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where he _commenced_ Bachelor of Divinity.--_Hist. Sketch of First Ch. in Boston_, 1812, p. 211. COMMENCEMENT. The time when students in colleges _commence_ Bachelors; a day in which degrees are publicly conferred in the English and American universities.--_Webster_. At Harvard College, in its earliest days, Commencements were attended, as at present, by the highest officers in the State. At the first Commencement, on the second Tuesday of August, 1642, we are told that "the Governour, Magistrates, and the Ministers, from all parts, with all sorts of schollars, and others in great numbers, were present."--_New England's First Fruits_, in _Mass. Hist. Coll._, Vol. I. p. 246. In the MS. Diary of Judge Sewall, under date of July 1, 1685, Commencement Day, is this remark: "Gov'r there, whom I accompanied to Charlestown"; and again, under date of July 2, 1690, is the following entry respecting the Commencement of that year: "Go to Cambridge by water in ye Barge wherein the Gov'r, Maj. Gen'l, Capt. Blackwell, and others." In the Private Journal of Cotton Mather, under the dates of 1708 and 1717, there are notices of the Boston troops waiting on the Governor to Cambridge on Commencement Day. During the presidency of Wadsworth, which continued from 1725 to 1737, "it was the custom," says Quincy, "on Commencement Day, for the Governor of the Province to come from Boston through Roxbury, often by the way of Watertown, attended by his body guards, and to arrive at the College about ten or eleven o'clock in the morning. A procession was then formed of the Corporation, Overseers, magistrates, ministers, and invited gentlemen, and immediately moved from Harvard Hall to the Congregational church." After the exercises of the day were over, the students escorted the Governor, Corporation, and Overseers, in procession, to the President's house. This description would answer very well for the present day, by adding the graduating class to the procession, and substituting the Boston Lancers as an escort, instead of the "body guards." The exercises of the first Commencement are stated in New England's First Fruits, above referred to, as follows:--"Latine and Greeke Orations, and Declamations, and Hebrew Analysis, Grammaticall, Logicall, and Rhetoricall of the Psalms: And their answers and disputations in Logicall, Ethicall, Physicall, and Metaphysicall questions." At Commencement in 1685, the exercises were, besides Disputes, f
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