Ai a; o; 0: 0: 0: 5^ 3 4 5 6 d Fifi California jgional .cility ^ c^5^ /<^>o rix-^ o~^^Jihi The 13'* of Att a Gen^all meeting Vpon publique notice. _y< I"* Mofieth, ffor d' Likewise it Was then gen'"ally agreed Vpon, y' o"" brother brother Philemon Pormort shalbe intreated to become schole- Formort to become master for the teaching & nourtering of children W**' schole- fftaster. '. EzIilyrUl C. K. OGDEN 2Dl)e 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