Their insistence on a common table, in particular, proved a terrible handicap. Sordid and needless as it now appears, the squabble with the butcher and the baker in the attempt to run a restaurant was the first and most formidable rock which Harvard College encountered after its launching, and on which it very nearly split and foundered.
The sprightly fancy of Oliver Wendell Holmes has pictured the first students:
And who was on the Catalogue
When college was begun?
Two nephews of the President,
And the Professor’s son,
(They turned a little Indian by,
As brown. as any bun;)
Lord! how the seniors knocked about
That freshman class of one!
But no pen short of Mr. W. S. Gilbert’s could do justice to the first Faculty. This educational Pooh-Bah was named Nathaniel Eaton, and in his own person united the offices of President, Treasurer, Secretary, Dean, Bursar, Professor, Tutor, and Steward. He was a smooth-spoken, well-dressed man in the early thirties, “of learning and talents,” who had just arrived at Boston with his brother Theophilus, a wealthy London merchant who shortly became the first governor of the New Haven Colony.
Under such propitious auspices he was put in charge
