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

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Hair 1H11IUP1'HIfg, 151 1 2-15 1 3 have some real love and appreciation of literature. He bethought himself of Mr. Lewis, languishing in a metropolitan attorney's office. He suggested to him a change from New York to New Haven, from Blackstone to Shakespeare. No need to ask him twice. Mr. Lewis came without any urging, and after a year of graduate studies, was made in 1895 instructor in English in Yale College. He received the doctor's degree in 1898, and the publication of his thesis, The Foreign Sources of English Versificationf' established his position as a scholar. In this same year he was made an assistant professor, and in a few months, in the spring of 1899, he was elected by the Corporation, Professor of English Litera- ture on the Emily Sanford foundation, being the first incumbent of this chair, the endowment for which had been left to the College by the late Judge Billings. Since that date Mr. Lewis has steadily grown in scholarly work and in the high art of teaching, His publications include: The Principles of English Verse, 1905, and The Genesis of Hamlet, in 1907, in addition to these works of pure scholarship, Mr. Lewis published in 1903 an original poem, Gawayne and the Green Knight, which combined in a most happy manner poetic fantasy with playful humor. As a teacher, he is one of the most valuable men on the entire Faculty, possessing great skill in the presentation of his subject, along with genuine sympathy for and understanding of his pupils. Common sense-an uncommon quality in poets-is the foundation of his mind and temperament, and partly accounts for his extraordinary success with every class that he has taught. Up to this point I have tried to regard the life and character of Mr. Lewis from the standpoint of an impartial observerg but it is impossible to remain thus aloof. I knew him when he was an undergraduate, and during the last eighteen years we have lived together in the closest intimacy as colleagues in the same department of a great university. Members of the Faculty have the same esprit de corps, the same sincere and ardent friendships that are found among undergraduates. Suffice it to say that the years of association and of steady effort in a common cause have steadily increased my admiration of this professor, and my affection for this man. W1LL1.,x M LYON P HELPS. Yale College 25 January, 1913 S

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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

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OLD SOUTH MIDDLE on CONNECTICUT HALL