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To the Weston house came once William Allen Neilson, the president of Smith College who had been one of my old professors and who still called me `` Boy '' when I was sixty.

It reminded me of my other professor, Edward Kennard Rand, of whom I had been so fond when I was at Harvard, the great mediaevalist and classical scholar who had asked me to call him `` Ken '', saying, `` Age counts for nothing among those who have learned to know life sub specie aeternitatis ''.

I had always thought of that lovable man as many years older than myself, although he was perhaps only twenty years older, and he confirmed my feeling, along with the feeling of both my sons, that teachers of the classics are invariably endearing.

I must have written to say how much I had enjoyed his fine book The Building Of Eternal Rome, and I found he had not regretted giving me the highest mark in his old course on the later Latin poets, although in my final examination I had ignored the questions and filled the bluebook with a comparison of Propertius and Coleridge.

He had written to me about a dinner he had had with the Benedictine monks at St. Anselm's Priory in Washington.

There had been reading at table, especially from two books, Pope Gregory The Great's account of St. Scholastica in his Dialogues and my own The World Of Washington Irving.

He said, `` Some have criticized your book as being neither literary criticism nor history.

Of course it was not meant to be.

Some have felt that Washington Irving comes out rather slimly, but let them look at the title of the book ''.

He felt as I felt about this best of all my books, that it was `` really tops ''.