taking advantage
of the great love I bear you, to play upon my feelings. Don't think
for a moment that I hold you in any way responsible for this note,
looking so nearly like your own handwriting as for a single instant
to deceive me, and suggest the idea that I would take a passage for
Europe in season to avoid all the college anniversaries."

I readily excused him, and I am sure you will be kind enough to be
charitable to me, gentlemen.

I know that one of the things which the graduates of the college look
forward to with the most confident expectation and pleasure is the
report of the President of the University. [Applause.] I remember that
when I was in the habit of attending the meetings of the faculty, some
fourteen or fifteen years ago, I was very much struck by the fact that
almost every matter of business that required particular ability was
sure to gravitate into the hands of a young professor of chemistry. The
fact made so deep an impression upon me that I remember that I used to
feel, when our war broke out, that this young professor might have to
take the care of one of our regiments, and I know that he would have led
it to victory. And when I heard that the same professor was nominated
for President, I had no doubt of the result which all of us have seen to
follow. I give you, gentlemen, the health of President Eliot of Harvard
College. [Applause.]

* * * * *

NATIONAL GROWTH OF A CENTURY

[Speech of James Russell Lowell at the Harvard Alumni dinner at
Cambridge, Mass., June 28, 1876. Mr. Lowell, as President of the
Alumni Association, occupied the chair.]

BRETHREN:--Though perhaps there be nothing in a hundredth year
to make it more emphatic than those years which precede it and which
follow it, and though the celebration of centennials be a superstitious
survival from the time when to count ten upon the fingers was a great
achievement in arithmetic, and to find the square of that number carried
with it something of the awe and solemnity which invests the higher
mathematics to us of the laity, yet I think no wise man can be
indifferent to any sentiment which so profoundly and powerfully affects
the imagination of the mass of his fellows. The common consent of
civilized mankind seems to have settled on the centennial commemoration
of great events as leaving an interval spacious enough to be impressive,
and having a roundness of compl