Though he could scarcely be said to have resorted to any set or customary methods of a professional sort, he was not without recourse to simple aids in his teaching. “Thirty odd years ago,” he wrote in 1889,[106] “I brought home with me from Nuremberg photographs of Peter Fischer’s statuettes of the twelve apostles. These I used to show to my pupils and ask for a guess at their size. The invariable answer was ‘larger than life.’ They were really about eighteen inches high, and this grandiose effect was wrought by simplicity of treatment, dignity of pose, a large unfretted sweep of drapery. This object lesson I found more telling than much argument and exhortation.” He made also some attempt, when the method was much more of a novelty than it is to-day, to bring in the aid of illustration from art. He interested himself to rid his class-room in University Hall of some dismal charts that hung on the walls, and brought down from Elmwood a number of engravings and photographs which he had collected in his travels abroad, especially illustrations of Florence and Rome; one year he presented each of his class who had persevered with a copy of the recently discovered portrait of Dante by Giotto; and again he gave to each of his small class in Dante a copy of Mr. Norton’s privately printed volume on the “New Life.” The actual exercise in the class-room was simple enough and unconventional. The classes were not large, and the relation of the teacher to his students was that of an older friend who knew in a large way the author they were studying, and drew upon his own knowledge and familiarity with the text for comment and suggestion, rather than troubled himself much to find out how much his pupils knew. A student would trudge blunderingly along some passage, and Lowell would break in, taking up the translation himself very likely, and quickly find some suggestion for criticism, for elaboration or incidental and remote comment. Toward the close of the hour, question and answer, or free discussion yielded to the stream of personal reminiscence or abundant reflection upon which Lowell would by this time be launched. Especially would he recall scenes in Florence, sketch in words the effects of the Arno, Giotto’s Tower, the church in which Dante was baptized, where he himself had seen children held at the same font; and so Lowell gave out of his treasures, using that form of literature which was perhaps the most perfectly fitted to his mind, free, unconstrained talk. Suddenly, glancing at his watch before him,--a time-piece which was as idly whimsical as its owner,--he would stop, bow and walk quickly out of the room, the men rising respectfully as he left.