^ o~^^Jihi The 13'* of Att a Gen^all meeting Vpon publique notice. _y< I"* Mofieth, ffor d' Likewise it Was then gen'"ally agreed Vpon, y' o"" brother brother Philemon Pormort shalbe intreated to become schole- Formort to become master for the teaching & nourtering of children W**' schole- fftaster. '. EzIilyrUl C. K. OGDEN 2Dl)e <i^\ntsit ^c^ool in America AN ORATION By PHILLIPS BROOKS, D. D. AND A POEM By ROBERT GRANT ^t the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of the Boston Latin School, April 2j, i88j BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 5rt)e Bi&ftBiOe ^preaa, Cambritrge Copjrright, 1885, By The Boston Latin School Association. The Riverside Press, Camhridge : Printed by H. O. Houghton and Compatiy. LTBRARY UNIVERSITY OF C ' t TFORyT SANTA BARi;.-.jiA NOTE. The Public Latin School of Boston en- joys the distinction of being the oldest existing school within the bounds of the United States. It was founded in the spring of 1635, thus antedating Harvard College, and has been in continuous exist- ence ever since, with the interruption of a few months during the siege of Boston, 1 775-1 776. The Association, composed of its past members and teachers, cele- brated the two hundred and fiftieth anni- versary by a festival in the building occu- pied by the school, on the evening of April 23, 1885, when the address and poem which follow were given. The appendix to this volume completes the record of the occa- sion. CONTENTS. Oration bj> Phillips Brooks, D. D. . . . p Poem by Robert Grant ..... 79 Appendix : Exercises at the Celebration of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary . p} a. Introduction by Edward Everett Hale, D. D. 95 b. Prayer by Rev. Henry Fitch Jenks . . 95 c. Presentation of Portrait of Epes Sargent Dixwell, Head Master of the School from 18)6 to 18^1, by John Phillips Rey- nolds, M. D., in behalf of the Sub- scribers ...... p8 d. Ode : Carmen Seculare, by Epes Sargent Dixwell . . . . . .102 e. Letters from Invited Guests . . . loj ORATION BY PHILLIPS BROOKS, D. D. THE BOSTON LATIN SCHOOL. Mr. President, and Brethren of the Latin School Association : GREAT public school which has lived to celebrate its two hun- dred and fiftieth anniversary must surely have a story of which it need not be ashamed. It may well fling wide its doors and invite the congratulations of the world, for it has entered for an apprecia- ble period into the world's history. Its arc on the great circle is long enough for the eye to see. It evidently has pos- sessed a true vitality, and had to do with perpetual principles and the continual ne- cessities of man. For, lo, it has lived through the changing seasons. It evi- dently was no creature of the air. It must have had its roots in the unchang- 12 The Boston Latin School. ing ground. It stands before us in that peculiar richness of old age which belongs alike to old trees and old schools, forever fresh with the new leaves of each new spring, growing stronger as they grow older, with ever sturdier grasp upon the soil. There is nothing which the world has to show which is two hundred and fifty years old that more deserves the thankful congratulations of its friends and children than an old school, all the more strong and alive for its venerable age. A quarter of a millennium ! Let us think for a moment how long a period of time that is. It is time enough for the world to turn a new face to her sister stars. It is a time long enough for a new order of government, a new religion, a new kind of man to appear and to become familiar on our planet. It is a time long enough for a new continent to be discov- ered and settled, and for men almost to forget that there ever was a time when its shores were unknown. It is two hundred The Boston Latin School. i ^ and fifty years from the crowning of Charle- magne to the battle of Hastings, from Wil- liam the Conqueror to the Black Prince, from Robert Bruce to Queen Elizabeth, from Oliver Cromwell to General Grant. It is a quarter of a millennium from Chau- cer to Milton, or from Shakespeare to Tennyson. Is it not manifest how the world may change in such a period as sep- arates the reign of Master Pormont from the reign of Master Merrill in our Boston Latin School? When an institution has covered so long a period of time with its continuous life, it becomes a bond to hold the cen- turies together. It makes most pictu- resquely evident the unity of human life which underlies all the variety of human living. One of the values of this anni- versary occasion lies in this, that in the unbroken life of our great mother the lives of all her children claim brotherhood with one another. You and I are fellow students and schoolmates with the little 14 The Boston Latin School. Indians who came in out of the wilderness to claim their privilege of free tuition, when Boston hardly reached as far as Winter Street. The little Puritan of the seventeenth century and the little Ration- alist of the nineteenth look each other in the face, and understand each other better because they are both pupils of the Latin School. Nay, I am not sure but even more than that is true. Who can say that in the school's unity of life the boys of the centuries to be, the boys who will learn strange lessons, play strange games, and ask strange questions in the Latin School in 1985, are not in some subtle way present already as companions and as influences to the boys who are to-day standing on the narrow line of the present between the great expanses of the past and future. It is safer, and so it is wiser, that on this anniversary evening we should deal more with the past than with the future, and be more historians than prophets ; yet never The Boston Latin School. 75 forgetting that no man ever deals truly with the past, when he turns his face that way, who does not feel the future coming into life behind his back. Let us remem- ber, then, that the history of our school covers the most of three centuries, and that it began to be, just at the time when what we may most truly call the modern life of our English race had at last, after many struggles, become thoroughly estab- lished. It is good to be born at sunrise. It is good for a man or an institution to date its life from the days when an order of things, which is to exist for a long time in the world, is in the freshness of its youth. Such a time was the first half of the seventeenth century. Then were be- ing sown the seeds whose harvests have not yet all been reaped. The eighteenth century which followed, and the nine- teenth century in which we live, were both enfolded in that great germinal cen- tury of English life. As I have read the 1 6 The Boston Latin School. history of our school, it has appeared to me that there was a true correspondence between the periods of its career and the three centuries through which its life has stretched. One evidence of what a vital institution it has been, of how it has re- sponded to the changing life around it, of how it has had its changing, ever appro- priate ministry to render to that changing life, has seemed to me to lie in this : that its history divides itself into three great periods, marked by three of its most illus- trious teacherships, and corresponding in a striking way to the three centuries, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, and the nine- teenth. It is in the light of that corre- spondence, which I am sure you will see is no idle fancy of my own, that I shall ask you to consider the history of our venerable school to-night. Happily, her annals have been so faithfully gathered by a few of her devoted sons, and so fully displayed in the historical account which has been or will shortly be spread before The Boston Latin School. ly all her children, that I am not called upon to write her history. I need only try, availing myself freely of the results of their indefatigable labors, to show with what broad and simple readiness she has caught the spirit of each passing time, and done her duty by them all. The institution which grows naturally in its own atmosphere and soil grows un- observed. It is the Hindu juggler's arti- ficial mango-tree whose growth you watch, seeing each leaf put forth. The healthy rose-tree no man sees as it opens its healthy buds to flowers. Only you look out some morning, and there it is. So it is with the Latin School, It was a nat- ural and necessary fruit of the first life of New England ; and that very fact makes its beginning misty and obscure. The colony under Winthrop arrived in the Ar- abella and founded Boston in 1630. On the 4th of September, 1633, the Griffin brought John Cotton from the Lincoln- shire Boston, full of pious spirit and wise 1 8 The Boston Latin School. plans for the new colony with which he had cast in his lot. It has been suggested that possibly we owe to John Cotton the first suggestion of the first town-school. Certainly we owe some other of the early things of the town to him. He brought the Thursday Lecture and the Market-Day in the Griffin with him. And it is evident that in his old city on the Witham he had been actually interested in the growth of a school which, in some of its features, was not unlike the one which in the sec- ond year after his arrival was set up in the new Boston. However this may be, here is the town record of the 13th of the second month, 1635. It is forever memo- rable, for it is the first chapter of our Book of Genesis, the very cradle of all our race: "At a general meeting upon publique notice ... it was then generally agreed upon that our brother Philemon Pormort shall be intreated to become scholemaster, for the teaching and nour- tering of children among us." It was two The Boston Latin School. ig hundred and fifty years ago to-day, just nineteen years after the day when William Shakespeare died, just seventy-one years after the day when he was born. How simple that short record is, and how unconscious that short view is of the future which is wrapped up in it ! Fifty- nine thousand children who crowd the Bos- ton public schools to-day and who can count what thousands yet unborn ? are to be heard crying out for life in the dry, quaint words of that old vote. By it the first educational institution, which was to have continuous existence in America, and in it the public school system of the land, came into being. Philemon Pormort, the first teacher of the Latin School, is hardly more than a mere shadow of a name. It is not even clear that he ever actually taught the school at all. A few years later, with Mr. Wheelwright, after the Hutchinson excite- ment, he disappears into the northern woods, and is one of the founders of Exe- 20 The Boston Latin School. ter, in New Hampshire. There are ru- mors that he came back to Boston and died here, but it is all very uncertain. One would say that it was better so. This was no one man's school. It was the school of the people, the school of the town. Dim, half-discerned Philemon Por- mort, with the very spelling of his name disputed, with his face looking out upon us from the mist, or rather with the mist shaping itself for a moment into a face which we may call his, merely serves to give a sort of human reality to that which would otherwise be wholly vague. Around the shadowy form of Philemon Pormort hovers the hardly less misty fig- ure of Daniel Maude, sometimes blending with it as possible assistant, sometimes separating from it as rival and successor "a good man, of a serious spirit, and of a peaceable and quiet disposition." He, too, disappears northward after a while, and goes to be the minister in Dover, in New Hampshire. In his place came Mr. The Boston Latin School. 