CHARLES HAMMOND AND ACADEMY LIFE.1

BY ELBRIDGE SMITH,

Principal of Dorchester High School.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN OF THE ASSOCIATION:

In the record of the world's progress it is a remarkable fact that so insignificant a place has been accorded to the culture and the cultivators of mind. The unseen but eternal forces which have shaped the world's destinies have been of little account in comparison with the visible and perishable forms to which they have given rise. We know far more of the Greek helmet than of the training of the brain which it protected. The world has always admired, and always will admire, that shield whose bright emblazonry embraced the symbols of the world's civilization; but the great creative mind that forged that shield, not on the anvil of Vulcan, but in the immortal lines of the Iliad, is still a subject of various and contradictory speculation. Two thousand years of wear, waste, plunder, and war have not removed from the Acropolis the lines of grace and forms of beauty drawn and piled by genius, piety, and patriotism in the Propylæa and the Parthenon. But how few of those who gaze upon these crumbling splendors know even the names of Phidias, Ictinus, Callicrates, and Corobus! How many have ever heard of Menecles of Alabanda, Philo the Athenian, Molo the Rhodian, Menippus of Stratonice, Dionysius of Magnesia, Eschylus of Cnidus, and Xenocles of Adramyttium? Yet these were the teachers and the schools of Cicero forgotten names, perished cities, abodes of art and eloquence, known only to the historian and the antiquary.

The Christian world is pouring forth octavos upon octavos and quartos upon quartos in study and eulogy of that great spirit who first persecuted, and then proclaimed the doctrines of the Cross in

1 MEMORIAL DISCOURSE on the Life and Character of Rev. Charles Hammond, LL. D., before the Massachusetts Teachers' Association at the Annual Meeting on the 31st of December, 1879. Printed by vote of the Association.

fair Damascus, in the wilds of Arabia, in Antioch, in Athens, in Ephesus, in Rome, and in the palace of the Cæsars. But the name of the teacher who attuned that spirit to such fine issues, and nerved it to that noble daring occurs in but two places in Christian records. One is the grateful mention by his distinguished pupil; the other is in connection with a lesson of the largest liberality to the persecuting Sanhedrim. The great apostle was the embodiment and enlargement of the instructions of his teacher. It is true there are striking exceptions to this rule. Socrates is still quite a distinct personality to us; and, were the Athens of Pericles restored, we should have little difficulty, thanks to his pupils, Plato and Xenophon, in recognizing in the streets, the groves, the porticos, the agora, the Areopagus, and the gymnasia the ungainly form, the bare feet, the coarse apparel of that philosopher, who, without writing a page gave a new direction to Grecian thought for succeeding centuries. Let us pause and retrace the course of the ages and listen for a moment to one of the most gifted and wayward of his pupils.

"When we hear the words of any other orator," says Alcibiades in the Symposium, "however eloquent, we remain comparatively indifferent to them; but when any one, be it man, woman, or child, hears him, or even his words through the mouth of another person, be he but an indifferent speaker, he is overpowered, and, as it were, taken possession of by them. Indeed, friends, if I did not fear that I should appear to you to have been drinking, I would declare to you now, on oath, all I have felt and am still made to feel by the power of his words; for when I listen to him, my heart beats, and tears come to my eyes, and I am more roused by far than are the Corybantian revelers in the rites of Cybele. And so it is, I see, with every one else. In listening to Pericles and other eloquent orators, I have thought that they spoke well; but never was I affected in this way, nor was my soul troubled and indignant at the thought that I was in a slavish condition. But I have often been put into such a state by this Marsyas, that it has seemed to me impossible to live as I am; and even now I am quite conscious that, if I should lend my ear, I should not be able to resist him, but should suffer again in the same way; for he compels me to acknowledge that, although I am far worse than I ought to be, I yet do not take care of my own soul, but busy myself with the affairs of the Athenians. Therefore, stopping my ears as if to shut

out the voice of Sirens, I tear myself away by force, lest I grow old sitting by his side. In his presence alone have I felt that which no one would suppose was in me to feel - shame. For while I am conscious that I cannot gainsay him, or maintain that I ought not to do what he bids, still as soon as I get away, the value I attach to popularity overcomes me. So I flee from him and make my escape; and when I see him I am ashamed at what I have acknowledged to him. Many a time should I have been glad to know that he was no longer among men; and yet had he died I well know that this would have grieved me still more sorely, so that really I do not know what I am to do with the man."

