Professor Winchester also said something about there being no modern epics like “Paradise Lost.”  I guess he’s right.  He talked as if he was pretty familiar with that piece of literary work, and nobody would suppose that he never had read it.  I don’t believe any of you have ever read “Paradise Lost,” and you don’t want to.  That’s something that you just want to take on trust.  It’s a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic—­something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Professor Trent also had a good deal to say about the disappearance of literature.  He said that Scott would outlive all his critics.  I guess that’s true.  That fact of the business is you’ve got to be one of two ages to appreciate Scott.  When you’re eighteen you can read Ivanhoe, and you want to wait until you’re ninety to read some of the rest.  It takes a pretty well-regulated abstemious critic to live ninety years.

But a few days later he was back again in the forefront of reform, preaching at the Berkeley Lyceum against foreign occupation in China.  It was there that he declared himself a Boxer.

Why should not China be free from the foreigners, who are only making trouble on her soil?  If they would only all go home what a pleasant place China would be for the Chinese!  We do not allow Chinamen to come here, and I say, in all seriousness, that it would be a graceful thing to let China decide who shall go there.

China never wanted foreigners any more than foreigners wanted Chinamen, and on this question I am with the Boxers every time.  The Boxer is a patriot.  He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people.  I wish him success.  We drive the Chinaman out of our country; the Boxer believes in driving us out of his country.  I am a Boxer, too, on those terms.

Introducing Winston Churchill, of England, at a dinner some weeks later, he explained how generous England and America had been in not requiring fancy rates for “extinguished missionaries” in China as Germany had done.  Germany had required territory and cash, he said, in payment for her missionaries, while the United States and England had been willing to settle for produce—­firecrackers and tea.

The Churchill introduction would seem to have been his last speech for the year 1900, and he expected it, with one exception, to be the last for a long time.  He realized that he was tired and that the strain upon him made any other sort of work out of the question.  Writing to MacAlister at the end of the year, he said, “I seem to have made many speeches, but it is not so.  It is not more than ten, I think.”  Still, a respectable number in the space of two months, considering that each was carefully written and committed to memory, and all amid crushing social pressure.  Again to MacAlister: