Santayana, George. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel.

London: Constable & Co., 1935. Written by the Harvard professor, its protagonist, Nathaniel Alden, lives in a house said to be modeled on the Parkman House at 33 Beacon Street, and is said to never, except for funerals, walk down Beacon Hill. Another character, Caleb Weatherbee, declares, “Boston and Harvard have need nowadays of new blood, of fresh spiritual courage. They are becoming too much like the rest of the country, choked with big business, forced fads, and merely useful knowledge.” He adds, “Our fearless souls of other days have left no heirs. We need to break away again – were we not always come-outers? – from intellectual professionalism, from the slough of wholesale standardised opinion, from the dulcet mendacity of the pulpits, from the sheepish, ignorant, monotonous, epidemic mind of our political rulers, well-meaning and decent as a whole, but oh, how helpless!”