George Lyman Kittredge
Encyclopedia
George Lyman Kittredge was a celebrated professor and scholar of English literature
English literature
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was Polish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, J....

 at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

' as well as his writings and lectures on Shakespeare and other literary figures made him one of the most influential American literary critics
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 of the early 20th century. He was also of great importance in American folklore studies, continuing the work of his mentor, Francis James Child
Francis James Child
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry...

, the first person to hold a chair at Harvard (created especially in his honor) dedicated to the study of English literature and author of a definitive five-volume comparative study of the English and Scottish popular ballad. As a folklorist Kittredge was instrumental in encouraging American folk song and folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 collecting among all ethnic groups in all regions of the country.

Biography

Kittredge was born in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

 in 1860. His father, Edward "Kit" Kittredge, had participated in the California Gold Rush
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands , and Latin America, who were the first to start flocking to...

 of 1849, been shipwrecked, and had walked 700 miles across the desert before returning to Boston to marry a widow, Mrs. Deborah Lewis Benson, and start a family. Their precocious and bookish son George attended The Roxbury Latin School, which then had about 100 pupils. George consistently led his class in marks and won a scholarship to Harvard, which he entered in 1878. To save money he walked to Harvard every day from his home in Boston across the Charles River
Charles River
The Charles River is an long river that flows in an overall northeasterly direction in eastern Massachusetts, USA. From its source in Hopkinton, the river travels through 22 cities and towns until reaching the Atlantic Ocean at Boston...

 to Cambridge. In his Freshman year, Kittredge came in second in his class of 181 to mathematician Frank Nelson Cole
Frank Nelson Cole
Frank Nelson Cole, Ph.D. was an American mathematician, born in Ashland, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, where he lectured on mathematics from 1885 to 1887....

, but in Sophomore, Junior, and Senior years he was first, garnering highest honors in his chosen field of classics.

While at Harvard Kittredge also joined several clubs and societies, wrote light verse, and won numerous consecutive Bowdoin prize
Bowdoin prize
The Bowdoin Prize is a prestigious award given annually to Harvard University undergraduate and graduate students. It is considered among the highest academic commendations the University can bestow upon a student...

s for his essays and translations, including one from English into Attic Greek. He also became a member of the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate. In 1881 Kittredge was the prompter and pronunciation coach in a celebrated theatrical performance by undergraduates of Sophocles
Sophocles
Sophocles is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides...

's Oedipus the King
Oedipus the King
Oedipus the King , also known by the Latin title Oedipus Rex, is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BCE. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chronology, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and then Antigone...

 in the original Greek that was attended by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

, Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe
Julia Ward Howe was a prominent American abolitionist, social activist, and poet, most famous as the author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".-Biography:...

, William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells was an American realist author and literary critic. Nicknamed "The Dean of American Letters", he was particularly known for his tenure as editor of the Atlantic Monthly as well as his own writings, including the Christmas story "Christmas Every Day" and the novel The Rise of...

, Charles Eliot Norton
Charles Eliot Norton
Charles Eliot Norton, was a leading American author, social critic, and professor of art. He was a militant idealist, a progressive social reformer, and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States.-Biography:Norton was born at...

, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was an American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline...

, and classicist B. L. Gildersleeve of Johns Hopkins University
Johns Hopkins University
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 among other luminaries. As an undergraduate, Kittredge also read widely outside of class, became known as a witty after dinner speaker. In 1882, he was elected Ivy Orator (chosen to deliver a humorous speech) of his graduating class. Graduating with Kittredge that year was Owen Wister
Owen Wister
Owen Wister was an American writer and "father" of western fiction.-Early life:Owen Wister was born on July 14, 1860, in Germantown, a well-known neighborhood in the northwestern part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Owen Jones Wister, was a wealthy physician, one of a long line of...

, author of the first Western
Western
Western may refer to:* Western , a category of fiction and visual art centered on the American Old West** Western fiction, the Western genre as featured in literature* Western music, a type of American folk music-In geography:...

 novel, The Virginian
The Virginian
-Literature:* The Virginian , a novel by American author Owen Wister-Film:* The Virginian , a silent film directed by Cecil B...

.

Lack of money prevented Kittredge from immediately pursuing graduate studies. From 1883 to 1887 he taught Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 at Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...

. About six feet tall and, at 140 pounds, slightly built, Kittredge impressed his prep-school students with his exacting standards, sense of humor, and apparent ability to converse fluently in Latin.

In 1886 Kittredge married Frances Gordon, the daughter of a prominent lawyer and philanthropist who had served as president of the New Hampshire Senate and was also a deacon in the Second Church (Congregational) of Exeter. The couple honeymooned in Europe, remaining for a year in Germany, which at that time was regarded as the best center of graduate studies and the mother of distinguished philologists and folklorists. Kittredge already knew German quite well and, although not formally matriculated, attended courses at the universities of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...

 and Tübingen, in, among other things Old Icelandic
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

. In 1887 he contributed an article for "a learned German periodical" on "A Point In Beowulf."

