His career has not frustrated those bright promises. His rare fusion of scholarship and genius won him the chair of English Literature in one of our most rapidly growing colleges, where he has incomparable opportunities for influencing the ideals of the young men under him. His courses are among the most popular in the college. Although his special scholarly research has been devoted to pre-Elizabethan literature, he is at home in all the ages. His lectures are models of carefully weighed criticism. “My purpose,” he says, “is to give my boys the spirit of the authors, and let them judge between them for themselves.” Consequently, however much Swinburne may revolt him, the Professor expounds the carnal and desperate message of that poet with the same care which he gives to his beloved Wordsworth. “When they have heard them all,” he told me once, “I can trust my boys to feel the insufficiency of any purely materialistic interpretation of life.” Impeccable as is his critical taste where the classics are concerned, he is reluctant about giving his opinion to those students who come for a clue through the current literary maze. Stevenson was early canonized, and the Professor speaks with charm and fulness upon him, but G. B. S. and Galsworthy must wait. “Time, perhaps,” says the Professor, “will put the seal of approval upon them. Meanwhile our judgment can be only tentative.” His fine objectivity is shown in those lists of the hundred best books of the year which he is sometimes asked to compile for the Sunday newspapers. Rarely does a new author, never does a young author, appear among them. Scholarly criticism, the Professor feels, can scarcely be too cautious.