Professor Weintraub was famous for that sort of thing. In the sixties he regularly conducted an extracurricular seminar one evening a week on one of his favorite subjects - the humanist tradition of historiography. The readings included Burckhardt, Herder, Ranke, Huizinga and others. He was not a light-hearted man, and these seminars, which usually included about 20 or so of us eager beavers, could be somewhat frightening, as he moved from person to person in relentless Socratic questioning. Not to have read the materials and not to have thought about them was a sin that would be found out under that scrutiny. Yet we all felt the intoxication of together closing in on the truth and thinking things no one had ever before thought - an illusion, but a pardonable one. He was childless and had suffered deprivations in the war; he was said to have been in hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands. Perhaps that background had something to do with his melancholy demeanor and tender ponderousness in the classroom. One felt that he genuinely liked young people but that something else very important was at stake in his interactions with them - perhaps civilization itself, considered as a value requiring our allegiance both as scholars and human beings. I always felt that he exemplified the very quality that he himself found in the great humanists - force of character. R.I.P.