mitted a man, after receiving his A.B. (and even his meaningless A.M.), to continue to occupy his chamber and a seat at Commons with the tutors, apparently on the theory that he was studying for a higher degree, or perhaps engaged in some recondite researches for the advancement of learning. In reality, such men were the college failures—incompetents who under the modern system of examinations would never have been allowed to graduate at all; bits of educational wreckage “who had become water-logged on their life-voyage, preachers who could not find willing hearers, men lingering on the threshold of professions for which they had neither the courage nor the capacity.”[1] For these timorous navigators the College offered at least a dignified and inexpensive haven of refuge.[2] Almost always impecunious, frequently lacking as much in social as in intellectual gifts, living a cramped and abortive life, they developed all the quirks that might have been expected, and contributed to the atmosphere of the Yard an outlandish flavor all their own.
- ↑ Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 211. Samuel Dexter graduated in 1720, and thereupon expressed his desire “to be Improv’d in Business, & not to live Idlely, [as] some Schollars do, without being Improv’d.” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Transactions, xviii, 316.
- ↑ An alumnus of very different calibre, Hon. James J. Myers, A.B. 1869, LL.B. 1872, the distinguished lawyer and sometime speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, who lived continuously in Wadsworth House until his death in 1915, seems to have been the last graduate to whom this ancient courtesy was extended.
