Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/341



has become of all the “college characters”? Is the modern University to lose the spicy individuality it has always possessed in the past from a long series of quaint and entertaining satellites either officially centred there or gravitating thither on their own account? The traditions of Harvard would indeed be poorer if all the oddities who have clustered round it for well-nigh three centuries had never existed, and there was nothing to look back upon save a dreary perspective of figures correctly conventional and insufferably commonplace.

Happily the facts have been far otherwise. Of old, indeed, such a flat horizon to the college world would have been next to impossible, for characters swarmed in all walks of life. The small and scattered population, the difficulties of intercommunication, the sturdy independence of thought and action, the absence of artificial standards of deportment, and the manifold problems of bare existence–resulting in every sort of irregular substitution and makeshift–produced an amount of diversity in dress, in speech, in habits, and in ideas that