Memorial Lecture on John Harvard by J. K. Hosmer

J. K. Hosmer '55 delivered a most interesting address last night in the Lecture Room of the Fogg Museum on "John Harvard in England." This was the first of two lectures on John Harvard to be given under the auspices of the Harvard Memorial Society. W. C. Lane '81 introduced the speaker.

He said that twenty-five years ago John Harvard was a mere name and that his history was unknown. Today we know intimately his own life, his parentage, and his surroundings.

We are indebted for our knowledge of John Harvard's parentage mainly to Mr. Henry Watters. Thomas Rogers, father of Katherine, John Harvard's mother, a well-to-do marketman, and later alderman and may or, brought up his children side by side with the Shakespeare children of Stratford-on-Avon, where both families lived. In one of Thomas Rogers' numerous trips to London, he prob- ably met Robert Harvard, the father of John Harvard, also a marketman. In 1605 Robert Harvard, of Southwark, married Katherine Rogers, and in November, 1607, occurred John Harvard's birth. As a child he must have been known to William Shakespeare. When John Harvard was 18, he lost his father and two brothers in the plague, and at the age of twenty, after his mother's third marriage, he went to Emmanuel College, Cambridge. We know much of his life there, his teachers, the events of which he was a spectator, and above all, his friends, chief among whom was John Milton, one year his junior. There was a close friendship between the two young men during the five years of John Harvard's residence in Cambridge. At 28, he received the degree of A.M.: Of his character we know almost nothing, except that he chose good friends, and had a literary bent. In 1636 he married Saddler's sister, and in 1637 came to America.

As his mother's house in Stratford has stood, and will probably stand, for centuries, thus the story of John Harvard, so miraculously recovered in our own times, will stand forth in the future