The object lessons drawn by the world's greatest teacher from the lilies of the field, the sower of the seed, the widow and her mite, from the proud and devoted city viewed from the slope of Olivet, the sermon preached in a mountain solitude, the swift-coming woes denounced in the porch of the temple against those who had profaned those hallowed courts and changed them from a house of prayer to a den of thieves, that sacred person whose very presence vanquished the arms that had conquered the world, the sensibility that found relief in sweating as it were blood, the calm courage that outshone all the fierce daring of Thermopylae, all these, graven upon no tables of stone, but upon the fleshly tables of the hearts of men, have preserved to us a personality which the mind can firmly grasp, but which no art can ever reach.

"The healing of his seamless dress,

Is by our beds of pain,

We touch him in life's throng and press,

And we are whole again."

Such is the power of mind over mind; such the effect of that mysterious contact which spirit may have with spirit. And yet it is just this influence of mind on mind which the world has most especially failed to recognize and record. A history of England with which you are all familiar (I refer to the Pictorial History of Knight, Craik, and Macfarlane) includes under seven heads all the elements of the national life; and these are, first, civil and military transactions; second, religion; third, the constitution, government, and laws; fourth, the national industry; fifth, literature, science, and the fine arts; sixth, manners and customs; and seventh, the condition of the people. In this great muster and parade of

wisdom and folly, of strength and weakness, of wealth and poverty, of war, with all its pageantry and horrors, the long procession of dynasties and kings, of nobles and statesmen, of prelates and priests, cathedrals and churches, rites and ceremonies, lawgivers, judges, and jurists, the rise of arts and industries, the various forms of literature, the triumphs of science, pure and applied, fashion with all its frivolities, costumes with all their absurdities, architecture in all its styles and magnificence, the cottage with its peaceful tenants, the citizen, advancing in intelligence and power, wresting one by one the claims of the prerogative and becoming gradually the central figure of the state, in the long march of this seven-fold narrative through eighteen centuries, the teacher or his teaching has not been accorded a place as one of the factors of the national life. We catch glimpses of him, however, amid the shifting scenery of the centuries. Once in the person of Roger Ascham he appears with his Schoolmaster and lays down distinctly and minutely a theory and a practice of teaching which may be studied with profit in our own time. John Milton begins his life work as a teacher, and comes forward with his Tractate, and his ideal "academy," as grand as the creations of his own Paradise; but he soon vanishes into the statesman and the poet. Richard Busby is seen stalking beside his sovereign, with head uncovered lest his boys should suppose there was a greater man in England than their master, and all authority be destroyed; pointing to sixteen prelates who had received the imposition of his hands in most unapostolic fashion, a scholar, a true genius for teaching marred by a tyranny which has eclipsed his virtues. Richard Bentley attracts attention, a miracle of erudition; but after showing himself the first scholar and critic of England, wastes his great powers in selfish and degrading controversies. Porson and Parr dazzle us by their learning, but add nothing to the fame of English tuition. It is not until the middle of our own century that the teacher, the scholar, and the man appear combined in the head master of Rugby.

Educational history and biography have fared but little better in our own country. It is true that in Barnard's "Journal of Education" we have a long array of educational biography from Ezekiel Cheever to the present time, and in the several volumes gathered from that periodical we can boast what no other country in the world save Germany possesses. But we have great occasion to lament, if not to complain, that this labor of love has been so poorly