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Gildersleeve ; Whitney 467 and Lucian and Platen, who hold life at arm's length for satirical comment. But his disillusionment brings with it no impair- ment of his wit, and this, despite the irrelevancies into which it often leads him, is both brilliant and profound. Everywhere his essential esprit and intellectual energy, when they do not bewilder the reader and leave him far behind, delight and stimu- late him. A literary satirist, Gildersleeve should have written a History of Literary Satire ; and one who would form an an- thology of the less technical sayings f rorn ' ' Bripf Mention ' ' would find that he had gathered many of the materials for such a work. Upon Gildersleeve all the ends of the world are come ; he has lamented the old Germany that died with the Franco- Prussian war, and the old South that died with the Civil War; and, having witnessed the passing of two civilizations and the unending vicissitudes of mankind, he is still gathering his multiform experience into writing, and yrjpdanei aisi noXXa SiSa0Kojj.£vos. The greatest English-speaking student of general linguistics and of the science of language, William Dwight Whitney (1827- 1894), was born at Northampton, to a fine local and family tradition of manners, character, and scholarship. Having graduated in 1845 at Williams College, he later became an assistant to his brother Josiah, who in 1849 was conducting the United States survey of the Lake Superior region; and he wrote for the report of the expedition the chapter on botany. Mean- while he had become interested in Sanskrit; he studied it in his leisure time during the survey, and immediately afterward went to Yale for graduate study in the Department of Phil- osophy and the Arts, which Professor Salisbury had been active in organizing (1846-48), and which was the first graduate school of genuine university rank in the United States. From 1850 to 1853 Whitney studied in Berlin under Weber, Bopp, and Lepsius, and at Tubingen under Roth. Returning to the United States in 1853, he was next year appointed Salis- bury's successor in the chair of Sanskrit, his duties including instruction in the modern languages. He was not released from undergraduate teaching until 1869, when Salisbury in- creased the endowment of Whitney's Yale professorship, and Whitney became "the only 'university professor' . . . in the whole country." He was now enabled to organize fully