In the midst of this President Felton appeared at the foot of the middle aisle and vociferated in an agitated voice, "Mr. President!" Whereupon several members of the Faculty gathered around him, apparently earnestly dissuading him from proceeding with his purpose. Luckily for him, he did not get the floor; for I have since learned that he had intended then and there to resign his office. Finally a vote was taken on Lothrop's motion to impeach and it was lost by a small majority. This was probably all the mover desired. I learned that they did not wish to carry their motion their main purpose was to bring the matter fully before the graduates and to make good their claim to a hearing. After the meeting W. and I went to the exercises at the church, where, I regret to say, I slept during most of Dr. Osgood's oration. President Felton's inaugural was a disappointment. His allusion to Will Forbes's case seemed to me unnecessarily pointed. I doubt if it gave general satisfaction.

At the Alumni dinner Dr. Holmes outdid himself; he was the perfection of a presiding officer; his remarks on introducing the speakers were in his happiest vein - delicate, pointed, eloquent. His allusion to President Quincy was particularly fine-full of feeling and rare appreciation. Felton again put his foot in it, so to speak, when he came to speak. In the course of his remarks he needlessly, as it seemed to me, went out of his way to allude harshly to the last class, whereupon he was greeted with hisses from his extreme right where several of the last class were seated. It may be imagined that such applause on such an occasion addressed to the new-born President of Harvard, "here in his pitch of pride," was not a little startling. Nor did the beneficiary mend matters when turning to the quarter whence the greeting came he flung out savagely, "I care as little for your hisses as I would for those of serpents." Here the "serpents" hissed fiercely again; but the hissee, more wise now, ignored the encore.

FROM DR. WALCOTT.

I was a graduate student at Cambridge at the time of President Felton's inauguration and was present at the occasion which the diarist has reported with absolute truth according to my own recollection, and the scene now is so vivid in my mind that I think I cannot be mistaken in this opinion.

As a matter of fact, during the meeting in the old College Chapel I stood quite near Tutor Eliot, who had not at that time attained the serenity of his present years, and carried on an extremely animated, if not passionate, discourse with a member of the Class of 1857, named Newell. They naturally represented opposite sides in the controversy. The person who really

defended most successfully the committee of the Association was Judge Hoar, and his eloquent good sense made a very marked impression.

The day was an extremely interesting one because, in addition to the inauguration of the new President, it brought out the best qualities of the then Governor of Massachusetts, Gen. Banks, whose address at the inauguration exercises in the church was distinctly the best thing of this sort that I have heard on these occasions. It was so well done that Dr. Osgood's tedious address and President Felton's not very brilliant speech were comparatively insignificant. Banks's success was so great on this occasion that at the dinner in Harvard Hall Mr. Everett, who could not ordinarily be suspected of any great sympathy with Gen. Banks or his associates, was moved to apply to the Governor the inscription which the French Academy placed below the bust of Molière, "We are not wanting to his glory, but he is wanting to ours"; and we all thought that the bobbin boy had received his just deserts.

FROM PRESIDENT ELIOT.

The account given by the anonymous graduate and Dr. Walcott of the inauguration of President Felton is remarkably correct, in details as well as in the general impression conveyed. The precedents would have put the inauguration in May or June; but the inauguration was postponed by the Corporation, for reasons not communicated to the College Faculty, till the day after Commencement, which was then the day for the annual proceedings of the Harvard Alumni Association, and all the arrangements for the day were in the hands of the officers of that Association.

Many members of the Association thought that the Corporation should not have put the inauguration of the new President on their day. The class which graduated the day before (1860) was very indignant; because the postponement of the inauguration deprived them of the honor of having one of their members give the Latin oration. They had quite made up their minds that their first scholar was the proper man to write and deliver that oration. The postponement of the inauguration till after Commencement entitled the Class of 1861 to supply the Latin orator; and Professor Lane selected the first scholar of that Class, Joseph H. McDaniels, afterwards professor of the Greek language and literature in Hobart College for forty-four years. It is of course possible that Professor Lane had some choice between the two first scholars; but the opinion of the anonymous diarist that "the whole thing . . . grew out of a pique that Professor L. entertained against the first scholar of the senior class (1860)" is without foundation.

