The announcement by the Trustees of the Dowse Institute of a course of five lectures, by Professor Kittredge at Sanders Theatre on "Five Tragedies of Shakspere", recalls attention to the interesting and fruitful endowment which these lectures represent. Thomas Dowse was a wool-puller and leather-dresser in Cambridge port. He began life with scarcely any schooling; was apprenticed to his trade as a boy, and continued in it until his death at the age of 84; living, unmarried, in rooms above his shop, over whose door a carved lamb was set, not to suggest his inclination to fleece, but to indicate his trade in sheepskins.

As he became prosperous, he became also a reader and collector of precious books, until his library numbered five thousand volumes, and was described by Mr. Robert C. Winthrop as the most valuable library of English books with which he was acquainted. Before the death of Mr. Dowse, he conveyed this library, gathered with infinite care, to the Massachusetts Historical Society, thus becoming at that time its chief benefactor. His executors, authorized by his will to distribute the residue of his estate for "literary, scientific, and charitable purposes", conveyed to the City of Cambridge $10,000 on condition that $600 a year should be paid "every year forever" to "provide one or more courses of lectures of the highest character on literary and scientific subjects". It was an agreement which was not only creditable to the City of Cambridge, but singularly consistent with the thrifty foresight of Mr. Dowse. This foundation, established in the Golden Age of lyceum lectures, at once attracted the most brilliant and notable of speakers. The names of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumher, Edward Everett, and many other personalities of that period, appear in the early lists. Professor Kittredge is a worthy successor of these masters of public address, and his hearers will listen with unusual pleasure, not only to his critical erudition, but to his wisdom, insight, and wit. --Boston Transcript