Professor Norton’s pre-eminent work in the interpretation of Dante—by which I mean his translation, text and notes, of the “Divine Comedy” and the “New Life,” an achievement of infinite piety, patience and resource; his admirable volume on Church-Building in the Middle Ages (to say nothing of his charming earlier one, “Study and Travel in Italy,” largely devoted to the cathedral of Orvieto); his long and intimate friendship with Ruskin, commemorated by his publication, as joint-executor to Ruskin’s will, of the best fruits of the latter’s sustained correspondence with him; his numerous English friendships, in especial—to say nothing of his native—all with persons of a highly representative character: these things give in part the measure of his finest curiosities and of his appetite, in all directions, for the best sources and examples and the best company. But it is probable that if his Harvard lectures are in form for publication, and if his general correspondence, and above all his own easily handsomest show in it, comes to be published, as most emphatically it should be, they will testify not in the least to any unredeemed contraction of life, but to the largest and happiest and most rewarded energy. An exhilarated invocation of close responsibility, an absolute ease of mind about one’s point of view, a thorough and never-failing intellectual wholeness, are so far from weakening the appeal to young allegiances that, once they succeed at all, they succeed the better for going all their length. So it was that, with admirable urbanity of form and uncompromising straightness of attack, the Professor of the History of the Fine Arts at Harvard for a quarter of a century let himself go; thinking no trouble wasted and no flutter and no scandal other than auspicious if only he might, to the receptive and aspiring undergraduate mind, brand the ugly and the vulgar and the inferior wherever he found them, tracking them through plausible disguises and into trumpery strongholds; if only he might convert young products of the unmitigated American order into material for men of the world in the finer sense of that term; if only in short he might render more supple their view, liable to obfuscation from sights and sounds about them, of the true meaning of a liberal education and of the civilised character and spirit in the civilised State.