Sadler's that he performed one of the creditable acts of his career. The Jews had been excluded from England since the days of Edward I, and at the suggestion of Sadler Cromwell took off the disability, enabling them to open a synagogue in London. In the year 1636 Harvard married Anne Sadler, the sister of his friend. There is a document dated 1637, showing that John Harvard parted with certain property to a ship captain named John Man, presumably passage money for himself and his wife, his library and his belongings, to America.

A word ought to be said about his library. We judge a man a good deal from the books that he buys. What kind of a library was it that John Harvard gathered around him and brought to this country? You can see it at Cambridge; Mr. Lane has it on exhi bition there. It was an up-to-date library for the time. Of course there was a prevalence of Calvinistic theology, but there were also represented the Catholic controversialists. In general literature we find there Bacon's Essays, Chapman's Homer, and one or two other books of that kind; while a refined scholarship was indicated by the fact that there were good editions of some of the best Greek and Latin classics.

I think we can say that he was a man of low vitality, both in body and mind, his vigor being sapped, probably, by the presence in his constitution of the insidious disease by which he was so early swept away. A personality refined, correct, scholarly, colorless, and yet in a wonderful way absorbing and reflecting color. A personality very vapory, but yet how marvellously prehensile! He takes hold in the strangest way of great events and of great men. It seems almost as certain as anything can be in the past that he was in contact with Shakspere and with Milton. As a young man from Cambridge, he must have heard his step-father, Richard Yearwood, talk; and what would he say, coming home from his seat in Parliament at St. Stephen's to Southwark? He might say that he had just looked into the face of Hampden, and listened to the eloquence of Pym; that he himself, perhaps, had taken part in the debate on the Petition of Right; and how Sir John Eliot had exclaimed: "None have gone about to break Parliaments but in the end Parliaments have broken them." It seems altogether probable that he must have come face to face with

young Harry Vane, for, arriving in Boston in the same month in which Vane sailed thence for England, what more natural than that Vane should seek out the intelligent new arrival for the latest news from the great arena whither he was going back to play so conspicuous a part?

In connection with John Harvard's proprietorship of the Queen's Head Inn, which was the principal item of his mother's bequest to him, and the estate out of which it is supposed that the money came, for the most part, for Harvard College, he comes, almost uncannily, into relations with Chaucer; for next door to the Queen's Head was the Tabard Inn, which was, some three hundred years before, associated with the Canterbury Tales; and he reaches forward two hundred years to Dickens, for closely adjacent to the Queen's Head Inn was the White Hart in which Mr. Pickwick met Sam Weller.

Will it be said that the basis of fact is really small for such a biographical superstructure as Mr. Shelley has reared, a book of three hundred pages? I find a figure to suit the case in the Elizabethan house in the High Street of Stratford. I was talking with a friend the other day who said he had paced the front of it, and it seemed to him from that rough measurement that it was not more than sixteen feet wide. The house rises until it seems to need the support to the right and left of the substantial masses of masonry that are there. And in the front each story overhangs one below, culminating in the beetling gable which fairly threatens the street: you think it needs to be buttressed. Yet, it has stood there into its fourth century; and, cherished as it will hereafter be by all Harvard men as the early home of John Harvard's mother, it will stand for centuries more. And so the story of John Harvard, it seems to me, is authentic and likely to stand.

It seems inappropriate to speak of a worthy of the old New England time except by a scriptural parallel. Let us say, in that connection, that John Harvard was like Apollos. Apollos is no significant figure in thé apostolic story, but he was associated with great men, and had to do with epoch-making events. Paul planted and Apollos watered; and what our New England Apollos watered was the perishing seed which the great Pauls of the New England Church had too feebly planted; and God gave the increase.

Mr. WILLIAM C. LANE exhibited some photographic facsimiles of documents relating to John Harvard, lately received by the Harvard College Library, and spoke as follows:

The two most important of these are the will of Katherine Yearwood, John Harvard's mother, and the will of Thomas Harvard, his brother. Both of these wills were first noted by Henry F. Waters, and together establish the identity of John Harvard. In the first, his mother refers to him as " John Harvard Clarke." The second made John Harvard and Nicholas Morton executors. It was proved in the Surrogate's Court, and letters of administration. were issued on May 5, 1637, to Nicholas Morton alone, with provision that letters should be issued to John Harvard, the other executor, when he should come to seek them. This date is just about the time when it is known that the John Harvard who founded Harvard College left England, and the fact of the absence at this time of Thomas Harvard's brother and executor, and of his never having qualified as executor afterwards, may be regarded as proof that he had left England. Taken in connection with the statement in the mother's will, it identifies the founder of Harvard College.

The other documents are photographs from the parish registers of Southwark, containing the marriage of Katherine Harvard and John Elletson, and of Wandsworth, containing the marriage of Richard Yearwood and Katherine Elletson, 28th of May, 1627; of the parish register of South Malling, containing the marriage of John Harvard of "the parish of St. Olives near London" and Anne Sadler of Ringmer, April 19, 1636; and of the record of a conveyance made by John Harvard and his wife, Ann, of a messuage and three cottages to John Man, February 16, 1637. Mr. Waters discovered that this John Man was a sea-captain, and finds from his will that the four houses described were situated in Bermondsey Street. He infers that the sale may have been in consideration of a passage to America in Captain Man's vessel. The record of Harvard's mother's first marriage, to Robert Harvard, we expect to have from the Stratford parish registers. One other interesting document I hope to get, of which a facsimile was made

in 1887, namely, the counterpart of the lease from St. Catherine's Hospital to "John Harvard, clerk, and Thomas Harvard, citizen of London and cloth-worker," of certain tenements in the parish of All Hallows, Barking. These facsimiles were for sale at the time by a London bookseller, but a recent inquiry brings the reply that all copies have been sold. I hope, however, that it will be possible to obtain a copy from some source, so that the expense of rephotographing it may be avoided.

Mr. LANE also exhibited a view of Harvard College as it appeared during the Revolutionary War, engraved by Paul Revere after a drawing by Josh. Chadwick, concerning whom Mr. Lane solicited information. Only three other original impressions of this plate are known. The copy exhibited was recently bought at auction in Boston and given to Harvard College by seven graduates, of whom four are members of this Society.

On behalf of Mr. WORTHINGTON C. FORD, a Corresponding Member, Mr. HENRY H. EDES made the following communication :

The following letters were written by William Plumer, whose long public career requires no detailed account. They describe an outbreak in New Hampshire which was the counterpart of that of Shays in Massachusetts, and are written with the vivacity of an eye-witness and participant, and with all the freedom of a young man confident of himself. His criticisms of men and measures are of interest. That he was unjust in some of his opinions he would have confessed in after years; but he could hardly have expressed himself so forcibly if there had been no common belief prevailing at the time of the truth of the characters thus drawn. He gives definite pictures of the daily events during the uprising, and conveys much information on the leading actors. Thus the letters are good material for history. They are copied from the originals in the Library of Congress, Washington.

1 They are owned by the Essex Institute, Mr. Zachary T. Hollingsworth, and Mr. Frederick L. Gay. The view was reproduced and described in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine for December, 1903, xii. 338, 339.