xt for laughter rang as free and true upon his deathbed as
at any previous time of his existence.

Born in 1813, he had lived through three generations, and seen enormous
social and public changes. When a carpenter has a surface to measure,
he slides his rule along it, and over all its peculiarities. I
sometimes think of Boott as such a standard rule against which the
changing fashions of humanity of the last century might come to
measurement. A character as healthy and definite as his, of whatsoever
type it be, need only remain entirely true to itself for a sufficient
number of years, while the outer conditions change, to grow into
something like a common measure. Compared with its repose and
permanent fitness to continue, the changes of the generations seem
ephemeral and accidental. It remains the standard, the rule, the term
of comparison. Mr. Boott's younger friends must often have felt in his
presence how much more vitally near they were than they had supposed to
the old Boston long before the war, to the older Harvard, to the older
Rome and Florence. To grow old after his manner is of itself to grow
important.

I said that Mr. Boott was not demonstrative or sentimental.
Tender-hearted he was and faithful as few men are, in friendship. He
made new friends, and dear ones, in the very last years of his life,
and it is good to think of him as having had that consolation. The
will in which he surprised so many persons by remembering them--"one of
the only purely beautiful wills I have ever read," said a
lawyer,--showed how much he cared at heart for many of us to whom he
had rarely made express professions of affection.

Good-by, then, old friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure,
the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in
that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours
forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and
their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and
that ancient human loves will never lose their own.

[1] An address delivered at the Memorial Service to Francis Boott in
the Harvard Chapel, Sunday, May 8, 1904. Printed in 38 _Harvard
Monthly_, 125.

V

THOMAS DAVIDSON: A KNIGHT-ERRANT OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.[1]

I wish to pay my tribute to the memory of a Scottish-American friend of
mine who died five years ago, a man of a character extraordinarily and
intensely human, in