21 Woodbridge, of whom even less is known than of his predecessors, and after him Robert Woodmansey, who ruled for twenty years, from 1650 to 1670. He, too, has faded to a shadow, leaving room for a picture only the least trifle clearer of Ben- jamin Thomson, of whom it is known that he wrote verses, which have given him a humble place among our earlier New Eng- land poets. They were not light or buoy- ant rhymes. None of the poems of those days would please our ear to-day. These were no gay or careless song-birds whose music breaks forth now and then in the morning of national life. Indeed, there is a strange lack of the gayety of sunrise in all those earliest New England days. The dawn of our history was not fresh and dewy. It was rather like the breaking of the daylight over a field where the battle which passed with the sunset of yesterday is to be opened again with the sunrise of to-day, and the best of its music is rather like the hoarse beating of drums than like the songs of birds. 22 The Boston Latin School. Pormort, and Maude, and Woodbridge, and Woodmansey, and singing Thomson, these fill with their ghostly shapes the vague, chaotic, almost prehistoric period of our school. And yet under these men the school got itself well established and became a certain fact. It was not what in these days we call a free school. The great idea of education offered without cost to all the town's children at the town's expense had not yet taken shape. It needed long and gradual development. The name " free school " in those days seems to have been used to characterize an institution which should not be re- stricted to any class of children, and which should not be dependent on the fluctuating attendance of scholars for its support. It looked forward to ultimate endowment, like the schools of England. The town set apart the rent of Deer Isl- and, and some of the other islands in the harbor, for its help. All the great citi- zens. Governor Winthrop, Governor Vane, The Boston Latin School. 2^ Mr. Bellingham, and the rest, made gen- erous contributions to it. But it called, also, for support from those who sent their children to it, and who were able to pay something ; and it was only of the Indian children that it was distinctly provided that they should be "taught gratis." It was older than any of the schools which, in a few years, grew up thick around it. The same power which made it spring out of the soil was in all the rich ground on which these colonists, un- like any other colonists which the world has ever seen, had set their feet. Rox- bury had its school under the Apostle Eliot in 1645. Cambridge was already provided before 1643. Charlestown did not wait later than 1636. Salem and Ips- wich were, both of them, ready in 1637. Plymouth did not begin its system of pub- lic instruction till 1663. It was in 1647 that the General Court enacted that re- solve which is the great charter of free education in our Commonwealth, in whose 24 The Boston Latin School. preamble and ordinance stand the immor- tal words: "That learning may not be buried in the grave of our fathers, in church and Commonwealth, the Lord as- sisting our endeavors, it is therefore or- dered that every township in this jurisdic- tion, after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall then forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read." There can be no doubt, then, of our priority. But mere priority is no great thing. The real interest of the beginning of the school is the large idea and scale on which it started. It taught the children, little Indians and all, to read and write. But there seems every reason to sup- pose that it taught also the Latin tongue, and all that then was deemed the higher knowledge. It was the town's only school till 1682. Side by side on its humble benches sat the son of the governor and the son of the fisherman, each free to take The Boston Latin School. 25 the best that he could grasp. The highest learning was declared at once to be no privilege of an aristocratic class, but the portion of any boy in town who had the soul to desire it and the brain to appropri- ate it. So simply, so unconsciously, there was- set up, where the School Street of the days to come was not even yet a country road, this institution, whose exact like the world had never seen, and which had in itself the germs of free commercial rivalry and republican government and universal suffrage and all the wondrous unborn things. The most valuable, perhaps, of all things which this new public school represented was that which we may well hold to con- stitute the greatest claim of the public school system in all time to our affection and esteem. It represented the funda- mental idea of the town undertaking the education of her children. It is in the loyalty, the gratitude, the educated notion of obedience to the town which has trained 26 The Boston Latin School. them. It is in the dignity and breadth and seriousness which the sense that their town is training them gives to their train- ing that the advantage of the public school boys over the boys of the best private schools always consists. And this was al- ready present from the day that the doors of the first public school were opened, two hundred and fifty years ago. The boys of Pormort and of Woodmansey were dimly conscious of it, and it had influence on them. Who was it that had built their schoolhouse .? Who was it that had laid out their course of study and arranged their hours 1 Who was it that set them their lessons and heard their recitations.? Whose were the sacred hands that flogged them } Who was it that sat, a shadowy form, but their real ruler and friend, be- hind the master's awful chair } It was their town. That is the real heart of the whole matter. That is the real power of the public school system always. It edu- cates the thought of law and obedience. The Boston Latin School. 2y the sense of mingled love and fear, which is the true citizen's true emotion to his city. It educates this in the very lessons of the schoolroom, and makes the person of the State the familiar master of the grateful subject from his boyhood. Such has been the power of our Latin School for two centuries and a half. Thus, then, the school is in existence, and now appears the first of the three great masters of whom I spoke who have given it its character. Now its history comes forth from the mist, for in the year 1670 Ezekiel Cheever becomes its master, with his long reign of thirty-eight years before him. The time will come, perhaps, when some poetic brain will figure to itself, and some hands, alert with historical imagination, perhaps the same which have bidden John Harvard live in immortal youth in Cam- bridge, will shape out of vital bronze what sort of man the first great master, Ezekiel Cheever, was. It will be well worth 28 The Boston Latin School. doing, and it will not be hard for genius to do. Whoever knows the seventeenth century will see start into life its typical man, the man of prayer, the man of faith, the man of duty, the man of God. Already, when he came to teach the school in Bos- ton, the wild tumult of the Restoration was engulfing social life in England, but it had not reached these quiet shores, or it had been beaten back from against our solemn rocks. The men here were Crom- well's men, and none was more thoroughly a man of the first half of his century than Ezekiel Cheever, He had been born in London, in 1614, and had come first to our Boston when he was twenty-three years old. He did not tarry here then, but went on to New Haven, where he taught schol- ars, among whom was Michael Wiggles- worth, the fearful poet of "r^he Day of Doom." Thence he came, by-and-by, to Ipswich, then to Charlestown, and he was a mature Puritan fifty-six years old be- fore, with solemn ceremony, he received The Boston Latin School. 29 from the great men of the town, on the sixth day of November, 1670, the keys of the schoolhouse, and became the master of the Latin School. He lived in the schoolhouse, and received a salary of sixty pounds a year. For this he evidently felt that he accepted grave responsibility. It was not only to teach these boys Latin. Latin was merely an instrument to life. And so all those conceptions and those rules of life which English Puritanism had beaten out perhaps more clearly and pre- cisely than any other religious system which ever ruled the thoughts of men, all these filled and were blended with the classic education of his school. He prayed with the boys one by one when he had heard their lessons. He not merely edu- cated their minds, but he wrestled for their souls. He wrote two books, his famous " Accidence," which for a century held the place of honor among Latin school-books, and his "Scripture Prophecies Explained," which reverently but confidently lifted the yy The Boston Latin School. veil from the eternal things. Probably the second book, no less nay, much more than the first, lay near his heart. He was called perhaps some of my modern hear- ers may not attach very clear notions to the name, but we are sure that he would have treasured it among his choicest titles, he was called by Cotton Mather " a sober chiliast." The next world for him was always brooding over and flowing through this world. We can well believe that it was the eternal terror, and no mere earthly rage, which was burning in his eye when his scholar, the reverend Mr. Samuel Maxwell, got that idea of him which, years afterwards, he wrote among his reminiscences. It is the only scrap of personal portrait, I think, which is left of Master Cheever. Mr. Maxwell says : "He wore a long white beard, terminating in a point, and when he stroked his beard to the point it was a sign for the boys to stand clear." It has often come to pass that great The Boston Latin School. ^i schoolmasters have found among their pupils the voice or pen which has saved them from oblivion, the " vates sacer " who has rescued them from lying unknown in long night : what Stanley did for Dr. Arnold of Rugby ; what Ernest Renan has done for Bishop Dupanloup of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet ; that Cotton Mather, the historian and poet laureate of early Bos- ton, did in a funeral sermon and a memo- rial poem for Ezekiel Cheever. The muse was never more modish and self-conscious, poetry never labored under such mountain- weight of pedantry, conceits never so turned and returned and doubled on them- selves, the flowers of rhetoric never so ran to seed, as in the marvelous verses in which the minister of the North Church did obit- uary honor to the master of the Latin School. And yet it shows how great a man the master was that the reality of his pupil's tribute to his greatness pierces through all his absurd exaggeration, and he walks grandly even in these preposter- ^2 The Boston Latin School. ous clothes. Hear him one instant pa- tiently, just to see what it is like : " A mighty tribe of well-instructed youth Tell what they owe to him, and tell with truth ; All the eight parts of speech he taught to them They now employ to trumpet his esteem ; They fill Fame's Trumpet, and they spread his Fame To last till the last Trumpet drown the same." Then come some lines which give us an