Strange to say, there was not, during my whole course at Yale, a lecture upon any period, subject, or person in literature, ancient or modern:--our only resource, in this field, being the popular lecture courses in the town each winter, which generally contained one or two presentations of literary subjects. Of these, that which made the greatest impression upon me was by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Sundry lectures in my junior year, by Whipple, and at a later period by George William Curtis, also influenced me. It was one of the golden periods of English literature, the climax of the Victorian epoch;--the period of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and the Brownings, of Thackeray and Dickens, of Macaulay and Carlyle on one side of the Atlantic, and of Emerson, Irving, Hawthorne, Ban- croft, Prescott, Motley, Lowell, Longfellow, Horace Bushnell, and their compeers on the other. Hence came strong influences; but in dealing with them we were left to ourselves. Very important in shaping my intellectual development at this time were my fellow-students. The class of 1853 was a very large one for that day, and embraced far more than the usual proportion of active-minded men. Walks and talks with these were of great value to me; thence came some of my best impulses and suggestions to reading and thought. Especially fortunate was I in my ``chum,'' the friend that stood closest to me. He was the most conservative young man I ever knew, and at the very opposite pole from me on every conceivable subject. But his deeply religious character, his thorough scholarship, and his real devotion to my welfare, were very precious to me. Our very differences were useful, since they obliged me to revise with especial care all my main convictions and trains of thought. He is now, at this present writing, the Bishop of Michigan, and a most noble and affectionate pastor of his flock. The main subjects of interest to us all had a political bearing. Literature was considered as mainly subsidiary to political discussion. The great themes, in the minds of those who tried to do any thinking, were connected with the tremendous political struggle then drawing toward its climax in civil war. Valuable to me was my membership of sundry student fraternities. They were vealy, but there was some nourishment in them; by far the best of all being a senior club which, though it had adopted a hideous emblem, was devoted to offhand discussions of social and political questions;--on the whole, the best club I have ever known. The studies which interested me most were political and historical; from classical studies the gerund-grinding and reciting by rote had completely weaned me. One of our Latin tutors, having said to me: ``If you would try you could become a first-rate classical scholar,'' I answered: ``Mr. B----, I have no ambition to become a classical scholar, as scholarship is understood here.''