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Show Dr. Elliot's Five-Foot Shelf THE NEW YORK TIMES reports that the railroad managers who for their "literary" cars supplied the five-foot shelf of books which Dr. Eliot, late of Harvard, recommended for the world to purchase and study, say that the public will not catch on, that the books are to be relegated to the rear, and the Bible, Shakespeare and modern magazines are to be substituted. That is a reminder of how quickly Dr. Eliot has disappeared disap-peared from public view. It is a reminder, also, that of all the students who graduated from Harvard while Dr. Eliot was president, not one has ever made a name except by putting aside not the sciences he explored in the university but the flim-flam of Dr. Eliot's theories and advice. ad-vice. The reason is that Dr. Eliot was given a fine brain, but he was born destitute of that something which we will call heart. To make our meaning clearer we will say he lacked what Phillips Phil-lips Brooks and Edward Everett Hale possessed. pos-sessed. The selection of his five-foot shelf of books emphasizes this. He could not even in that consult the nature of the average man, but took that occasion to advertise how profound and deep and austere his own mind is. And he was not honest even in that, for he named at least three works which it would be a safe gamble to wager he never spent an hour in reading. He was not thinking of the public at all while selecting the books, but what might be included in the epitaph that will be embossed on his gravestone. grave-stone. Not many men have been endowed with brains enough to give them Immortality, unless at the same time they uad hearts great enough to steady and humanize and give splendor to their minds. |