At Harvard

Kittredge joined the faculty at Harvard as an instructor in autumn of 1888, was promoted to Assistant Professor in 1890, and in 1896 succeeded Professor Child as Professor of the Division of Modern Languages (i.e., languages other than Latin or Greek), with a final say in the granting of degrees. He and Child had shared the teaching of English 2 (Shakespeare), which Kittredge took over in 1896 on Child's death. Because Child had died without quite finishing his work of ballad
Ballad
A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of British and Irish popular poetry and song from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many...

 scholarship, Child's publishers asked Kittredge to see the project through the press and to supply a short introduction to the five-volume opus. Later, Kittredge helped expand ballad and folklore studies to include American folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

, serving in 1904 as president of the American Folklore Society
American Folklore Society
The American Folklore Society is the US-based professional association for folklorists, with members from the US, Canada, and around the world. It was founded in 1888 by William Wells Newell, who stood at the center of a diverse group of university-based scholars, museum anthropologists, and men...

. Kittredge also took over Child's graduate course in the English and Scottish popular ballad.

English 2, the Shakespeare class for which Kittredge became so famous, was a lecture courses of about 275 Harvard students. He also gave the course to the women students at Radcliffe, as well as lecturing on Shakespeare at the Lowell Institute and on tours. Other courses and subjects which Kittredge taught or co-taught were English 28, a survey course covering Chaucer, the epic, and the ballad; Historical English Grammar, and Anglo-Saxon, a prerequisite for his course in Beowulf. In the German Department, Kittredge taught Icelandic, Old Norse, and, for many years, a course in German Mythology. His graduate courses included Germanic and Celtic Religions (which he co-taught with F. N. Robinson, a Celticist); English Metrical Romances (including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...

and Sir Orfeo
Sir Orfeo
Sir Orfeo is an anonymous Middle English narrative poem, retelling the story of Orpheus as a king rescuing his wife from the fairy king.-History and Manuscripts:...

); as well as Child's ballad course.

Kittredge's students included Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John A. Lomax, whose lectures and collection of cowboy ballads Kittredge supported, and the folklorists Robert Winslow Gordon
Robert Winslow Gordon
Robert Winslow Gordon was born September 2, 1888 in Bangor, Maine. Educated at Harvard, he joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkley in 1918. He was the founding head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1928, later the Archive of Folk...

, James Madison Carpenter
James Madison Carpenter
James Madison Carpenter, born in Blacklands, Mississippi in 1888, was a Methodist minister and scholar of American and British folklore. He received his bachelor and masters of arts degrees from the University of Mississippi, and a PhD from Harvard in 1929. He is most known for his substantial...

, and Stith Thompson
Stith Thompson
Stith Thompson was an American scholar of folklore. He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne-Thompson classification system.- Biography :...

. Kittredge was named Gurney Professor of English at Harvard in 1917. He retired from teaching in 1936 and continued to work on his edition of Shakespeare until his death in 1941.

Scholarship

Kittredge's edition of Shakespeare was the standard well beyond his death and continues to be cited occasionally. He was also arguably the leading critic of Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer , known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey...

 of his time and is considered largely responsible for the introduction of Chaucer as a standard part of the college English curriculum. His essay on "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" (1912) has traditionally been credited with introducing the idea of the "marriage group" in the Canterbury Tales. Through his historical researches Kittredge also identified Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur
Le Morte d'Arthur is a compilation by Sir Thomas Malory of Romance tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and the Knights of the Round Table...

 (1985), and hitherto an obscure figure, with a knight and member of Parliament who served with the Earl of Warwick, a discovery that paved the way for further researches on Malory by Edward Hicks, to whose 1928 book on Malory's turbulent career Kittredge supplied the introduction. Kittredge's work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the poem, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his...

 was influential as well.

Kittredge also collected folk tales and songs, writing extensively on the folk lore of New England
New England
New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...

 and on the New England witch trial
Witch trial
A witch trial is a legal proceeding that is part of a witch-hunt. * Witch trials in Early Modern Europe, 15th–18th centuries** Salzburg witch trials - 1675-1690, Salzburg, Austria** Spa witch trial - 1616, Belgium...

s. He also wrote and co-wrote introductory Latin and English grammar text books. While still teaching at Phillips Exeter he undertook the general editorship of a popular English masterpieces for the general public published by the Antheneum Press. At Harvard he collaborated with E. S. Sheldon in editing eleven volumes of the Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, which appeared in 1907, and was a founding member and supervisor of the Harvard University Press. His popular book, written in collaboration with J. B. Greenough, Words and their Ways in English Speech (1901) met with great success and served as a storehouse for teachers. Kittredge was also responsible for the revision of the English used in a translation of the Psalms for the Jewish Publication Society, issued in 1903.