I was at the time Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Chemistry, and had been a member of the College Faculty since 1854. On the morning of the inauguration, the Faculty was summoned to meet at 5 University Hall at about the same hour that the Alumni Association was to meet in Gore Hall, so that I did not witness any of the proceedings of the Association in Gore

Hall; but when hundreds of the alumni, and apparently the entire Class of 1860, arrived at the College Chapel, I soon went from the then Faculty room into the Chapel to hear the hot discussion which seemed to be imminent.

I left President Felton in the Faculty room in a state of considerable excitement. Rumors had come to him that a large and influential party in the Association was prepared to pass a vote of censure on the Corporation and Faculty for postponing the inauguration, and putting it on the day of the Alumni Association, a proceeding which he felt called upon to resent. The discussion in the Chapel was warm on both sides, and did not adhere closely to the motion before the meeting - a motion which censured the College Faculty for postponing the inauguration.

The anonymous diarist names correctly the principal disputants, and Dr. Walcott is correct in saying that the defeat of the motion was due chiefly to Judge Ebenezar Rockwood Hoar, supported by several of the older graduates. While I was standing in the Chapel near one of the southerly entrances, I suddenly found beside me President Felton, very pale, and his lips trembling with emotion. He was accompanied by several of the elder members of the Faculty who seemed to have been trying to prevent him from entering the Chapel. He said to me, "Eliot, I cannot endure this. I am going to resign on the spot." One of the disputants was speaking in an excited way at the moment, and there was much confusion in the room; so that the President could not immediately carry out his purpose. Members of the Faculty who were about him took advantage of the delay and tried by words and pressure to get the President out of the Chapel back into the Faculty room. I took part in that operation; but immediately returned to the Chapel, and had the pleasure of witnessing a scene that I have never forgotten. The motion was put by the Chair, and the vote was a rising vote. The Class of 1860 seemed to me to rise unanimously in the affirmative. They were supported by a fair number of older graduates. When the noes were called, the mass of the older alumni voted in the negative, and in the middle of the Class of 1860 one man rose and stood alone to be counted in the negative. It was delightful to see that not a word was addressed by his classmates at the moment to that one dissentient member. It was William Channing Gannett, afterward a Unitarian minister, and a poet of rare attainments, still living, and inspired to-day by the same independent and conscientious spirit.

The motion which had been discussed with so much vigor was founded on a total misconception. The College Faculty had had nothing whatever to do with the postponement of the inauguration.

The address of Governor Banks was so good that many persons who listened to it could not believe that he wrote it himself. I have heard the writing of that oration confidently attributed to a classmate of mine; but I have never known what the facts in the case were. Banks's admirable delivery contributed very much to the effect of the address at the moment. He read it, but with great freedom.

President Felton had an unhappy opening of his presidency; and it was so short that many of the members of the College Faculty who worked under him had not time to find out whether he was to be a serviceable President or not. I was predisposed in his favor because I knew that he was Dr. James Walker's candidate for the succession. His long service as a professor, his distinction as a man of letters, his great friendliness with his colleagues, his habitual kindness to young men, and his integrity commended him for his new position, and would probably have given satisfaction to the main body of the alumni if his health had not failed so soon.

RECENT BOOKS.

VICTOR CHAPMAN AND ALAN SEEGER.

ON June 23, 1916, Victor Chapman, a member of the Franco-American Aviation Corps, was killed near Verdun while going to the rescue of three comrades who were sorely pressed by a superior force of enemy machines

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died fighting, fighting against odds

Such as in war the gods

Æthereal dared when all the world was young."

