In Memoriam William John Alexander

IN MEMORIAM WILLIAM JOHN 'ALEXANDER, 'J. MEMOIR M. W. WALLACE THE fame of the university professor rarely penetrates far beyond a limited ,academic circle. Some of his colleagues and students may he impressed by his qualities of mind arid character, but of these things the general public knows little. The fame of university presidents extends . throughout the land,together with that of politicians, soldiers} great business men, newspaper editors and lawyers. A new medical discovery (or pseudo- , discovery} may familiarize the multitude with the name of the discQverer. But most men aJre too busy and too completely absorbed in their own activities to devote -much curiosity or interest to such inconspicuous human beings as university teachers. At best they are regarded with a peculiar mixture of condescension and the respect which attaches to the specialist. When ,Professor W. J. Alexander died recently, only those who had,come into intimate ~ontact with him felt that Canada was the poorer for his passing. A man, of modest and retiring temperament, he had shunned publicity throughout his life. Even in. the world of English scholarship he was not widely known. -His studies in Browning arid Shelley and his occasional articles in learned journals were regarded by all serious students of lite~ature as original, highly competent analyses of the English poets. But he had published comparatively little, though that little had always been of the highest quality. He was the rare phenomenon of a great scholar who was more interested in life and in teaching than in pure scholarship . He prepared many texts 'for use in the high schools of the province, and in this way did more than any other single person to establish standards of taste and of-the, teaching of English in Ontario. -A great multitude of teachers who had been his students recognized his determining influence on their taste and on their thinking. In a more sophisticated world than that,which we inhabit he would have been generally regarded as one of the great men of his generation. . William John Alexander was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1855. Both his father and mother were natives of Aberdeenshire, and both had emi- - grated to America only a short time before their marriage in 1843. Alexan-_ der Alexander, the father, has been described by his son as shy, proud and reserved, showing little of his feelings, a lover of flowers, fruits and birds, absolutely unbookish an.d unintellectual. ' It was from his mother, Isabella Buchan,-that Professor Alexander inherited his passionate love of learning. Like all her family she delighted in books, and she would tell her son tales of the literary.interests of her Scottish home and especially of a performance of Allan Ramsay's The Gentle Shepherd which had been superintended by her older brother. She was ambitious for her children, and like most Scotch 1 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY parents she sought to make religion and learning the _corner-stones of their lives. From his earliest years Professor Alexander was a precocious boy, and he was fortunate in the fact that Hamilton Collegiate Institute was, an excellent school. The headmaster was J~ M. Buchan, M.A. (his own cousin» who -was succeeded a year or two after young Alexander became a student by George Dickson, M.A. Both were cultivated, scholarly men, and both were later to be'come Principals of Upper Canada College. " Alexander passed the University of Toronto matriculation examin,ation in 1873 with the highest honours, -winning two scholarsh.ips. The next year he won ,the Dominion Gilchrist Scholarship in the University of London, ranking fourth among 'six hundred and fifty-two competitors- ((the highest place attained by a gentleman in 'the colonies." In their day the Gilchrist Scholarships opened the way to several brilliant yqung Canadians including President Schurman of Cornell and President Walter Murray of Saskatchewan. To be transported from a smali"provincial town to the capital of the Empire would be a thrilling experience for any intelligent youth, but to young Alexander with his insatiable thirst for knowledge it was more than that. At the age of nineteen he found himself precipitated into a world of which he had...