than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make
anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent
through life. The Bostonian educated at Harvard College remained
a collegian, if he stuck only to what the college gave him. If
parents went on generation after generation, sending their
children to Harvard College for the sake of its social
advantages, they perpetuated an inferior social type, quite as
ill-fitted as the Oxford type for success in the next generation.

Luckily the old social standard of the college, as President
Walker or James Russell Lowell still showed it, was admirable,
and if it had little practical value or personal influence on the
mass of students, at least it preserved the tradition for those
who liked it. The Harvard graduate was neither American nor
European, nor even wholly Yankee; his admirers were few, and his
many; perhaps his worst weakness was his self-criticism and
self-consciousness; but his ambitions, social or intellectual,
were necessarily cheap even though they might be negative. Afraid
of such serious risks, and still more afraid of personal
ridicule, he seldom made a great failure of life, and nearly
always led a life more or less worth living. So Henry Adams, well
aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his
social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook
himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely
have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last
remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He
wrote.

The College Magazine printed his work, and the College
Societies listened to his addresses. Lavish of praise the readers