not only of his age but his country? Was he right or wrong in being a Ghibelline? To what extent is a certain freedom of opinion which he shows sometimes on points of religious doctrine to be attributed to the humanizing influences of the Crusades in enlarging the horizon of the Western mind by bringing it in contact with other races, religions, and social arrangements? These and a hundred other such questions were constant stimulants to thought and inquiry, stimulants such as no merely objectless and, so to speak, impersonal study could have supplied.” When, therefore, Lowell was brought face to face with a company of young men, in the relation of teacher, he appears not to have cast about to see how he could adjust his powers to some prevailing method of teaching, but to have used the material of literature as an instrument of association, and naturally, untrammelled by pedagogic theory, to have tried to communicate to the minds about him the kind of interest which the literature he was handling inspired in him. So far was he from a professional teacher that it is doubtful if he individualized his students much, or made any attempt to find entrance into this or that mind by first trying to detect what opening the mind offered. Undoubtedly, one or another with special aptitude or appreciation may have stimulated him and quickened his faculty of instruction, but for the most part these young men gave him the occasion for utterance, and the text before him gave the theme of discourse. Mr. Barrett Wendell, in his illuminating paper on Lowell as a teacher, confesses with a generous chagrin, that though he had been an enthusiastic pupil and had used Lowell’s hospitality fully, the acquaintance was very one-sided. He came to know Lowell well, but Lowell when he met him again after no great interval of time, had quite forgotten his face, and almost forgotten his name.[105]