idea of the specimen words of the famous " Accidence " : " Magister pleased them well, because 't was he ; They saw that Bonus did with it agree ; When they said Amo they the hint improve, Him for to make the object of their love." And then these verses, which link his name with that of his brother teacher in Cambridge : " 'T is Corlet's pains and Cheever's we must own That thou, New England, art not Scythia grown ; The Isles of Scilly had o'errun this day The Continent of our America." It is poor verse, not to be made much of in this presence. But there is a certain The Boston Latin School. ^} reality about it, nevertheless. It catches something of the stumbling style, half grand, half commonplace, with which all that old New England greatness used to walk. It has the same patchwork coloring, yet giving on the whole a total and com- plete impression, which we behold in the sentence which Judge Sewall wrote in his diary on the twenty-first day of August, 1708, when he heard at last that the old schoolmaster was dead at the good age of ninety-four, " He labored in his calling," Sewall says, " skilfully, diligently, con- stantly, religiously, seventy years, a rare instance of piety, health, strength, service- ableness. The welfare of the Province was much upon his spirit. He abominated periwigs." Can we not see the good, sim- ple, severe old man } They buried him from the schoolhouse, with the familiar desks and benches looking on at the ser- vice, and as the grammarian's funeral passed out over the Neck to Roxbury Burial Ground, the reign of the first great master of the Latin School was over ! ^4 The Boston Latin School. No doubt it all was very grim. The master was grim, and the boys were grim. And a grim boy is the grimmest thing on earth. But we must not let the picture of the Puritan schoolhouse grow too sombre in our thoughts. They were boys still, those little Puritans, and the whole genera- tion of sober manners and repressed feel- ings cannot have wholly exorcised the spirit of mischief which has haunted the boy-nature in all the ages. And always, in thinking about the Puritan times, we need to remember that the brightness or dull- ness of any spot in a picture depends altogether on the tone or key in which the picture, as a whole, is painted. A spot of dull red in a canvas which is all ashen- gray will glow and burn as the most brill- iant scarlet fails to do in the midst of a great carnival of frantic color. It is a question of backgrounds and proportions. And so a very little frolic must have gone a great way in the Boston of Ezekiel Cheever, which was the Boston of the The Boston Latin School. ^5 " Scarlet Letter." Where Cotton Mather was the Homer and the Magnalia was the Iliad, the power of being amused was no doubt in true relation to the means of amusement which were offered ; and it may well be doubted whether, save in some exceptional mortal here and there, born out of due time, too early or too late, born with a humorous and freakish spirit which had embodied itself in the wrong place, there was any felt lack of those brighter elements, that ozone in the atmosphere of life, which has come to seem to us so absolutely necessary. But if we leave the question of amuse- ment on one side, and think about more serious things, then the school shines with an unquestionable light. It may have been very grim, but that it was pervaded with a clear, deep sense of duty, that it was a place where life was seriously thought of and where hard work was done, no student of those days can doubt. Not yet had come the slightest hesitation concerning the di- ^6 The Boston Latin School. rection which education ought to take. They gave themselves to the classics with- out any mocking voice to tell them that their devotion was a fetich-worship. In- deed, any one who thoroughly believes that the classical study is to-day a homage to an effete idol may still be free to own that in the days of Cheever it was a true service of a still living master. The Renaissance and the Reformation, both full of the spirit of classicism, were hardly two centuries old. Latin was still the living language of diplomacy. John Milton, once the Latin secretary of Cromwell, possibly himself a teacher of Ezekiel Cheever in his youth, did not die till the great Boston master had been teaching here four years. And the New Testament, being the book which lay at the very soul of all New England, kept the Greek tongue vital and sacred in every true New England heart and house- hold. To forget that days have changed since then is folly. To shut our eyes to the great procession of new sciences which The Boston Latin School. ^7 have come trooping in, demanding the recognition and study of educated men, is to be blind to a great series of events which the world sees and in which it glories. The classics are not, cannot be, what they were when Ezekiel Cheever taught Cotton Mather and President Leverett their Latin Grammar. They are not and they cannot be again the tools of present life, the in- struments of current thought. All the more for that they may be something greater, something better. All the more they may stand to those whose privilege it is to study them as the monumental struc- tures which display the power of perfected human speech. All the more they may shine in their finished beauty in the midst of our glorious, tumultuous modern life as the Greek temples stand in the same Europe which holds the Gothic cathedrals, offering forever the rest of their complete- ness, for the comfort of men's eagerness and discontent. All the more they may show enshrined within them the large and ^8 The Boston Latin School. simple types of human life and character, the men and women who shine on our per- plexed, distracted, modern life as the calm moon shines upon the vexed and broken waters of the sea. So long as they can do these offices for man, the classics will not pass out of men's study. It is good to make them elective, but we may be sure that students will elect them abundantly in school and college. It was the classic culture in those ear- liest days that bound the Latin School and Harvard College close together. The college is young beside our venerable school. It did not come to birth till we were four years old. But when the college had been founded, it and the school became, and ever since have made, one system of continuous education. Boys learnt their Accidence in School Street, and went and were examined in it at Cambridge. The compilers of our catalogue have thought it right to assume that every Boston graduate of Harvard in those earliest years had The Boston Latin School. 59 studied at the Latin School. Such union between school and college has continued year after year, and has been a great and helpful influence for both. It has kept the school always alert and ready for the highest standards. In the days of the first great master Cotton Mather wrote : " It was noted that when scholars came to be admitted into the college they who came from the Cheverian education were gener- ally the most unexceptionable." We Latin School boys have loved to think that that has never ceased to be the case. And so the college has always helped the school. But the school also has helped the college. Its response to all the new methods which have risen in the university has ever been cordial and sincere. Its thoroughness of work has helped to make those methods possible. The men in whose minds those methods have arisen have been often men of our school. From Leverett to Eliot the school has given to the college not a few of its best presidents and professors. And 40 The Boston Latin School. so we have a right to feel that we have not merely been dragged in the wake of our great neighbor, but have had something to do with the shaping of her course. Ships which met the Alaska and the Winnipeg upon mid-ocean thought that they saw only a great steamer with a little one in tow ; but really the little steamer was the rudder that was keeping the great steamer in her course. And so we part with Master Cheever, the great seventeenth-century schoolmas- ter, and pass on. Almost the last glimpse which we catch of him in the schoolroom, when he is more than eighty years old, has something noble in its simplicity. A boy is angrily rebuked by him for a false syntax. He ventures to dispute the master's judg- ment. He shows a rule which had escaped the master's memory, and proves that he is right. The master smiles and says, "Thou art a brave boy. I had forgot it." That is the very heroism of school-teach- ing. So let his serious face pass smiling out of our sight. The Boston Latin School. 41 With Cheever's death the school passed into the reign of Nathaniel Williams. He is already a different kind of man. It is said of him that he was "agreeable," which nobody had said of Cheever. He has ac- complishments. And in him there are signs of versatility which belong more to the new century than to the old ; for he was minister and doctor at the same time that he was schoolmaster. It is written that " amid the multiplicity of his duties as instructor and physician in extensive practice he never left the ministerial work." No part of man's threefold nature was left out of his care. Well might he have writ- ten as the motto of his memorandum book, in which perhaps he kept all together his prescriptions and the notes of his sermons and the roster of his school, " Humani a me nil alienum puto." No doubt his pupils were both losers and gainers by the diffu- sion of their master's mind. In those pupils also we begin to see a change. It is no longer Cotton Mather, 42 The Boston Latin School. but Benjamin Franklin, who is the typical Boston boy. At eight years old, his father intending to devote him, according to his own account, as the tithe of his sons to the service of the church, he was put to the grammar school. He did not stay there long, for he did not accept his father's con- secration of his life, but soon passed out to the printer's shop and the Continental Congress and the French Court, and ex- periments upon the thunderous skies. But he and Samuel Adams, who was one of Master Williams's later scholars, let us feel how the times have changed and another century begun. Yet still the sober religious spirit of the past days has not vanished. For years to come the school is dismissed early for the Thursday Lecture. In 1709 the first beginning of what now is the school com- mittee makes its appearance. A certain number of gentlemen of liberal education, together with some of the reverend minis- ters of the town, are asked to be inspectors The Boston Latin School. 