later the turret-like cupolas were sliced off. In order to conform to the scheme of the now completed Yard, however, the eastern entrance was retained, and the old western door, ornamented with a correspondingly classic treatment, was permanently closed. Since that time the building has been occupied in irregular succession by the music department, the elocution courses, the choir rehearsals, and other more or less resonant assemblages desiring a detached hall of moderate size.
If then in closing we cast a retrospective glance over the nine-score years of Holden’s history, we may safely say that no other Harvard building has had such a picturesquely checkered career. It has been a most piquant example of the lucus a non lucendo. Losing irrevocably its intended aim of “promoting true Religion” in less than a generation after its erection, it has alternated between long periods of disuse and others of active employment as senate-chamber, court-house, barracks, carpenter-shop, engine-house, dissecting theatre, recitation building, museum, lecture-hall, clubhouse, laboratory, general auditorium—everything but a chapel.
In some of these capacities, dramatic scenes have been enacted beneath its roof; but the drama has required, so to speak, a most laborious amount of stage-setting. At least four entire changes of its arrangements, to say
