Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/268

 telligent hearers.” Chief Justice Shaw, his successor, says that in addressing a jury (and doubtless also a college audience) “his reasoning was clear, forcible, and exact; his language chaste, pointed, and select; his fluency uncommon, and his action animated.”

But he does not seem to have put his heart into his work. To his thorough-going mind the range of subjects he was expected to cover in a dozen lectures was simply impossible: he used to caution his listeners that he was not giving them a complete legal education, and add that most of them would not know what to do with one if they had it. It was pretty plainly irksome for him to spend his time in giving them merely a “gentleman’s knowledge” of the subject. On the whole, his lectures did not leave behind them the impression to be expected from such an eminent authority. They were never published, and are now forgotten. All the same, they mark a unique point in the college history—the only period when jurisprudence formed a part of the undergraduate curriculum.

Isaac Royall is generally spoken of as the founder of the Harvard Law School. Considering the facts, that statement will not quite hold water. The lectures which he endowed were intended to be given to the under-