Indisputably Barrett Wendell belonged to the great group of Harvard professors which included Norton, Child Shaler, Royce and William James; but almost as indisputably he stood apart from it--was never really of it. To the fetich of German "scientific" scholarship, the true divinity of which no one then doubted, he paid scant homage. His mind worked by flashes--flashes of wit, of iconoclastic paradox, of profound intelligence and of almost magical divination; but still, as it seemed to academic Cambridge, it worked uncanonically, irresponsibly. His knowledge was wide and luminous; on most of the subjects of which he wrote it was exhaustive; yet always it was the knowledge not of the researcher nor even of the steady-going teacher of youth, but of the adventuring man of letters. Long before the Shavian era in England, he was a professorial Bernard Shaw.

A part of the disesteem which for years dull minds visited upon him was the result of his novel writing, which was not first rate. Though his mind was essentially creative, it worked less freely through his imagination and sympathy than through his critical faculty. Whereas his novels were mainly empty shells of form, his volume on English Composition was full of meat, probably the most philosophic and stimulating work on this much be-written subject. His critical biography of Shakespeare was by turns brilliantly original and deficient in imaginative feeling. In his later years his methods sobered somewhat, his interests widened and his sympathies broadened. As to the permanent value of his output it is too early to heard a guess. But of his value as a teacher there can be no question. In a group of men suavely Victorian, he stood for the unconventionality, the daring and the happy irresponsibility of the twentieth century. New York Times.