sentimentally, and with that protective and jealous passion which resents a slurring word from one who has not so loved her. But since the current mode of contemplating one's grandmother has come in, since several years ago I heard James Harvey Robinson, in the picked diction of Columbia University, characterize all hitherto recorded history as "bunk," I have lain awake night after night foreseeing the devastation which is going to be wrought the moment that it occurs to some young man, bred in Professor Robinson's school, to deal with the "awful majesties" of New England's Great Age as Lytton Strachey and Ford Madox Ford and Max Beerbohm have dealt with the Victorians and Pre-Raphaelites.
If I, or any man who thought of Barrett Wendell merely as a Harvard professor, had attempted to produce his "spitting image," what sort of caricature would our treacherous memories and our still more treacherous "realistic method" have produced? Well, I am afraid we should have seized upon some quite inadequate statement of his idiosyncrasy, trimmed it up in his abundant external eccentricities and thus have made a figure of considerable interest to his former students and perhaps to his colleagues, but of very mild concern to the public at large. To be more specific, it would be easy to make a brilliant caricature of this subject entitled either "A Harvard Professor" or "The Last of the Brahmins"—attenuations of humanity, neither of which could have stirred a deeper emotion in the vast democratic laity than amusement.
Mr. Howe saw both these opportunities. He proved his greatness as a biographer by dismissing them both in favor of a far more difficult task, namely, to show Barrett Wendell attempting to become an honest man,
