Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/38

 effort of some ambitious master-builder or some home-taught head mason. There was then but one trained architect in New England, Peter Harrison of Newport; and this design not only antedates all his known work, but is not altogether in his style. The easiest solution of the problem is to assume that the plans were drawn in London, and brought over by the thorough-going Hutchinson along with the money to carry them out. Perhaps further search may some day successfully link one at least of Harvard’s buildings with the name of a great English architect of the eighteenth century.

The foregoing considerations of the origin and style of Holden Chapel show the unique position this little structure occupies among its fellows in the Yard. Not alone is it the only one of the existing “ancient” buildings that was given by a private individual, but it is the only one ever given by an English donor—the sole tangible, brick-and-mortar evidence of the mother country’s good-will to Harvard. Furthermore, its design, from carved coat-armor to oaken benches, was as English as its giver; so that it stands to-day a complete exotic, a bit of the old world set down in the new, a solitary English daisy in a field of Yankee dandelions.

It remains to follow the equally unusual fortunes of the completed edifice.

For twenty years or so the chapel fulfilled its intended