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38 a spirit, a method, and an ideal which they caught from him.

It seems as though no man could again attain to the absolute impartiality of his spirit. A young enthusiast often mistook its crystal clarity for coldness and lack of zest. It prevented Professor Whitney from being what is called magnetic. For this a certain degree of partisanship would seem to be requisite. It even made him seem at times to lack proper appreciation of a beauty or a power which others were more ready to acknowledge; and this, no doubt, kept him from the somewhat ephemeral success of interesting and stirring large miscellaneous classes of undergraduates. A young man just entering the domain of classical philology, and getting his first ranges over the fields of classical literature, is sure to have a distorted idea of the relative superiority of those literatures, from comparative ignorance both of other ancient and of modern literatures. This often blinds him to the real merits of other literary expressions, and especially to much of the narrowness and squalor of ancient classical life, and to its hideous injustices. It was not, then, alone the fact that Professor Whitney introduced such students to a new ancient language and literature of great richness, upon which successive ages had spent themselves in comment and elucidation, but it was his comparative estimate of this and other ancient languages and literatures, or of all ancient and modern languages and literatures, which led those who came under his teaching to revise their standards and readjust their mental perspectives. He did not unduly exalt the