Rollins--

best as a man of enormous learning and of unequaled kindness, who was amazingly charitable to ignorance, who was never too busy, even at the age of 81, to drop his own pressing tasks to answer questions (and when did he ever fall to know the answers?), to discuss scholarly or personal problems, to read bulky manuscripts with the eye of a critic and proof-reader and the heart of a friend.

The debt scholarship owes Mr. Kittredge is immense. Yet valuable as his dozens of published books and articles are, it may well be doubted whether their influences at all equals that exerted by his personality. He had the satisfaction of knowing that in almost every importance college and university in America "Kittredge men" were, as they still are, at least trying to carry on his work and his methods. His impressive appearance, his fine histrionic powers, his extraordinary learning and intellectual curiosity, his superb teaching ability, these and other things made him for decades an outstanding figure in English and American scholarship. To those of us who were both his students and his colleagues in the English Department his death marks the end of an epoch.