For better for worse, German ideals and methods continue to dominate in twenticth century as they did in nineteenth century higher learning in the United States. The graduate schools of arts and sciences of today are modelled on the German universities of 1820, and it was Harvard College and Harvard men who took the lead in the development of the modern graduate school. Mr. Long's essays on Ticknor, Everett, Cogswell, Longfellow, Bancroft, and Motley are this not only chapters in the history of faste and scholarship in this country but are also chapters, and important ones, in Harvard history.

These men were the pioneers who opened the trail from American college to German universities and returned to preach the gospel of German philosophy, philology, and science. All but one had gone out from Harvard; all but one returned to Harvard to expound the new vision of scholarship. It is a colorful series of pictures that Mr. Long draws from the letters and journals of these cager young men, all of whom gravitated to Goettingen to hear the giants of learning. Edward Everett, who was a Harvard A.B. at seventeen, preacher to "the politest congregation in Boston" at twenty-one, and ultimately president of Harvard, was the first American to earn the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Germany. His studies in his second year at Goettingen he lists as Roman Law, Archacology, Ciccro's de Oratore, Greek syntax and meters, Greek and Latin Composition, Latin conversation, French, and Italian, Riding and dancing, he adds, are "pursued at odd intervals." Yet, he says, "All the students here who pass for diligent hear far more lecturing than I. Cogswell hears 8 courses daily." We see George Bancroft, fresh from college, sent by the Harvard Corporation for three years' study in Germany in order to become, as President Kirkland expressed it, "an accomplished philologian and biblical critic, able to expound and defend the Revelation of God." Bancroft was not so uncritically enthusiastic as his predecessors had been. Ticknor had written that there was more "absolute learning in Germany than in all the rest of the world besides." But Bancroft was too fastidious to find the unkempt German students congenial, agreeing with the sentiments of Longfellow's mother, who wrote her son when he contemplated a period of study abroad that, from all accounts, the Goettingen students were "very licentious, unrestrained by the government, and addicted to duclling." The professors too, in Bancroft's opinion, were anything but gentlemen in the New England sense. They were learned, to be sure, but "they learn Hebrew, because it is better to teach Hebrew than to till the earth ... In conversation they are dull ... I have seldom been able to get any information from any of them, in company ... The answer always is, I read a lecture on the subject, which you can hear next summer."

What is most important, however, is that they all come back from their Goettingen discipline, and their visits to Goethe (Cogswell persuaded Goethe to give a set of his works to the Harvard Library) to plant the seeds of German academic culture in this country. Ticknor and Longfellow were the first and second incumbents of the chair later distinguished by James Russell Lowell and Bliss Perry. Mr. Long treats the academic influence of the pioneers fully. These are, it is worth repeating, significant chapters in the history of education in the United States.