Professors Child of Harvard, Lounsbury of Yale, March of Lafayette,
Corson of Cornell, and Price of Randolph-Macon College
-- afterwards of Columbia University -- have a commanding place
in the development of English teaching which has become
such a marked feature of educational progress since, say, 1870.
Throughout schools and colleges and universities English is now
firmly established as perhaps the most important branch of study.
It is to the credit of Lanier that before much had been done in this direction
he saw the great need of such work. Indeed, as early as 1868,
while examining the catalogue of a Southern university,
he jotted down in his note-book a suggestion that the most serious defect
in the curriculum was the lack of any English training.
It is true that there had been from time immemorial chairs of belles lettres
in institutions of learning, but the department had rather to do
with things in general. Even where English was studied there was a tendency
to use manuals of literature rather than the works of authors themselves;
and there is now a tendency to use literature as the basis for
philological work. Lanier's ideas strike one as singularly balanced and sane,
suggesting a compromise between the warring camps of recent years.
By reason of Lanier's sympathy with the ideals of the University,
and his influence over some few students, he has a permanent place
in the history of Johns Hopkins. Mr. Edmund Clarence Stedman
wrote to President Gilman: "It is a fine thing that such an institution
as your University should have its shrines -- and among them that of
its own poet, in a certain sense canonized, and with his most ideal memory
a lasting part of its associations.
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