According to his biographer, "Neither Child nor Kittredge, trained classicists and able linguists, had themselves bothered to undergo the limitations of a Ph. D. degree". There is a widely circulated story that when asked why he did not have one, Kittredge was supposed to have replied, "But who would examine me?" However, according to Clifton Fadiman
Clifton Fadiman
Clifton P. "Kip" Fadiman was an American intellectual, author, editor, radio and television personality.-Literary career:...

, "Kittredge always maintained that the question was never asked, and if it had been he would never have dreamed of answering in such a manner." On May 17, 1932, during a lecture tour of England, Oxford University conferred on him a D. Litt. honoris causa
Honorary degree
An honorary degree or a degree honoris causa is an academic degree for which a university has waived the usual requirements, such as matriculation, residence, study, and the passing of examinations...

.
Burdened with no illusions about his erudition, or the lack of it in others, he famously remarked, "There are three persons who know what the word 'Victorian' means, and the other two are dead."

Influence on Literary Studies

Kittredge and Child belonged to the philological
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 school of scholarship pioneered in nineteenth-century German universities. Philology, especially in its early years, had been conceived as a "total science of civilization, an ideal originally formulated for the study of classical antiquity and then transferred by the German Romanticists to the modern languages.

When the various modern language departments were introduced into American universities in the 1880s, speakers at the first meeting of Modern Language Association in 1883 had been concerned to counter the popular perception that “English literature is a subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual study for serious workers", a mere "accomplishment", whereas when “a boy studies Greek you know he has worked hard”. Philology "met the desire for facts, for accuracy, and for the imitation of the scientific method which had acquired such an overwhelming prestige" in the United States. It had yielded the discoveries of the Grimms and others, tracing the step-by-step relationships of classical and modern European to ancient Indian languages and their evolutionary development. A former Harvard graduate student James H. Hanford, reminisced how under Kittredge,
Students were expected to talk in a scholarly way in the classroom and on a final examination about Grimm’s or Verner’s laws, the differentiating characteristics of Anglo-Saxon among the Teutonic languages, the changes in English phonology, inflection, and syntax from Anglo-Saxon times to the sixteenth century, the influence of Danish, French and Latin on the English language in its various periods. But these phases of language development were closely associated with the entire cultural history of which they were a part. The philologist is the person who makes his approach to the past through the phenomenon of language. “In the beginning was the word”.
The objective was the equipment of a man of real erudition, about whose professional and scientific status there should be no doubt and who could hold up his head in pride among his fellows in the older and more reputable field of classics. . . . Source and background study, so decried by [later] critics of the philological regime, was conceived of both as a means of interpretation and as an independent contribution to cultural history.


Undergraduate Shakespeare students were required to read six plays extremely slowly and to virtually memorize the texts. “It is the purpose of this course”, Kittredge used to remark, “to find out what Shakespeare said and what he meant when he said it.” Where Professor Child had been often been imposed on in the classroom by students who took advantage of his extremely sweet nature, Kittredge's dramatic classroom manner kept his students on the edge of their seats – lateness, wearing of hats, yawning, and coughing (one student was permanently expelled from the class for this offense) were strictly forbidden. His manner with his graduate students was entirely different, with them he was extremely collegial and invited them to his home for weekly fireside gatherings. There, in dim light, the students read papers which, with his encouragement, would often form the nucleus of subsequent dissertations.

As chairman of the Division of the Modern Languages Division of Harvard, a position he inherited from Child, Kittredge was in a position to set graduate degree requirements and he insisted that that graduate literature candidates master several foreign languages, as he himself had done. Neither he nor Child wished the modern languages to replace the study of Greek and Latin, and Kittredge would oppose Harvard president Charles W. Eliot's efforts to abolish Greek as a requirement for graduation.

Kittredge's administrative power, vast erudition, prestige, and the histrionic attitude he assumed with undergraduates provoked resentment. In addition there were from one colleague, Irving Babbitt
Irving Babbitt
Irving Babbitt was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 to 1930...

 (a professor of French) and a former student of his, Stuart Sherman
Stuart Sherman
Stuart Pratt Sherman was an American literary critic and educator of the early 20th century noted for his criticisms of H. L. Mencken.-Background, education, and academic career:...

