SELF PORTRAITURE

Pencilled notes for a forgotten lecture may tell a vivid story. And the few sentences thus written by President Eliot, printed elsewhere today, draw a curiously clear picture. Written as notes for a speech of advice to undergraduates, these brief maxims are the best shor: description of President Eliot that has ever been written.

The careful, upright handwriting was perhaps the first sign the clear concise statements complete the portrait. Best of all is the sentence describing the writer's visage the face with character stamped so strongly upon it.

Such a find by Professor Morison or whoever it was that discovered this important biographical material--is one of the most rewarding and important tasks of historians and biographers. If every Harvard President could have left such self-revealing notes, to be found by the writers of Harvard's history, that historian's task would be even more thrilling than it is. The biographer of President Eliot--Henry James '99--may welcome the discovery; and future biographers of present and future presidents may look long through "miscellaneous papers in Widener" for pencilled notes of lectures. But few of such notes, if any, will draw as unwittingly clear a self-portrait as those of President Eliot.