Yale University - Banner / Pot Pourri Yearbook (New Haven, CT)

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Eehiraiinn En Qlharlinn iliiinnr Erwin, 131.5 Sinn' 1359 Iirnfrsznr nf English Hlitrraiurr un Thr limilg ?'fa11fnrh EEDIIXIDEIHHXI

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EEL? Elm Annual ge ar iannk of The cgfurlmzhls of Elerie iB.11i1mm:if3 VOLUME V BEING VOLUME LXXI OF Tl-IE BANNER and VOLUME XLVIII OF THE POT POURRI iihitnrz Alrxanhrr Eunnphrvg Eearh Albert Evrrlyrx' Gra1ufurh Anann Blake Cgarhum' Zlanwa iihluarh illrrkrr

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mzmunrr zmh Ilnt ljlnurri CHARLTON MIN ER LEWIS O Lewis, stand fast! the devil tempts thee llCl'l?!u'-'lfillg John. HARLTON LEXYIS delivered his inaugural address to this planet on the fourth of March, 1866, at Brooklyn. His father was a distinguished man, being a prominent lawyer, an authority on American social condi- tions Chis specialty was prison rcformj, and a really eminent scholar in the Latin language and literature. He was, in fact, remarkably versatile without any taint of the superficial, and the younger Charlton grew up amid the best intellectual influences and in the heart of a big, well-chosen library. He was prepared for college at an unusually early age, and was, I think, the youngest man in his class at Yale. He took hisvB.A. degree in 1886, three months after his twentieth birthday. As an undergraduate, he had a reputation for making impromptu rceitationsg for although he was interested in so many things that he did not apply himself exclusively to the curriculum, he seemed to have 110 difficulty in maintaining a grade of scholarship very close to the head of the class. He knew a good deal about music, and was in constant demand in dormitory rooms as a piano playerg but his chief interest was in literature, and his election to the editorial board of the Yale Literary Illagasine was as inevitable as a sunrise. He was the best poet in his college generationg and his poems, A Sprig of Lotus, and The Land of Gold, published in the Lit., were sufficiently mature in thought and finished in technique to have adorned any magazine in the country. After graduation, Mr. Lewis went to the Columbia Law School, receiving the degree of LLB. in 1889. Then came five lean years in the dusty purlieus of the law. His interest in law was literary and academic rather than practical, and the life of a New York lawyer became increasingly uninteresting and finally repugnant. He rebelled at the Pauline thought that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth. But now, while he was under bondage to the law, a man in New Haven delivered him from the law. This man was Professor Henry A. Beers. Professor Beers, not being wholly satisied with the young doctors of philosophy that our graduate schools were then manufacturing, ardently desired to add to the Yale English department a young teacher who, in addition to sound scholarship, should - 7