In 1863 Emerson was one of the ‘visitors’ to the Military Academy at West Point. In 1866 he was Phi Beta Kappa orator at Harvard, and the following year received from his college the degree of LL. D. From 1867 to 1879 he was an overseer of Harvard. In 1870, before a little audience of students from the advanced classes, he gave a course on the ‘Natural History of Intellect,’ the subject in the handling of which he had hoped to write his master work. One of the surprises of his later life was his nomination for the office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University by the independent party (1874). There were two other candidates. Emerson polled five hundred votes. Disraeli was victor with seven hundred votes. Emerson’s memory failed gradually, but the defect was not much noticed until after the shock consequent on the burning of his house (1872). A trip to Egypt did much to restore his health and he never lost the ‘royal trait of cheerfulness.’ He died, after a brief illness, on April 27, 1882. II EMERSON’S CHARACTER The praise which Emerson gives to character at the expense of luxurious surroundings was sincere. His own tastes were very simple. ‘Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them one’s self, so as to have something left to give, instead of being always prompt to grab?’ Acknowledging himself enmeshed in the conventionalities of ‘civilized’ life and no more responsible than his fellow victims, he nevertheless did what he could to follow out his theory. He would at least not be one of the infirm people of society, who, if they miss any one of their comforts, ‘represent themselves as the most wronged and most wretched persons on earth.’ Emerson did not live in the woods on twenty-seven cents a week, but he had no objection to a friend’s living that way if the friend found it profitable. For himself he would not be ‘absurd and pedantic in reform.’ No characteristic is more marked than his spirit of tolerance. It was not of a smooth, purring sort, growing out of eagerness to please or unwillingness to offend, but rather an aggressive tolerance. Emerson would not merely grant to every man ‘the allowance he takes,’ but would even force him to take it. He was patient with the most obnoxious of reformers. And he could be tolerant with those who could tolerate nothing. With pronounced and original views he had little solicitude to impose his views on others. He was without egotism. To state the truth as he apprehended it and to let the world come to his ideas if the world could and would, contented him. But he had no quarrel with the order of things. His good humor and smiling patience are manifest in everything he has written.