4} of the school ; and at their visitation, " one of the ministers by turns to pray with the scholars, and entertain 'em with some instructions of piety specially adapted to their age and education." According to its light the town still counted that it was its responsibility and right to watch over its children's characters. And the child honored religion all the more because he had heard his mother city praying, his Jerusalem crying out to God for him. But I suppose the most striking thing which came in the teachership of Williams must have been the disturbance in town meeting in the year 171 1. Some innova- tors, restless spirits who were not satisfied to leave things as they were, had made inquiries and found that in the schools of Europe boys really learned Latin, and learned it with less of toil and misery than here. And so they sent a memorial to the town house which recounted, to use its curious words, that " according to the methods used here very many hundreds of 44 The Boston Latin School. boys in this town, who by their parents were never designed for a more liberal ed- ucation, have spent two, three, and four years or more of their early days at the Latin School, which hath proved of very little or no benefit to their after accom- plishment," and asked "whether it might not be advisable that some more easie and delightful methods be attended and put in practice." It was referred to committees in the good old way, and came to nothing then ; but it is interesting, because in it there is the first symptom which our town has to show of that rebellion against the tyranny and narrowness and unreasonable- ness of the classical system which will be heard as long as the classical system man- ifests its perpetual tendency to become tyrannical and narrow and unreasonable. " Some more easie and delightful meth- ods ! " How the souls of the school boys have hungered for them through the ages all along ! How we, the students of a century and a half later, looking back on The Boston Latin School. 4^ our own schoolboy days, feel still that a more easy and delightful method than that which we know somewhere exists and must some day be found ! Were not we started on a course of study which, if one of Pormort's boys had begun it on the day on which the school was opened and continued it till now, he hardly would have mastered yet? Were not we treated as if the object of our study were not that we should get the delight out of Cicero and Vergil, but as if every one of us were meant to be either another Andrews or another Stoddard ? Remembering these things, we bless the memory of the memo- rialists of 171 1 ; we rejoice to think that the classics, finding themselves hard pressed by upstart modern sciences, must ultimately justify and keep their place by finding out more " easie and delightful methods." The eighteenth century then was well upon its way when, almost exactly a hun- dred years after the foundation of the 46 The Boston Latin School. school, John Lovell, the second of its rep- resentative men, became its master. The school at last has reached that stage of growth in which it produces its own seed and renews itself from its own stock. John Lovell was the first true Boston boy, bred in the orthodox routine of Latin School and Harvard College, who attained the mastership. Since him only one mas- ter has ascended to that dignity save by those sacred stairs. It has kept us very local, but has made no small part of our strength. John Lovell's name shines in our history as perhaps the best known of all our sov- ereigns. His portrait, painted by Smibert, whose son he taught, hangs in the Memo- rial Hall at Cambridge, and its copy here looks down on us to-night as it has gazed on many of the fast-coming and fast-going generations of Latin School boys here and in Bedford Street. Look on its calm com- placency and say if it be not the very em- bodiment of the first three quarters of the The Boston Latin School. 47 eighteenth century, before the great dis- turbance and explosion came. The age of troublesome questions and of wrestling souls has passed away. The time of reason has succeeded to the time of faith. Au- thority and obedience are the dominant ideas. System and order are the wor- shiped standards. Satisfaction with things as they are is the prevailing temper. A long and somewhat sultry calm precedes the outburst, as yet unfeared, with which the century is to close, and which is to clear the air for the richer days in which it has been our privilege to live. John Lovell seems to have been thor- oughly a man of his time. It is said of him that " though a severe teacher, yet he was remarkably humorous and an agreeable companion." That is a true eighteenth- century description. Insistence on author- ity and comfortable good-humor united in the self-satisfied conservatism, the marvel- ous self-contentment, of those days. The great achievement of the master was his 48 The Boston Latin School. oration on the death of Peter Faneuil, Esq., delivered in the new hall, which the benefactor of the town had built. It is florid and was considered eloquent. " May this hall be ever sacred to the inter- ests of truth, of justice, of loyalty, of honor, of liberty. May no private views or party broils ever enter these walls." How little he who so consecrated the cradle knew of the tumultuous child who was to fill it, and to make the country and the world ring with its cries ! The whole oration , is tumid and profuse, real no doubt in its day, but bearing now an inevitable suspicion of unreality and superficialness. Ezekiel Cheever could not have written it. But we think that Ezekiel Cheever would not have written it if he could ; he would have had stronger things to say. I have not thus far tried to trace the history of the schoolhouse in which the masters of whom I have been speaking taught, because the negligent records have allowed it almost altogether to slip through The Boston Latin School. 49 their careless fingers ; and there are hardly more than modern guesses left. The soul was sacred, and the body got but little care. We only know that from the first a school- house, which was also the head master's dwelling, stood where now the rear of the King's Chapel stands, its ground reaching about to where the statue of its former pupil, Benjamin Franklin, has been set up in bronze. This schoolhouse lasted until Lovell's time. It is of it in his time that it is said that the garden, which belonged to it, was cultivated in the most thrifty manner, free of all expense, by the assistance of the best boys in school, who were permitted to work in it as a reward of merit. The same best boys were allowed to saw the master's wood and bottle his cider, and to laugh as much as they pleased while performing these delightful offices. Remember that these " best boys " were the future signers of the Declaration of Independence. They were John Hancock and Robert Treat Paine and William Hooper. James Bow- ^o The Boston Latin School, doin and Harrison Gray Otis were the names of the boys who made the garden which they tilled ring with their licensed laughter. The hands which sawed the master's wood were the same hands which dragged their sleds to General Haldimand's headquarters in 1775, and whose owners remonstrated, with the vigor of young freemen, against the desecration of their coast by the insolent British soldiers. The spirit of loyalty and the spirit of liberty together, the readiness to obey legitimate authority and the determination not to submit to tyranny, these two which united to secure and which have united to sustain our institutions, burned together in the bosoms of the boys who went to the old school on the north side of School Street. In 1748 the disturbance of that school- house came. It made a wild excitement then in the little town, but the tumult has sunk into silent oblivion with the old quar- rels of the Athenian Agora and the Forum of Rome. The King's Chapel was pros- The Boston Latin School. 5/ parous, and wanted to enlarge its house of worship. The schoolhouse stood right in the way. Science and religion were in conflict. The influential chapel asked the town for leave to tear the schoolhouse down and build another on land which the chapel would provide across the street. The town's people for some reason, per- haps because of the offensive prelacy of the petitioners, were violently opposed to the idea. Master Lovell himself fought hard against it. Town meeting after town meet- ing of the most excited kind was held. The strife ran high, but the chapel carried the day, and in a town meeting of April 18, 1748, by a vote of 205 to 197, the prayer of the petitioners was granted. The only epigram to which our school ever gave occasion, the only flash of wit which lightens the sky of our serious his- tory, comes in here, and, unique as it is, must not be omitted, however familiar it may be, in any memorial address. I charge my successor of two hundred and fifty years 5-2 The Boston Latin School. hence to find for it a place in his semi-mil- lennial oration. On the morning after the great fight was over and the great defeat had come, Mr. Joseph Green, the wearer at that time of the never-fading laurel of the wit of Boston, sent in to the school to Master Lovell these verses, which the mas- ter probably read out to the boys. " A fig for your learning, I tell you the town, To make the church larger, must pull the school down." " Unluckily spoken," replied Master Birch, " Then learning, I fear, stops the growth of the church." The schoolhouse which the King's Chapel built in fulfillment of its promise, which stood where the eastern portion of the Parker House now stands, seems to have vanished mysteriously and completely from the memory of man. It stood for sixty years, and to-day no record tells us what was its look. There is something pa- thetic in this total vanishing of an old house, especially of an old schoolhouse. It was so terribly familiar once. It is so The Boston Latin School. 5^ hopelessly lost now. We might as well try to reconstruct the ship of Jason or the horse of Troy. A hundred years is as good as a thousand to such pure oblivion. The successor of that first schoolhouse on the south side of School Street was the building in which you, sir, and many whom the city still delights to honor, gained their education between the time of its comple- tion in 1812 and its destruction in 1844. Nothing remains of it now except its key, which makes part of our modest museum, and which I here hold up for the recognition of my older friends. After that came the Bedford Street house, which many of us who still feel young when we talk with the boy who went to school in School Street remember with various emotions, and which gave way only four years ago to this pala- tial edifice, which, standing in our imagina- tions alongside of the little, hardly discov- erable shed in which Philemon Pormort taught, is the real orator of this occasion. We must not linger too long with Mas- ^4 The Boston Latin School. ter Lovell. It was in the mysterious building which the world has now forgotten that he was teaching when the Revolution took him by surprise. He was not equal to the time, and saw no farther into the future than allowed him to be a Tory. But his son James, whom he had called to be his assistant, had the spirit of the second and not of the first half of the eighteenth cen- tury, and was a patriot. Tradition tells how the old man and the young man sat, like the embodied spirits of the past and the future, on separate platforms at the two ends of the long-vanished schoolroom, and taught the rights of the crown and the rights of the people to the boys, who lis- tened to both, but turned surely at last away from the setting to the rising sun. At last there came the day of which Har- rison Gray Otis, then a schoolboy nine years old, has left us his account. I must recite to you his graphic words : " On the 19th of April, 1775, I went to school for the last time. In the morning about seven. The Boston Latin School. ^^ Percy's Brigade was drawn up, extending from Scollay's building through Tremont Street and nearly to the bottom of the Mall, preparing to take up their march for Lex- ington. A corporal came up to me as I was going to