Copeland Reads

The announcement that "Copey," alias Prof. Emeritus Charles Townsend Copeland, 'is to read at the Harvard Union next Tuesday, and that late comers will be given the privilege of gnashing their teeth at the closed door, does not go far enough. Is the radio audience not to have the joy of listening to him? He has more friends outside the academic grove than in Cambridge, and it is debatable whether the under-graduates appreciate good reading. Nobody can read the Bible like him. Nobody knows what Kipling's verse is until "Copey" reads it. In the days when folks used to roar at Mr. Dooley, "Copey"--then, demme, not a professor, but a mere instructor--used to be wonderful with the brogue.

The community does not hear enough of this man, remarkable for the affection in which thousands of Harvard graduates hold him. While his contemporaries of the nineties and early nineteen hundreds were writing books, most of which are now forgotten, the sage of Hollis Hall was writing himself on the hearts of his undergraduates, and now they have a Copeland Club which entertains him in New York every year. Here is a living monument unique in American education.