ABSTRACT
Harvard for the young Santayana was not just his Spartan lodgings in Hollis, the library, or high jinks at the Hasty Pudding; there was also Cambridge, the town, and Boston, the city. For Harvard students, the town beyond the Yard was jungle, inhabited by Irish "cads," and forbidding. Santayana compared both Cambridge and Boston to the London of Dickens: "the same dismal wealth, the same speechifying, the same anxious respectability, the same sordid back streets, with their air of shiftlessness and decay, the same odd figures and loud humour, and, to add a touch of horror, the monstrous suspicion that some of the inhabitants might be secretly wicked." Santayana's actual drawings were more accomplished than the usually witless ideas behind them, supplied by others. In his junior year, Santayana expressed concern about how he would live after graduation, and actively explored, with the enthusiastic assistance of his father, the requirements and possibilities of a diplomatic career in Spain.
