socially yet unborn and therefore possessing, for literature, no significance, or almost none.
Even within the sacred pale of New England, and among Harvard's own graduates, Wendell draws social distinctions like a lady. He anticipates the absurd snippiness of Mrs. Gerould in finding Thoreau and Alcott underbred and distasteful by reason of a vulgar "self-assertiveness," alarming to people "of sagely conservative habit." He asserts that it requires a hundred years to form a genuine American. He traces his own ancestry to the seventeenth century, revels in his connection with the best families of Massachusetts, delights in adorning the walls of his study with pictures of ten generations of his line, and performs a pious pilgrimage to the grave of his Dutch ancestor. He publishes a tract against the usurpations of the workingman, and hotly resents the iniquity of his standing in a street car while a man with a dinner pail occupies two seats. The death of Queen Victoria occasions in him an "overwhelming sense of personal bereavement"; he regards her life as "surely the most noble in modern times." In the midst of a war "to make the world safe for democracy" he rises in Sanders. Theater to deliver as his last message to the Phi Beta Kappa Society his repudiation of the ideal of democracy, his adherence to the ancient, "traditional," aristocratic republicanism. Meeting his colleague, Professor Merriman, he engages in this dialogue:
Barrett Wendell: In all the twenty-five years you have known me, Roger, have you ever heard me utter one liberal sentiment?
Professor Merriman: Not one, sir.
Barrett Wendell: Thank God!
