The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries ed. by William Bentinck-Smith (review)

SHORTER NOTICES 439 The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries. Edited by WILLIAM BENTINCK-SMITH. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press [Toronto: S. J. Reginald Saunders and Company Limited]. 1953. Pp. xx, 369. $6.50. Harvard has her own character, as anyone who has walked across the Yard will know; but she presents many faces, beginning with the prim elegance of Massachusetts Hall and ending-for the presentwith the unblinking assurance of Gropius' new buildings. In tills agreeable book the editor of the Harvard Alumni Bulletin has gathered together from many sources a miscellany of some seventy-eight pieces concerning Harvard written by her own sons and a select com· pany of visitors. There are noble words from President Eliot (about Harvard's aristocracy), shameful words from Mistress Eaton (about the bad fish served in the College), and bizarre words from Professor Sophocles (about himself, his pupils, and his friends). The savour of Harvard life is enjoyed wannly by Dean Briggs and coolly by Santayana . Cleveland Amory contributes a fascinating account of the murder of Dr. Parkman by Professor Webster, ending with the story of the refusal by Bliss Perry's mother, thirty years later, to put up as a guest James Russell Lowell, who was a distinguished man of letters but also a professor at Harvard. "I could not sleep," she said, "if one of those Harvard professors were in the house." The University'S scholarship does not escape either, for we read of the Dutch pastors who, after an unlucky visit to the College in 1680, reported that the students "knew hardly a word of Latin"; but in 1833 things were better: at any rate, when President Quincy showed to Dr. Beck the Latin address which he had prepared for the visit of Andrew Jackson, Beck, after making two corrections, pronounced it "as good Latin as a man need write." The visitors too make their contributions, for example in Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley's delicious account of her visit to Agassiz in 1849 or Alistair Cooke's wry narrative of the Harvard -Yale cricket match of 1951. All in all, this book provides much that" is diverting and instructive, and it falls only infrequently into (what must be the peril of such books) the vapidities of undergraduates , the sentimentalities of alumni, or the avuncular jocularities of professors. It will not remind the Harvard man, or infonn anyone else, of all that the University is; hut it will serve for the delectation of the one and-perhaps-the edification of the other. LEONARD WOODBURY ...