– makes it a book primarily for Cornellians." The writer regretted this, but observed that the hundredth anniversaries of a number of the land-grant universities would soon arrive and that this might prompt a number of similar, single-institution histories, on the bases of which more general histories could be written. History of Education Quarterlys reviewer had high praise for Bishop's portrayal of the founders, Ezra Cornell and Andrew D. White, and indeed for the book as a whole, not least for its "substantial sketches of the wider social, intellectual, and cultural contexts within which [the university's] leaders dreamed and worked". The review in the Washington, D.C., Evening Star found the history an unusually absorbing example of its genre, thanks to the distinctiveness of both the university and the author. "Prof. Bishop's sonorous almost victorian style is vividly evocative. . . . [His] account is more than even the most captious reader could ask." The first part of the work was reissued in 1967 as Early Cornell, 1865–1900. It was reviewed in British Journal of Educational Studies together with Becker's Cornell University: Founders and the Founding. The reviewer said that Becker's work was more likely to appeal to the general reader, Bishop's book being "more reverent"; but that both constituted "a fitting tribute to a prestige institution". A History of Cornell retained its high reputation decades after it was published. Light verse Bishop had a high regard for light verse: The aim of poetry, or Heavy Verse, is to seek understanding in forms of beauty. The aim of light verse is to promote misunderstanding in beauty's cast-off clothes. But even misunderstanding is a kind of understanding; it is an analysis, an observation of truth, which sneaks around truth from the rear, which uncovers the lath and plaster of beauty's hinder parts. Bishop's obituary in The New York Times describes him as "an extraordinarily gifted writer" of light verse, publishing "about fifteen poems and casuals a year in the New Yorker" over a period of over thirty years. Bishop also published verse in Saturday Evening Post, Archaeology, Poetry, The Colonnade, The Measure, The Smart Set, Judge, Saturday Review of Literature and the pre-Luce Life. After noting how light verse had almost completely vanished from the magazines that had previously published it, David McCord (himself an exponent) wrote: But from the twenties on down into the fifties there was Morris Bishop, the one