who took up teaching for bread-winning while going
through the divinity school. Naturally most of the
work done under these was perfunctory. There was too
much reciting by rote and too little real intercourse
between teacher and taught. The instructor sat in a box,
heard students' translations without indicating anything
better, and their answers to questions with very few
suggestions or remarks. The first text-book in Greek was
Xenophon's ``Memorabilia,'' and one of the first men
called up was my classmate Delano Goddard. He made an
excellent translation,--clean, clear, in thoroughly good
English; but he elicited no attention from the instructor,
and was then put through sundry grammatical puzzles,
among which he floundered until stopped by the word,
``Sufficient.'' Soon afterward another was called up who
rattled off glibly a translation without one particle of
literary merit, and was then plied with the usual grammatical
questions. Being asked to ``synopsize'' the Greek verb,
he went through the various moods and tenses, in all sorts
of ways and in all possible combinations, his tongue
rattling like the clapper of a mill. When he sat down my
next neighbor said to me, ``that man will be our
valedictorian.'' This disgusted me. If that was the style of
classical scholarship at Yale, I knew that there was nothing
in it for me. It turned out as my friend said. That
glib reciter did become the valedictorian of the class, but
stepped from the commencement stage into nothingness,
and was never heard of more. Goddard became the
editor of one of the most important metropolitan news-
papers of the United States, and, before his early death,