Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
General
Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O
Speeches, addresses, etc.
The President of the college has spoken to you of the pleasing fact that
there is an endowment of seventy thousand dollars for fellowships. Well,
when I was in college, a very moderate endowment of five dollars
contributed by those who were associated as companions was a very good
endowment for good fellowship. [Laughter.] And now in looking at life as
it is, as we remember it in college and have seen it since, who is there
that would compare mere fellowship with good-fellowship? What is there
that is heartier, what sincerer, what more generous and what more just
than the relations of young men of a liberal spirit toward one another
in college? How many of us as we have gone on in life, prosperous, as we
may have been, with nothing to complain of as to our success or our
situation--how many of us have been disposed to repeat that lament of
AEneas where he was continually baffled in holding closer conversation
with his goddess-mother who was always carried off in a nimbus or her
accents lost in the whisper of the wind:--
"cur dextrae jungere dextram
Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces?"
Maybe in the good-fellowship of after-life, you, Mr. President, will not
hesitate to walk down Broadway with your arm over General Jackson's
shoulder and his about your waist, and then all the people shall cry
with applause: "See how Yale men love one another!"
You will observe, from this little classic allusion that I am on the
side of those who favor in the curriculum the maintenance of the learned
languages. For myself, whether an education in the classic languages and
in the classic literature should or should not be discarded from the
education of the noble youth of the country is the question whether it
is worth while in the advancing and strenuous life of modern times that
men should have a liberal education. For be sure that there is no trait
in that education that entitles it to the name of liberal more sure and
more valuable than this education in the literature, in the history, in
the language of the great men of the ages past. If any boy is put
through what is called a liberal education, and finds when he goes out
from it, that he is not on a level with those who understand and cherish
the Greek language and literature, he will find that he is mistaken in
wishing to dispense with that distinguishing trait.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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