HARVARD'S KITTREDGE

Harvard has a happy way of not losing the greatest of her teachers when they retire. President Eliot was a familiar figure in Cambridge for years after President Lowell took his place. Dean Briggs was a part of Harvard long after he gave up English 5. "Copey", though retired, is still a living cornerstone of the college. On Friday "Kitty" delivered his last lecture.

But Cambridge is as unthinkable without the aggressive and autocratic figure of the great Shakespeare scholar as it would be without Harvard Hall, in which for so many years he has lectured. The university has known more palatable teachers. Bliss Perry won the hearts of generations of students of literature by the charm and urbanity of his readings. But Professor Kittredge has been at once a good, a scourge and an inspriation. For nearly a half century he has prodded good students into better work and opened their minds. He has blistered the incompetent with his scorn and brought shame to the cheeks of the ill-mannered or the inconsiderate. To those with inquiring minds he has pointed out roads which they have followed with happiness in succeeding years. With the hammer of scholarship and the tongs of wit he has beaten the plays of Shakespeare into the reluctant minds of adolescence.

Many who took his famous "English 2" did not realize until later years that Professor Kittredge had given them more than they were conscious of Shakespeare is rarely appreciated to the full by youth. But "Kitty, hammered into the minds of his students thoughts an dideas about the plays which, half forgotten in the early years of business or professional life, later have come back to illuminate not only Shakespeare but much else.

It will be fortunate indeed for those who attend Harvard in the next few years if Professor Kittredge can be induced from time to time to talk. Most of his students have feared his harp tongue and quick impatience. But they have respected his great learnings and gloried in his eccentricities and mannerisms. More salt of the Kittredge kind in colleg lecture halls would be a boon to American education. --New York Herald-Tribune May 3, 1936