, of the so-called "New Humanist"
New Humanism
New Humanism or neohumanism were terms applied to a theory of literary criticism, together with its consequences for culture and political thought, developed around 1900 by the American scholar Irving Babbitt, and the scholar and journalist Paul Elmer More...

 school of literary appreciation. In a famous article in The Nation of 1913, Sherman accused Kittredge of pedantry and of squeezing the life out of his subject. Deep ideological disagreements lay at the bottom of these attacks. The New Humanists were social and cultural conservatives who conceived of literary studies as leading to moral improvement by providing a guide to conduct and "humane insight" through an appreciation of and reflection on of the timeless beauties of prescribed "great works." Babbitt bitterly opposed the introduction of elective courses for undergraduates. Deeply suspicious of democracy, he envisioned the goal of a university education as the formation of a superior individual in whom the "will to restraint" would counter what he saw as the degenerate modernism he traced back to pernicious ideas of social progress initiated by Rousseau and his followers. Kittredge and his students, on the other hand, situated the study of languages and literatures in their historical contexts, seeking to capture "the spirit of an age" and often ranging far afield of the traditional Western canon. For Kittredge, reading Chaucer illuminated the world of the Middle Ages, which Kittredge often stated, had points in common with our own age, and thus helped one understand the world in which we live. Often he guided his students into newly opening fields that he had not had time to investigate, such as Finnish and Celtic studies. According to David Bynum:
In an age of literary ethnocentricity, Kittredge was as readily and as genuinely interested in Russian ballads or American Indian folktales as in the plays of Shakespeare…. Kittredge’s intellectual hospitality toward "foreign" traditions and his equanimity toward "vulgar" ones appear in retrospect as the most important sources of his influence.

For Babbitt, on the other hand, such disciplines as anthropology, folklore, and the medieval scholarship so dear to Kittredge, represented a dilution of the real goal of literary studies and a waste of time. Kittredge's students and colleagues defended him vigorously, however. One former student, Elizabeth Jackson, writes of Kittredge's sheer enthusiasm: "Kittredge taught Shakespeare as though every single human being could go on reading Shakespeare through time and eternity, going from strength to strength and rejoicing as a strong man to join a race."
As the decade of the 1920s unfolded, the New Humanists began to seem increasingly irrelevant, and as the Depression of the 1930s hit, the intellectual climate turned decidedly leftward and other forms of criticism emerged, initially from writers outside the academy, some of which, in the coming decades would be incorporated as aspects of the New Criticism. Meanwhile although there was continued chafing against the supposed antiquarianism of the philological school in some quarters, Kittredge's prestige and influence continued unabated, and the extensive list of language requirements for a Harvard graduate degree in English literature, including Old and Middle English, Old French, and Gothic, stayed in effect until his retirement in 1936. With the coming of the Cold War in the late 1940s, 50s and early 60s disagreements between the historical and "literary appreciation" schools in English literature studies were subsumed by the ascendancy of the New Criticism
New Criticism
New Criticism was a movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic...

 which favored, like Kittredge, rigorous study of literary text, but sidestepped potential controversies over ideology by ruling out mention of historical context or social questions. In consequence, the concept of philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 itself fell into disrepute and never recovered, even after social engagement once again became respectable and the New Criticism gave way to Structuralism
Structuralism
Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

, Gender Studies
Gender studies
Gender studies is a field of interdisciplinary study which analyses race, ethnicity, sexuality and location.Gender study has many different forms. One view exposed by the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born a woman, one becomes one"...

, Post Modernism, and the New Historicism
New Historicism
New Historicism is a school of literary theory, grounded in critical theory, that developed in the 1980s, primarily through the work of the critic Stephen Greenblatt, and gained widespread influence in the 1990s....

. Thus, the context of Kittredge's prestige and his place in the history of English literature studies became obscured and forgotten, a situation which in recent years some scholars are attempting to rectify. As Jill Terry Rudy writes:
In the process of overthrowing Kittredge’s perceived pedantry in order to enshrine New Critical methods of rigorous reseach and institutional control over graduate training and doctoral degrees (without offering the concomitant grounding in cultural history and linguistic concerns that Kittredge promoted), New Critical literary scholars assured that the term philology itself would be denigrated and then ignored as their newly trained graduate students conquered the vocabulary and intricacies of critical scholarship (Wellek 1953). As suggested previously, the philosophical methods and ideologies that informed the early history of English department organization deserve continued conversation and critique rather than simply being erased or ignored.

Major works

  • Observations on the Language of Chaucer’s Troilus, 1894.
  • Professor Child, 1897.
  • Chaucer and Some of his Friends, 1903.
  • Arthur and Gorlagon, 1903.
  • Notes on Witchcraft, 1907.
  • Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage, 1912.
  • An Advanced English Grammar, with Exercises, 1913.
  • Chaucer and his Poetry, 1915.
  • A Study of Gawain and the Green Knight, 1916.
  • Witchcraft in Old and New England, 1929.
  • The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1936.
  • The Old Teutonic Idea of the Future Life (the Ingersoll Lecture, 1937)

External links

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