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 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.
 
 LD 
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