If not all ingenious disciples could give independent proof, however, all could rally and feel the spirit; all could crowd to a course of instruction which, largely elective and optional, yet united more listeners than many others put together, and in which the subject itself, the illustration of European artistic endeavour at large, or in other words the record of man’s most comprehensive sacrifice to organised beauty, tended so to take up on familiar ground the question of manners, character, conscience, tone, to bristle with questions addressed to the actual and possible American scene. That, I hasten to add, was of course but one side of the matter; there were wells of special science for those who chose to draw from them, and an inner circle of pupils whose whole fruitful relation to their philosopher and friend—the happy and easy privilege of Shady Hill in general, where other charming personal influences helped, not counting as least in this—can scarce have failed to prepare much practical evidence for observation still to come. The ivory tower of study would ever, by his natural bent, I think, have most solicited Charles Norton; but he liked, as I say, he accepted without a reserve, the function of presiding over young destinies; he believed in the personal and the social communication of light, and had a gift for the generous and personal relation that perhaps found its best issue, as I have already hinted, in his admirable letters. These were not of this hustled and hustling age, but of a cooler and steadier sphere and rhythm, and of a charming mannerly substantial type to which he will have been, I think, among correspondents truly animated by the social spirit and a due cosmopolite ideal, one of the last systematically to sacrifice. With the lapse of years I ceased to be, I admit, a near spectator of his situation; but my sense of his activity—with more intimate renewals, besides, occasionally taking place—was to be, all along, so constantly fed by echo and anecdote and all manner of indirect glimpses, that I find myself speak quite with the confidence and with all the attachment of a continuous “assistant.”