his doubtful, reactionary temper: "Such moods as mine are not things that literature demands." A few weeks later he unbosoms himself to Mr. Robert Herrick:
Shut up here in New England, and getting less and less discontented with its daily repetition of things no one outside cares for, I find myself, as I read your letter again, wishing to goodness I had had the luck and the pluck to give and take in a world where something was a-doing.
Returning from lecturing in France, he develops skepticism about his life work, and an acute distaste for teaching: "Harvard stifles me, more than I expected."
It was at about this time, between 1904 and 1906, that I heard him speak on French life, and attended, as a "listener" his course of lectures on the disintegration of the English national temper in the seventeenth century. Mr. Howe describes him well as he appeared in those years:
Well proportioned of figure, of moderate height, shapely of head, tawny bearded, with quick blue eyes, alert and responsive in personal encounter, the man of the world rather than the professor in general appearance.
He entered the lecture room with a cane, in a cutaway coat and spats, with the air of an Anglicized Boston man of letters who had crossed the Charles to speak to the boys about life. As he proceeded to his desk we noticed that his hair was parted down the back of his head to his collar. He plucked his glasses from their hook, somewhere about his waistcoat, and
