John Mage wrote:
>
> > agreed, as I believe the great James Spedding said "if Bacon wrote
> > Shakespeare, that would leave an even more difficult question to
> > answer - who wrote Bacon?"
>
> i'm told that this was said by George Lyman Kettridge, Harvard prof of a
> century ago, rather than by Spedding. perhaps many people said this or
> something much like it.
Austin Warren (of Wellek and Warren, Theory of Literature) was an extraordinarily mild person. But one day when I was walking between two buildings with him after class on a cold Novembeer day (1955) I happened to mention Kittridge. He exploded. Kittridge, he said was worthless as a teacher, a scholar, and as a human being. He gave a number of anecdotes, but the one I remember is Kittridge coming into the classroom and seeing a student wearing a cap, which K proceeded to knock off with his cane. A fellow grad student told another interesting bit on Kittridge. It seems that the great collector of border ballads, F.J. Child, when reading one of the ballads to a class would become choked up emotionally, but being of the stiff-upper lip school wished to conceal that emotional response, so to cover it up he would call harshly on some student to give the etymology of some word in the ballad. Kittridge, one of Childe's students, noticed the habit but did not notice the origin, so he adopted that behavior as a core part of his teaching style.
Carrol