school and turned me off to pass down Court Street, which I did, and came up School Street to the schoolhouse. It may well be imagined that great agita- tion prevailed, the British line being drawn up a few yards only from the schoolhouse door. As I entered the school I heard the announcement of Deponite libros, and ran home for fear of the regulars." That was the end of one scene of our drama : with the departing form of little Otis running home "for fear of the regu- lars " ends the administration of Master Lovell and closes the distinctively eigh- teenth-century period of our history. The master himself disappears soon with the evacuating British. His son ^.oitve^ was V<i^ carried off a prisoner, perhaps in the same ( ship, no doubt in revengeful memory of the ^6 The Boston Latin School. oration which he had dared to deliver in the old South Meeting House in honor of the victims of the Boston Massacre. There is nothing heroic about Master Lovell. It was not an heroic nature. It was not an heroic world in which he lived. The lamps were being overtaken by the sunrise, and looked pale and belated as they always do. But he will ever be re- membered as one who served his city well according to his light. He keeps and will long keep a local fame. He is of that class of men whose monuments we read everywhere in quaint and ancient towns and own that though their fame never overleaped the walls within which they were bom, yet it is better for the world that they have lived than that many a great man with whom Fame and her silly trum- pet have been busy should have strutted on his loftier stage. They have given great faithfulness to little things, and no one can say how wide-reaching the results have been. " In tenui labor at tenuis non The Boston Latin School. ^y gloria." We smile at their exaggerated eulogy, but are glad that their city does them honor. So we may leave the good name of John Lovell to the safe-keeping of his grateful town of Boston. You will remind me, if I do not soon re- mind myself, that I have not undertaken to write the whole history of the Latin School, but only to recall something of the spirit of what its past has been, letting my thoughts gather especially about the names of its three great masters who mark the three centuries in which it has lived. Re- membering this, I must not pause to re- mind you of how, after Lovell's flight, the school was closed for more than a year, and of how then it was reopened under the mastership of Samuel Hunt. His reign has left severer memories than that of any other of our masters. As we listen at the windows which the recollections of some of his pupils have left open, it is almost like Vergil's awful record : $8 The Boston Latin School. " Hinc exaudiri gemitus et saeva sonare Verbera ; turn stridor ferri tractseque catenas." After him came William Biglow, of whom there remains no strong mark on our an- nals. Then to a school fallen a good deal into degeneracy, as if to set it in order for the demands of another century, came the wise, energetic administration of Master Benjamin Apthorp Gould, the teacher of Emerson and Motley and Adams and Win- throp and Sumner and Hillard and Beecher and James Freeman Clarke. We have come now to familiar names and days. We are binding the pride of modern Bos- ton very closely to the promise of the past when we see the boys of 1824 come for- ward to receive their prizes at the hands of Master Gould. Charles Sumner has written a translation from Sallust for which he receives two dollars as a second prize ; and a translation from Ovid for which one dollar is thought enough. George S. Hil- lard has two dollars for the third declama- tion prize, and is loaded down with other The Boston Latin School. 59 rewards of merit. Robert C. Winthrop has written a Latin poem for which he wins a second prize and gets six dollars. Epes S. Dixwell was even then singing in Latin odes, his hymn for that year bring- ing him just as much as Mr. Winthrop's poem. Not this year, but the next, James F. Clarke gets the first prize for an English poem, and little Wendell Phillips gains one of six third prizes for declamation. To read those old catalogues makes the last sixty years seem very short. The mas- ters and scholars of those days are only the masters and scholars of to-day standing just far enough off for us to study them. The dusty drudgery of the schoolroom has settled, and we can see its meanings clearly. Let us pause a moment and think what this school-keeping and school-going means. There stands the master, like a priest be- tween the present and the past, between the living and the dead, between the ideas and the life of the world. His is a noble, nay a holy, priesthood. He is the 6o The Boston Latin School. lens through which truth pours itself on young human souls ; he is the window through which fresh young eyes look out at human life : and there around him sit his scholars. Like Homer's heroes, Mr. Hil- lard says they are, in the frankness and di- rectness of their life. They make their friendships and their feuds. They meet the old temptations with their sublime young confidence. That school life is to them their hill of Ida or their palace of Jerusalem, They are Paris or Solomon in their critical encounters with the nobler and the baser allurements of their life. Yet for the time they live magnificently apart. The old world roars around them and they do not care, but live their sepa- rate life and are in no impatience for State Street or Court Street. In these days School Street and the Common and the Charles River made their sufficient world. This ever-recurring life of the new genera- tions, this narrow life of boyhood opening by and by into the larger experience of man- The Boston Latin School, 61 hood, to be narrowed again into the boy- hood of their children, and so on perpetu- ally, this makes perpetual inspiration ; this makes the rhythmic life of the com- munity. It is the systole and diastole of the city's heart. Master Gould passes away, and Master Leverett succeeds. He was scholarly and gracious, and goes down the road of sure and well-earned fame with his dictionary under his arm. Then Master Dillaway, our honored president, takes up the scep- tre, and wins the grateful honor which he has never lost. Then Mr. Dixwell begins his 16ng respected reign, which will hence- forward be commemorated by this speaking portrait. The old walls in Bedford Street have disappeared, but they would almost rise up from the dust to protest against my effrontery if I dared to say more than to pay passing tribute to his mastership with this one word of thanks. Who is the scholar, that he should forget himself and exercise his irreverent analysis on his old 62 The Boston Latin School. master to his living face ? Long may it be before any of his scholars has the right to do it. But with the close of Mr. Dixwell's rule came Francis Gardner. That is to say, that remarkable man then became head master of the school of which he had long been under-teacher. How shall I speak of him in the presence of so many of his old boys, to whom he is a never-fading mem- ory } At least I know that he will be a very vivid recollection with you as I speak. The character and work of Francis Gard- ner will furnish subjects of discussion as long as any men live who were his pupils, and perhaps long after the latest of his scholars shall have tottered to the grave. But certain things will always be clear re- garding him, and will insure his perpetual remembrance, especially these two. His whole life was bound up in the school and its interests, and his originality and inten- sity of mind and nature exercised the strongest influence over the boys who passed under his charge. TheBoston Latin School. 6} This last is the best thing, after all, that a teacher can bring to his scholars. Best of all things which can happen to a school- boy is the contact with a vigorous and strongly marked nature which breaks its cords and snaps its shells, and sets it free for whatever it has in it the capacity to do and be. My honored and beloved classmate and friend, Dr. William Reynolds Dimmock, himself a notable instructor, has left a very complete account of Dr. Gardner in the Memorial Address which he delivered at the time of our master's death. In his way he did for Francis Gardner what Cot- ton Mather did two centuries before for Ezekiel Cheever. As I read his graphic pages I feel very strongly what I have al- ready suggested, that in Gardner the cen- tury to which he belonged is very strik- ingly embodied. Think of him, O my fel- low students, as he sat upon his platform or moved about the hall among our desks thirty years ago ! Tall, gaunt, muscular, 64 The Boston Latin School. uncouth in body; quaint, sinewy, severe in thought and speech ; 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 mind and body, think what an interesting mixture of opposites he was ! He was proud of himself, his school, his city, and his time ; yet no man saw more clearly the faults of each, or was more dis- contented with them all. He was one of the frankest of men, and yet one of the most reserved. He was the most patient mortal, and the most impatient. He was one of the most earnest of men, and yet no- body, probably not even himself, knew his positive belief upon any of the deepest themes. He was almost a sentimentalist with one swing of the pendulum, and almost a cynic with the next. There was sympa- thy not unmixed with mockery in his grim smile. He clung with almost obstinate conservatism to the old standards of educa- tion, while he defied the conventionalities The Boston Latin School. 65 of ordinary life with every movement of his restless frame. Can you not see him as we spoke our pieces on the stage, bored our- selves and boring our youthful audiences, and no doubt boring him, with the unreal- ity of the whole preposterous performance ? Can you not see him in his restlessness taking advantage of the occasion to climb and dust off the pallid bust of Pallas, which stood over the schoolroom door, and thun- dering down from his ladder some furious correction which for an instant broke the cloud of sham and sent a lightning flash of reality into the dreary speech ? Can you not hear him as he swept the grammar with its tinkling lists aside for an hour, and very possibly with a blackboard illustration enforced some point of fundamental morals in a way his students never could forget ? Can you not feel his proverbs and his phrases, each hard as iron with perpetual use, come pelting across the hall, finding the weak spot in your self-complacency, and making it sensitive and humble ever since ? 66 The Boston Latin School. He was a narrow man in the intensity with which he thought of his profession. I heard him say once that he never knew a man who had failed as a schoolmaster to succeed in any other occupation. And yet he was a broad man in his idea of the range which he conceived that his teaching ought to cover. He made the shabby old schoolhouse to blossom with the first sug- gestions of the artistic side of classical study, with busts and pictures, with photo- graphs and casts ; and hosts of men who have forgotten every grammar rule, and cannot tell an ablative from an accusative, nor scan averse of Vergil, nor conjugate the least irregular of regular verbs to-day, still feel, while all these flimsy superstruc- tures of their study have vanished like the architecture of a dream, the solid moral basis of respect for work and honor, for pure truthfulness, which he put under it all, still lying sound and deep and un- decayed. Mr, Gardner's great years were the The Boston Latin School. 