His equanimity was further shaken by a disagreeable experience when the son of an old friend, making a show of a friendly visit, led him on into discourse about England and English affairs, and then, relying on his memory, decanted the conversation into an article for a New York paper with which he was connected. “If he had reported what I really said, instead of his version of it, I should not feel so bitterly,” was Lowell’s comment, and to a friend he wrote: “As for ---- he _knew_ that I didn’t know he was interviewing me. To any sane man the shimble-shamble stuff he has made me utter is proof of it. I say ‘made me utter’ deliberately, because, though he has remembered some of the subjects (none of my choosing) which we talked about, he has wholly misrepresented the tone and sometimes falsified the substance of what I said.... The worst of ----’s infidelity (I mean to keep my temper) is that it is like a dead rat in the wall,--an awful stink and no cure.” It is not easy to say just what gave rise to the peculiarly American academic custom of making a celebration to consist of an oration and a poem, but Harvard was fortunate in being able to summon from her graduates Holmes to deliver a poem and Lowell an oration. To Lowell himself the occasion was stimulating, not only because of the pride and loyalty with which he regarded the college, but because he had given it twenty years of service, and came back to it now after nearly a decade in which he had abundant opportunity for comparison of its fruit with that which hung on the boughs of older institutions. As one reads again an address which was listened to with eagerness, one follows the course which Lowell’s thought took with a deepening sense that he was speaking out of a full mind, not so much upon the specific questions of university education as upon the large aspects of education and life which rose to view as an historical survey laid them bare. The address was the outcome of Lowell’s life as a scholar broadening into the experience of a man who had had to do with the affairs of a great world. The affectionate pride which he had in New England as exemplified in his historic study, “New England Two Centuries Ago,” had grown into a feeling of reverence which leads him in the opening passages of his address to set forth the founders of the college in a manner to leave on the minds of his hearers the impression of an august body chosen out of the greatest of their time to lay the foundation of a noble institution; and toward the close of his address he returns to this theme and presents it anew with an eloquence and beauty of phrase that make the passage one which may be read without fear beside the sonorous Latin which faced the audience in Sanders Theatre.