Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/269

 graduates of the college without the erection of any new machinery whatever. The credit for originating such a school rightly belongs to that other Isaac, Parker hight. His appointment seems to have set him thinking on the subject. Realizing the superficiality of his own lectures, and recalling his own early struggles for a legal education, he was soon seized with the inspiration of a separate graduate department in the University wherein lawyers could be taught their business as methodically and thoroughly as the Medical School was already teaching doctors.

At the beginning of his first course of lectures (April, 1816) he suggested that “a school for the instruction of resident graduates in jurisprudence may be usefully ingrafted on this professorship.” In the course of a year he grew so enamoured of the idea that he drew up a written plan, and formally “represented” to the Corporation “that in his opinion and in that of many friends of the University and of the improvement of our youth, the establishment of a School, for the instruction of Students at Law at Cambridge, under the Patronage of the University, will tend much to the better education of young men destined to that profession, and will increase the reputation and usefulness of this seminary.”

In these novel views the Corporation, no doubt after