6y years of the war. It would have been a sad thing if the mighty struggle of the na- tion for its life had found in the chief teacher of the boys of Boston a soul either hostile or indifferent. The soul which it did find was all alive for freedom and for union. The last news from the battlefield came hot into the schoolroom, and made the close air tingle with inspiration. He told the boys about Gettysburg as Cheever must have told his boys about Marston Moor, and Lovell must have told his about Ticonderoga. He formed his pupils into companies and regiments, and drilled with them himself. It was a war which a great master might well praise, and into which a school full of generous pupils might well throw their whole souls, for it was no war of mere military prowess. It was a war of principles. It was a war whose soldiers were citizens. It was a war which hated war-making, and whose methods were kept transparent always with their sacred pur- poses shining clearly through. Such a war 68 The Boston Latin School. mothers might pray for as their sons went forth ; masters might bid their scholars pause from their books and listen to the throbbing of the distant cannon. The statue of the school honoring her heroic dead, under whose shadow the boys will go and come about their studies every day for generations, will fire no young heart with the passion for military glory, but it will speak patriotism and self-devotion from its silent lips so long as the school- boys come and go. Two hundred and eighty - seven graduates of the school served in the war with the rebellion, and fifty-one laid down their lives. Who of us is there that does not believe that the school where they were trained had some- thing to do with the simple courage with which each of these heroic men went forth to do the duty of the hour ! " Patriaeque impendere vitam Nee sibi sed toti genitum se credere mundo." The life of Francis Gardner was not The Boston Latin School. 6g without a certain look of pathos, even in the eyes of his light-hearted pupils. As we looked back upon it after we had left him, we always thought of it as sad. That color of pain and disappointment grew deeper in it as it approached its end. It was no smug, smooth, rounded, satisfactory career. It was full of vehemence and con- tradiction and disturbance. 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. The very confusion and struggle always after something greater than itself make it a true typical life of the century in which he lived. We look into his stormy face upon our walls, and bid him at last rest in peace. I must not tell of those who have suc- ceeded him : not of him whom death re- moved almost as soon as he was seated in JO The Boston Latin School. the master's chair ; not of him who to-day so wisely and happily and strongly rules the venerable school. I hope that you can see as I do how our whole history falls into shape about these three great masters to whom I have given most of my discourse. Let that be the picture which is left upon our memories. Cheever and Lovell and Gardner ! The Puritan, the Tory, and, shall we not say in some fuller sense, the Man, are they not characteristic figures .-' One belongs to the century of Milton, one to the century of Johnson, one to the century of Carlyle. One's eye is on the New Jerusalem, one's soul is all wrapped up in Boston, one has caught sight of Humanity. One is of the century of Faith, one of the century of Common-sense, one of the cen- tury of Conscience. One teaches his boys the Christian doctrine, one bids them keep the order of the school, one inspires them to do their duty. The times they represent are great expanses on the sea of time ; one shallower, one deeper, than the others. The Boston Latin School. 7/ Through them all sails on the constant school, with its monotonous routines like the clattering machinery of a great ship, which, over many waters of different depths, feeling now the deepness and now the shallowness under its keel, presses along to some sea of the future which shall be better than them all. To that distant sea and the waters which are still to cross before it shall be reached, to the future of the Latin School for which all this past has been preparing, let me direct your thoughts for a few moments before I close. Our century is growing better towards its end. With the wealth and richness of the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries gathered and distilled into its life, the nineteenth century has been larger and nobler than them both. Its master is the greatest of the three. What sort of figure shall we picture to ourselves the master of the Latin School who shall illustrate the twentieth century, the gates 72 The Boston Latin School. of which are almost ready to swing back ? What shall be the life which he will govern and will help to create ? It will bear, no doubt, the same great general features which have marked the past, but with more generous and broad development. Let me only make three easy prophecies : I. In the twentieth century, as in those which have gone before, our school will be a city school. Its students will find that enlargement of thought and life which comes from close personal connection in the most sensive years with the public life. Here, let me say again, is a blessing which no private school can give. The German statesman, if you talk with him, will tell you that, with every evil of his great mil- itary 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, The Boston Latin School. 75 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. It would add tender- ness and pride and gratitude to the more base and sordid feelings with which her sons rejoice in their mother's wealth and strength and fame. 2. And again our school always must be, 74 The Boston Latin School. in the twentieth century as well as in the nineteenth, a school of broad and undi- vided scholarship. No doubt her teaching will grow more comprehensive as the years go on. The Latin and Greek classics are destined not to be dropped out of our cul- ture, but to share with other studies the generous task of developing the youthful powers and laying the foundation for the more special work of life. They must ac- cept their place and learn to teach in easier and quicker ways those lessons for which men will have less leisure than they used to have, but which they never will consent to leave entirely unlearned. The sciences of physical nature will open more and more capacity for the development of character and thought. Art and the modern speech and life of man will prove themselves able to do much for which it has seemed as if only the study of antiquity had the power. Changes like these must come, and will be welcome. But the first principle of liberal learning, the principle that all special edu- The Boston Latin School. 75 cation must open out of a broad general culture which is practical only in the deepest and the truest sense, must ever be the principle which rules and shapes our school. "The strictly practical is not practical enough," says a wise writer upon education. To the education which is most practical because it aims at that breadth of nature in which all special prac- tices shall by and by come to their best, let us dedicate our school anew. 3. And, yet once more, the school with its continuous history running on into the new centuries, as it has run through these three, taking the boys who are to-day un- born and educating them for the duties which the exigencies of the new centuries are to bring, will bear perpetual witness that civic manhood is the same always. The school of the period may start out of the exigencies of the period, and perish with the period that gave it birth. It bears its testimony of how every age is exceptional and different from every other. j6 The Boston Latin School. Our school, the school of Cheever and Lovell and Gardner, bears witness to a nobler, deeper truth, the truth that, how- ever circumstances may change, the neces- sary bases of public and private character are still the same ; that truth and bravery and patriotism and manliness are the foundations of private and public happi- ness and strength, not merely in the sev- enteenth and eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but in the twentieth century and all the centuries to come until the end, A great school is a great person, only it has, what we men vainly desire, the privi- lege of growing mature without any of the weakness of growing old, the ripeness of age with none of its premonitions of decay. We greet our school to-night, then, vener- able in its antiquity, but with the dew of perpetual youth upon its forehead. We congratulate the boys, its present pupils, who feel the thrill along its deck as the old ship sails bravely through the straits of this commemoration and catches sight of The Boston Latin School. yy vast new seas beyond. We commend her to the great wise future, to the needs and the capacities of the coming generations, to the care of the God of the fathers, who will be the God of the children too. With the same kind heart and with yet wiser hands may she who educated us ed- ucate the boys of Boston for centuries to come, so long as the harbor flashes in the sunlight and the State House shines upon the hill ! POEM BY ROBERT GRANT. POEM. Methinks a theme as ponderous as mine Needs the long sweep of the heroic line ; The stately resonance of classic verse, Formal and grandiose as a royal hearse, And prized by bards whose privilege it is To bore occasions similar to this. Thus backed by learned precedent I choose The well-worn toga of the epic muse, Content to feel that many a cherished son Of this old school would choose as I have done, Were he alive to sing instead of me The annals of this anniversary. Let us recall with gratitude to-day The Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, A people nurtured upon corn and cod. With rather hardy notions about God. But not the warwhoop of the savage foe, 82 The Boston Latin School. Or untilled fields in which few crops would grow, Or winter's cold, or unrelenting sky. Could dim the faith which knew that He was nigh. With rugged patience, and in pious awe. They laid the corner stone of modern law On one broad truth with which the world has rung : Free public education for the young. Philemon Pormort, Heaven rest your soul ! Two centuries and a half behind us roll Since our forefathers learned beneath your sway That "injun " should be spelt without a "j." What though your fate be clouded by the ban Which killed the cause of Antinomian Anne ? The juster hand of history writes you down The first preceptor of St. Botolph's town. Would that we had your semblance at our call To hang beside the portraits on the wall, Whose features life-like by the limner's skill The Boston Latin School. 8^ Keep boyhood cautious down the centuries still ! But cruel fortune would not have it so, Nor puts your four successors in the row: A Maude, a Woodbridge and a Woodmansey, Anterior to a Thompson with a *' p " ; Of each of whom the hierarch of fame Knows little more than the baptismal name. From you divide some fifty years of time The famous scholar of the well-known rhyme : " ' T is Corlet's pains and Cheever's we must own That our New England is not Scythia grown." (A sentiment explaining, by the way, Why Boston is the Athens of our day.) Ezekiel Cheever ! Would that we knew more Of him who lived to teach at ninety-four Beside a senile but historic knee The fathers of the men who made us free. Perpetuated by a Mather's pen His pious learning prompts his countrymen To cast a backward glance on history's page And reverence the Nestor of his age. Within the sacred shade the chapel flings. Called " Stone " by patriots and by Tories King's," 84 The Boston Latin School. He reared his scholars on the deeds of Rome To emulate antiquity at home, And drew for salary, as the Records say. The rental of Deer Island down the Bay. When death had taken Cheever to himself Nathaniel Williams had his place and pelf ; A pedagogue of versatile repute, A clergyman and skilful leech to boot. Not only was his privilege to see That youth and ignorance should strangers be ; The whole community he saved from ills, And preached the gospel while he peddled pills. Where Franklin's figure stands in bronze to-day A contrast to contemporary clay, Within the ken of that head-master's eye. There flew his paper pilot in the sky. And though in later years he summoned down And tamed heaven's fire to gild him with renown, Still bows his head o'er the familiar sod To bless the spot where first he felt the rod. John Lovell next appears upon the stage To train the youth of a tempestuous age The Boston Latin School. 8^ With such success that ere his course was run He saw a stubborn patriot in his son. Severe though faithful, autocrat but true, He loved authority. All masters do. And though it seem invidious to mix A pedagogue's prestige with politics, He lived a royalist in spite of tax And died a refugee at Halifax. His were the pupils he allowed when good To dig his garden, and to saw his wood ; His were the pupils who maintained the boast That royal ashes spoil no rebel coast ; And his the pupils who when grown to men Made history with the flint-lock and the pen. While Lovell taught, a Hancock's prentice hand Fashioned that autograph since thought so grand, A youthful Otis learned with force to speak, An Adams showed proficiency in Greek. Their undiminished fame reechoes still Loud as the musketry of Bunker Hill. Marbles decay and gorgeous textures rot, But noble names time strives in vain to blot. 86 The Boston Latin School. Let Lovell's live; not only son, but sire Who awed the hearts that laughed at royal ire ; Age is conservative, and it is given To youth to recognize new truths from heaven. * Let us commiserate that man whose hand Brandished the rod while war convulsed the land ; And him who taught when freedom's fight was o'er Pupils ablaze with mimicry of war. Who with a breath can calm the ocean's swell ? Good boys will not obey when men rebel. Though Hunt and Biglow found authority Hard to enforce on souls so lately free, The wronged divinities of Rome and Greece Obtained in Gould a harbinger of peace. Good Master Gould ! His faithful labors crown The final days when Boston was a town. Whose famous area still seemed a speck, In shape a clam with an extended Neck The Boston Latin School. 8y Pigmy beside her late proportions spun In golden highways following the sun. Good Master Gould. Beneath his generous sway Ovid was easy, Vergil almost play. A Winthrop's prose, a Clarke's exalted thought Attest the excellence his methods wrought. That careful scholar, Master Leverett, next With learning glossed his predecessor's text ; Whose numerous works in classic order shone A galaxy around his lexicon. Death took him early. The fastidious King Oft strikes the student pallid with the spring Of thought, and leaves the volatile and vain To skim like swallows heedless o'er life's plain. But still he spares and hesitates to slay The erudition of a Dillaway, Long may he live ! The kindly gentleman. Honored in life's decline as in the van Of a renown which saw his laurels blow When he was Master fifty years ago ! Distant the day, when over Dixwell's fame Shall creep the dust which blurs each hon- ored name. 88 The Boston Latin School. Posterity will love to pay the debt Of gratitude, accumulating yet, To him whose taste and scholarship combined To chain ambitious boyhood's opening mind. His youthful ardor wooed the classic muse. His honored age her favors still pursues. Haply the lore of Greece and Rome may give Naught that is vendible and lucrative ; But he who holds them oft before his eyes Feels the electric current from the skies. Which tells humanity that life means more Than freighted argosies or golden store. Though not a parrot or a mocking-bird, I learned the Latin grammar word for word. Open the page and start me at the top I could continue until bid to stop, And shall remember to the day I die The ablatives with either e or /. Appalling lists still aggravate my brain Familiar as a nursery refrain. Which ne'er have been, so far as I can see. Helpful to others or of use to me. Let us accept the bitter with the sweet ; Continuous eulogy is indiscreet. The Boston Latin School. 8g Our Masters knew the ancient way to teach. Forgive me, guardians of my infant speech ! Not even he whose love of learning shone Pure as the springs that rill from Helicon, He of the rugged frame and furrowed brow And heart of oak, as e'en his foes allow, A stern impressive figure claiming kin In nature with the souls who ushered in New England history, not even he Forebore to satiate my memory With rules of grammar it could ne'er digest, Of very little value at the best. Committees made the system, God the man. Peace to his dust. No criticism can Impair his greatness, which will live secure While pedagogues prevail and boys endure. Still rings his query hoarsely from the grave : " Which horn of the dilemma, fool or knave ? " Such were our Masters, and to them belong The preference and the burden of my song. High-priests of learning, sedulous for truth, Who girded up their loins in aid of youth. Distance around their heads a halo flings As history casts a glamour about kings. po 77!;^ Boston Latin School. Large thanks we owe them ; yet the thought- ful soul O'erlooks the blazonry to scan the scroll, And seldom cares the modern chronicler Who were the kings, but what the people were. Our fathers' faithful struggle toward the light, Their dogged zeal, consistent with the right. To make their children wiser men than they, This is the cause we celebrate to-day. Old school, about whose lengthening annals climb Ivies of memory and the moss of time. Your halls of classic learning ever stand Free to the scantiest income in the land. No prejudice of class, no pride of race Obscures the glass where Justice sees her face, And with impartial favor smiles upon An Everett or a tallow-chandler's son. Not only he remote from toil and shops Is fit to soar among the mountain tops ; God sends Empyrean fire at random down, The Boston Latin School. 91 And genius may take refuge in a clown. Trust of our fathers ! As from year to year The centuries ride on in full career, Fresh bourgeons your extending branches crown To take the places of the sere and brown. From the old truth which ever is the same They blow profusely to refute the blame Of those who find the bloom, which once was new, Grown stale and obsolete, as all things do. Their verdure which is vigorous to-day Beneath the scythe of time must turn to hay; Progress ne'er heeds the cry "for pity's sake," But rustles the dry foliage with her rake. How vast a stride from Cheever's " Acci- dence " To Gardner's scholarship and Merrill's sense ! An Eliot once with apostolic zeal Employed his classics for the red man's weal, That the poor Indian a God might find Better than in the cloud or in the wind. To-day, his learned namesake wiser grown 92 The Boston Latin School. Leaves the much injured Indian's faith alone, But from the arsenal of thought again Hunts superstition with the voice and pen. So let our children's children never tire To teach ambitious boyhood to aspire Toward the sweet wisdom which can laugh at pelf And make a soul companion for itself. Thus shall these halls, whose rich propor- tions rise Welcome, despite our taxes, to the skies, Echo with annals in the years to come To strike the voice of contumely dumb ; And future City governments afford To keep high learning handmaid of the Lord. APPENDIX. APPENDIX. a. The members of the Boston Latin School Association, invited guests, and friends of the school met in the hall of the Latin School on the evening of April 23, 1885, when Rev. Ed- ward Everett Hale, D. D. (class of 183 1), called the gathering to order with these words : I have the great pleasure of welcoming this company on this occasion. We are fortunate in having with us our distinguished President. We all of us should not feel so well if Mr. Dil- laway were not here. A slight cold, however, prevents him from addressing the assembly this evening. It is, therefore, my privilege to con- gratulate you on the memories of the past two hundred and fifty years, and on the auspices of the millennium which is to come. You will give your attention while the Rev. Mr. Jenks will lead you in prayer. b. Prayer by Rev. Henry Fitch jFenks (Class of 1854)- Almighty God, who hast been our dwelling- place in all generations, who art from everlast- g6 Appendix. ing to everlasting, with whom is no beginning of years and no end of time, we come before Thee this evening to thank Thee for Thy mer- cies and Thy watchful providence and care, which have been so constantly with this institu- tion, founded by our fathers, which has given to us its privileges, which offers those privileges to those who are yet to come. We thank Thee that in the days of their trial and of their small things our fathers sought first to establish the church and then to found the school. We thank Thee that they set such high value upon education. We thank Thee that this school which they founded has gone on increasing in these years that have rolled by, and that it is to-day an institution in which we can take so much pride and so much pleasure. We thank Thee for those whom Thou hast raised up in the past to preside over its fortunes, to instruct the youth in the ways of truth and of righteous- ness, to lead them to honorable manhood. We thank Thee for those who have been nurtured here, for the many who have held high place in church and State, who have occupied positions of influence and power in the councils of the nation, who have been instructors of youth and have guided in our ancient university and in other institutions the young in ways of wisdom. We thank Thee, Father, that in the time of our country's need there have always been those Appendix. 