Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[111] of them would, of course, be Dr. McCosh, and receiving as the other name that of a gentleman of whom I had never heard, and whom I have now forgotten; so that my young friend's compliment may be distributed for what it is worth among all those professors who may wish to claim it. Such and so honorable was the enthusiastic feeling expressed by President Garfield toward Mark Hopkins,—that to sit on the same log with him was to be in a university,—or the feeling that the Harvard students of forty years since had toward James Walker. Compare this boyish enthusiasm with the delight of Sir Walter Scott over the possession of a wineglass out of which George IV. had drunk when Prince Regent; and remember how he carried it home for an heirloom in his family, and sat down on it and broke it after his arrival. Which was the more noble way of getting at a personal ideal? ‘There is no stronger satire on the proud English society of that day,’ says Thackeray, ‘than that they admired George.’ When the history of this age comes to be written by some critic as fearless as the author of ‘The Four Georges,’ does