creature's lips. Since Mr. Howells loves a joke, he probably enjoys the incongruity of having his volume adorned with all these pseudo-classical figures.

As an honest critic, we have a final confession to make: in these volumes of verse there are about 85 sonnets which we have not read; not because we wished to shirk, but because we think it our duty to aid in overcoming the sonnet habit, than which no epidemic more distressing has overtaken our verse-writers during the past fifteen years.

OPEN SCHOLARSHIPS.

THE Overseers of Harvard have recently requested the Faculty to devise some method by which greater distinction may be given to scholarship. May I suggest that one method of conferring such distinction would be the opening of scholarships to the rich as well as the poor? This question of open competition has been discussed almost ad nauseam, and, no doubt, much may still be said on both sides. But whatever the merits of the debate may have been, the fact remains that the question has practically been settled in favor of indigence. Now, while I have not the slightest desire to take from the poor any advantage that they may obtain by their merits, still I object most strenuously to the proposition that poverty and scholarship are substance and shadow. Is it wholly wise that sound scholarship should be marked with the brand "Indigence," before it can receive academic prizes? Do not the rich need incitements to sound learning quite as much as the do? Is it not reasonable to suppose poor that young men of wealth and social influence, when once attracted to the serene regions of high scholarship by the stimulus of liberal prizes, would exert upon the country an influence as potent, as salutary, and as lasting, as that exerted by those who though equal to their competitors in character and ability, lack the levers of wealth and social prestige? And would not the opening of scholarships to all give to the winners of such academic prizes a glory undimmed by the present cloud of indigence to which possibly a scholarship is the silver lining? At Harvard, the very fountain-head and

well-spring of electives, must indigence in competition for scholarships be compulsory, now that even attendance at religious exercises is purely voluntary?

I am of the opinion that a large majority of the holders of scholarships to-day would prefer to have the competition free to all. Poverty is no disgrace. On the contrary, it may, in certain circumstances, become a man's chief glory. But who wishes to be branded as poor? And why in the name of common-sense should scholarship be a synonym for indigence? "Scholarship" should mean scholarship irrespective of poverty or wealth. Harvard ought to be the last institution on earth to establish a "dead line" between the rich and the poor. Whether there is any such tendency in the present system of awarding scholarships, may be asked in all fairness. Of course, it is well to bear in mind that the system of distributing scholarships at Oxford and Cambridge is radically different from that in vogue at Harvard, and that the English Universities make no invidious distinctions of poverty or wealth calculated to wound the feelings of the sensitive, and to bring high scholarship into disrepute.

It is only fair to state that this communication is intended in no sense as a criticism of the Board of Overseers. As was very clearly stated in 1893, almost all, if not all, of the scholarship funds at Harvard have been left to the University on such terms that indigence must be a condition of competition. If no change can be made legally in these terms, the present system is evidently the only one that can be rightfully employed, until remedial legis lation shall relieve the authorities of conditions disagreeable to themselves and to beneficiaries alike. Perhaps the hope of improvement in the method of distributing scholarships must be directed towards those that are yet to be founded. Undoubtedly, as years go by, many new scholarships will be established. Would it not be wise for founders of new scholarships to bear in mind the needs of the rich as well as those of the poor and the moderately well-to-do, and to establish scholarships free from the requirement of indigence, and open to all?

QUINCY

Frederic Allison Tupper, '80.

PRESIDENT HOLYOKE.

EDWARD HOLYOKE was President of Harvard College for a longer term than any one who preceded or has followed him in that office; and for almost thirty-two years he exerted a strong and healthful influence on the College and the Province. In the century which closed with his election the College sent out about thirteen hundred graduates: during his administration nearly a thousand received their first degree. A few years after he ceased to guide the current of thought at Cambridge, and to inspirit the young men and boys who went there to secure the best preparation for life which Massachusetts could offer, the controversy with the mother county entered on its final stage. As Dr. Palfrey pointed out in his "History of New England," all the leaders on the popular side in Massachusetts, with a single exception, had been students under Holyoke. Samuel Adams graduated in 1740, James Otis in 1743, Jonathan Mayhew and Thomas Cushing in 1744, James Bowdoin in 1745, John Hancock in 1754, John Adams in 1755, Joseph Warren in 1759, and Josiah Quincy, Jr., in 1763. Among the other young men who sat at Holyoke's feet and afterward gained distinction were the younger Edward Wigglesworth, the first Judge Lowell, Francis Dana, Elbridge Gerry, Jeremy Belknap, Timothy Pickering, and Theophilus Parsons, to name no others. To have presided over the training of such men is in itself worthy of note.

President Holyoke was of English descent, his first ancestor on this side of the Atlantic having come over from Staffordshire about the time the College was founded, and settled at Lynn. The immigrant's only son went to Springfield, from which place a grandson removed to Boston, where a great-grandson, the subject of this notice, was born June 26, 1689. The boy, who was the first to make the name distinguished, received his early education at the North Grammar School in his native town; and from this school he appears to have gone at once to college. He graduated in 1705, at the age of sixteen, in a class numbering eleven members. His part at Commencement was the Bachelor's Oration; and in it he referred to the recent death of Michael Wigglesworth, author of that "poem of appropriate sadness," as