Less than a fortnight later, on the 4th of July, Alan Seeger fell, mortally wounded, as his regiment swept forward in the attack on Belloy-en-Santerre. “A young soldier of the Legion, eager and tireless, a passionate lover of France." So reads his official citation to the Ordre du Jour. The high final fact of the heroic death of these two young Americans lifts their letters and diaries,1 which have just been published, far beyond the power of criticism to add or to detract. Both volumes are to be read rather than to be reviewed; and this brief notice will have served its purpose if it calls the attention of a few readers of this magazine to the fact that triumphant answer has been given the question, now insistently asked, as to what will be the mental and moral reaction of the war on the hundreds of thousands of our countrymen preparing for ordeal on the battlefields of France. They, too, are now to be included in the noble company of whom Mr. John Jay Chapman, in the altogether remarkable Memoir which introduces his son's letters, says: "All the men fighting for the Allies, and especially all those young Americans who have been fighting for France and England, and thereby doing more for their own country than for Europe, should be in our minds when we think of any one of them. They form a single soul and spirit."

It is no reflection on the temper and quality of Victor Chapman's letters, written to his family and friends during his service in the Foreign Legion and the Aviation Corps, to lay initial stress on this Memoir, which, when all is said and done, stands out as one of the really great enrichments of our literature through the war. From the nature of the case Mr. Chapman's relation to such an intimate volume, so far as the public was concerned, must be either that of 1 Victor Chapman's Letters from France, with Memoir by John Jay Chapman. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917; Letters and Diary of Alan Seeger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917.

austere silence or of unrestrained utterance from an open heart: and there are a hundred reasons why the world at large should rejoice that he took the latter course. The portraits he gives of Victor and his mother are etched deep with the strong acids of sorrow and loneliness; the whole outpouring is pervaded by the inner spirit of the great classical lamentations, - of "Lycidas," or David's grief for Jonathan, and its only reticences are those of the great classics.

"She had the regular brow, heavy dark, free gait of the temperament that lives in heroic thought and finds the world full of chimeras, of religious mysteries, sacrifice, purgation. This part of her nature was her home and true refuge. Here dwelt the unpersonal power that was never far from her. There have been few women like her; and most of them have existed only in the imagination of Æschylus and the poets." This is only a fragment of the wonderful characterization of Victor's mother, as incontrovertible as one of Turgénieff's, for which one is doubly grateful; for, as Mr. Chapman says, she was so much the author of the heroic atmosphere, the poetic aloofness which hung about her son, that to leave her out of any account of him would immeasurably darken our understanding of his late-ripening nature.

As a boy, we are told, he was morbid, withdrawn, capable of terrible suffering. The two great tragedies of his early life - the death of his mother, in whom he "had lived as an egg lives in its shell," and of his dearly-beloved brother, seem to have darkened the heavens for him beyond all human remedy. Only in the presence of danger did the clouds seem to clear away. "Victor never really felt that he was alive except when he was in danger," says Mr. Chapman. "Nothing else aroused his faculties. This was not conscious, but natal a quality of the brain. As some people need oxygen, so Victor needed danger," and later: "Victor's entry into the American Aviation was, to him, like being made a Knight. It transformed - one might almost say, transfigured him. That the universe should have supplied this spirit with the consummation which it had sought in infancy and should have given, in a few weeks, complete happiness and complete fulfilment - the crown of a life to which one can imagine no other perfect ending — is one of the mysteries of this divine age.”

Of Victor Chapman, then, as well as of Richard H. Dana, it is true that "life offered him the magical human chance and he took it. There was something in him for which the decorous and conventional life allowed no place in its scheme." His letters belong to the literature of escape, and in reading them one feels the serenity of a soul which has at last found itself, though one must look for it between the lines. Like most intensely masculine natures, Victor Chapman was little given to introspection and the analysis of motives; all the preoccupation of his tremendous energy is with action. But as he acts he sees! Wonderful descriptive bits there are which make the landlubber gasp with a new sensation.

"I played hide-and-seek in and out of the clouds yesterday; sometimes flat blankets like melting snow on either side below me, or, again, great icefloes