97 from the pupils of this school who have been ready, either in council or in the field, to do noble service for right and truth and humanity. We thank Thee that in the earlier and in the later struggles there have been those who were ready to show how sweet and beautiful it is even to give up iheir lives for their country, and we pray Thee that the memories of the past may be incentives for the future, and that those who are to be instructed here may be led by the noble examples given by their predecessors to consecrate themselves to the high purposes of truth and righteousness, of holiness and hu- manity. Our Heavenly Father, we bless Thee for all the privileges we enjoy, our privileges of having been born and of having had our educa- tion in a Christian land, and under the influences of the gospel. We thank Thee for our nation, for our State, and for our city. We thank Thee, Father, that this city of ours has always been foremost in seeking after those things which pertain to sound learning and to good morals. We thank Thee that our people have always given without stint to secure the best educa- tion for their children ; and we beseech Thee, Father, that in the future, as in the past, they may devise liberally and wisely for the benefit not merely of this ancient school, but for all other schools which seek to train the youth of our city to honorable lives. We ask Thy bles- gS Appendix. sing, Father, upon all those who, whether in city, or State, or nation, have rule and author- ity ; may they rule with wisdom and counsel with discretion. Grant, we pray Thee, that those who are to take the places that we now fill may go forward with earnest purpose and high resolve, ready to do better service for truth and humanity than we have ever accom- plished ; and wilt Thou, the God of our fathers, ever be the children's God. Father, our prayer is before Thee ; we beseech Thy blessing upon the exercises of this evening, upon those who are to lead and guide our thoughts ; may the words which we hear be to us an inspiration and a help, encouraging us to nobler service and greater faithfulness. Hear our prayer ; accept our service ; grant us now and ever Thy benediction, which we ask in the name and as the disciples of Thy Son Jesus Christ. Amen. c. Presentation of the Portrait of Epes Sargent Dixwell. After the prayer music was rendered by a select choir under the direction of Mr, George Laurie Osgood. Then Dr. Hale introduced Dr. John Phillips Reynolds (class of 1837), who, in behalf of the subscribers, presented the portrait of Mr. Epes Sargent Dixwell, Head Master of the School from 1836 to 185 1. Dr. Reynolds said : Appendix. gg It is a great pleasure to offer to the Associa- tion to-night a portrait of Epes Sargent Dix- well, for sixteen years the distinguished head of the school. Happily, Mr. Dixwell is yet among us, in vigorous health, with every power undiminished. His name recalls, in the his- tory of the school, a period of unexampled prosperity, usefulness, progress. Alma Mater, though ruled by men of ripe learning, had, we are told, somewhat declined in public favor, when a group of well-wishers appealed to Mr. Dixwell to come to her aid. Something, it may be, was stirring in the blood that answered to their call. For though he bore the name and was the lineal descendant of one of those three hunted enemies of the Stuarts who here among our freedom-loving fathers found sure refuge, his father's father had been Master Hunt, whom Latin School boys in the small years of this century had slight reason to forget, and the grandson may well have felt some tra- ditional interest in the school. Whatever the impulse that tempted this young and accom- plished man, on the threshold of professional life, to enter a calling rarely honored as it de- serves, but than which earth knows none nobler, his assent brought instant life and strength. He came a model of unbending integrity and uprightness; a teacher diligent and untiring; a disciplinarian exact, uncompromising, perhaps too Appendix. even a thought too precise ; a guide and counsellor whom it was always safe to trust. I should do wrong to my heart, and I should grieve many around me, did I forget one great soul, through all these years Mr. Dixwell's never failing counsel and stay ; in genius, in bent of mind, nay, even in the mould and form of the body, singularly the opposite of his chief. Fortunate the school that together possessed them both. To us they gave years the happiest in all the halcyon time of boyhood and youth. When we recall the friend of to-night to whose personal presence this was mainly due there rises but one regret. Could we have stretched that term of service to years twice sixteen or longer; could we have saved for the school his whole teaching life, great had been our con- tent. From boys here, but none the less from boys far off, from boys in beards of gray as well as from younger men, have poured upon us heartfelt tributes of love and esteem for this their honored teacher. We have put to no ordinary test the painter's cunning, bidding him conjure back from the lineaments of to-day what was dear to the childhood of men no longer young, at a period when he could not by any chance have known his sitter. You will soon bear witness to the rare skill and truthfulness of his work. It remains only, Mr. President, that we lovingly intrust to the Association this Appendix. loi its latest treasure, that we pray you to assign it a place beside the famous portrait of Dr. Gard- ner. Boys of long years to come will watch with reverence features that to us have meant so much. As Dr. Reynolds uttered his final words the portrait was unveiled, and the well-known fea- tures of the ex-Head-Master were greeted with warm applause. Dr. Hale said in acknowl- edgment of the gift : Dr. Reynolds and Gentlemen, I gratefully accept, I gladly accept, on behalf of the As- sociation the admirable, living portrait of our friend which we have the great pleasure of see- ing now. We recall, indeed, the memories of those happy days when for the benefit of so many of us he was the chief of this great school. It used to be said of the pupils of Master Lovell, that when any one of those boys strayed into Smibert's studio and got a glimpse of the picture which hangs there just above Mr. Grant's head, the boy was afraid ; but nobody was ever afraid to look this man in the face, to seek his friendship, or to trust in his sympa- thy. I assure you, Dr. Reynolds, I assure the gentlemen who have joined with you, that the picture shall be honored among the treasures of the Association. Mr. Dixwell is detained by a distressing family bereavement at his home, but he is present with us in the spirit. We LTB1RARY IJlflVERSITY OF CALIFOR; SANTA BARBARA 102 Appendix. owe to him the charming " Carmen Seculare," which is the vernacular to most of us here ; we are speaking in English only out of respect to the boys and the ladies. Mr. Osgood and the chorus will sing to us the " Carmen Secu- lare." d. Carmen Seculare, by Epes Sargent Dixwell {Class of 1816). Seculo festam referente lucem, Nunc simul laeti modulemur omnes Carmen exornans homines prioris Laudibus aevi. Trans mare et terras vehimur vapore ; Ferreo filo loquimur per orbem Gentium ; nee est tonitrus domandus ; Servit et ipse. Ecce Libertas stabilita jure; Vinculis legum Pietas soluta; Literae cunctis pariter reclusae ! Reddite laudes. Rivus ex undis Heliconis alti Defiuens, ortus scopulis nivosis, In vi^ nobis gelido roseta Irrigat imbre. Ne fluat turbas operosus inter Machinantes et strepitum molarum. Quare montanus pateretur haecce Servitiumque ? Immo delectet potius susurro Corda spectantfira placidb canoro, Appendix. lo^ Et dein, lymphs repetente visum, Aethera pandat. Machinas nee per medias fragosas Nos feramur immemores CamenCim ; Sed propagentur suboli remotae Dona parentiim. e. Letters from Invited Guests. From Robert Charles Winthrop (Class of 1821). It would have given me peculiar pleasure to unite in the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the old school of which I was a pupil more than sixty years ago. But I am obliged to avoid night air and crowded assemblies. I return the tickets so kindly sent me, and shall envy those who may be privileged to oc- cupy these reserved seats, and listen to the ora- tion of Mr. Brooks. 90 Marlborough St., 18 April, 1885. From Frederick Augustus Farley (Class of 181 1). I regret greatly to say nay to your invitation of 2oth ulto. to join the Boston Latin School Association in the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the foundation of the school on the 23d inst. But I thank you heartily for the invitation and the courteous proffer of a reserved seat. My advanced age and conse- quent feebleness compel me to remain at home. I04 Appendix. I anticipate for you a delightful reunion, and rejoice with you in the in-gathering of the accumulating honors of the school, and of the Association which subserves its interest, its usefulness, and its wide-spread reputation. 130 Pacific Street, Brooklyn, N. Y., April 10, 1885. From James McCosh. I esteem it as a compliment that I have been invited to attend the commemoration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Latin School. I have been led to regard that school as one of the very highest in this country, or indeed in any country. I should like much to be present with you on the 23d, but my college duties do not allow of my leaving Princeton at that time. But you will be pleased to look upon me as joining in the congratulations which will be presented. College of New Jersey, Princeton, N. J., April 9, 1885. From William Maxwell Evarts (Class of 1828). I had hoped when I received the circular of the Latin School celebration that my then expected visit to Boston would enable me to stay over to the 23d for the celebration. I regret very much that this hope has been disappointed, and that my engagements in court Appendix. lo^ require me to be in New York to-morrow morn- ing. I should be very glad to hear Mr. Phillips Brooks and Mr, Robert Grant, and to meet the large numbers of the many classes that are to enjoy this reunion. Boston, April 20, 1885. From William Henry Furness (Class of 1812). It would give me great pleasure to renew with the Alumni of Boston Latin School the memory of the Latin nurse of my boyhood but my years prevent. Accounting it, with all boys, a joy to be let out of school, I vividly remember how surprised I was at the sob and the tears that suddenly came when, as I gath- ered up my books nearly seventy years ago and left the Latin School, the thought occurred to me that I was leaving it forever. I should like to be with you to bear grateful testimony to the magic with which Mr. Benja- min A. Gould, in a wonderfully short time, con- verted a nest of idle, mischievous imps, in a perpetual state of insurrection, into a hive of little students, rivalling the traditional bee of Dr. Watts. I often wish I had been old enough to discover how he did it. He made truth to be so respected by us that if any boy was caught transgressing the rules, he would state the case against himself, as if he had never told a fib in io6 Appendix. all his life. With best wishes for a pleasant time, yours in the brotherhood of the venerable school. 1426 Pine Street, Philadelphia, April 8, 1885. From Henry Kemble Oliver (Class of 181 1). H. K. O. Sal. Dat G. H. N. Armigero. Literas tuas in quibus me certiorem fecisti de festivitate in honore anni CCL""' Scholae Latinae Bostoniensis, bene amatae, recepi. Gratias maximas tibi ago, sed magno dolore afficior quod sociis meis alumnorum adesse non possum. Per hosce menses triginta aegrotavi, et intra domum meam permanere coactus fui. Cor meum afficitur. Sed si erga Deum cor rectum sit, quid rei est ? Fiat volun- tas Ejus ! Fides mea me sustinet, et " oro et laboro." Penna mea, et libri et amici, me quoque sustinent. Mortui mei, qui trans rivum leti sunt, uxor et filiae, me expectant, et manus video et voces caras audio. Sitis felices, et in omni vita vestra felicissimi. Non sum solus superstes anni MDCCCXI"" ? Solymae, Mass., Id. Ap. 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