sand volumes; and in 1815, on the other hand, into that periodical which long remained the serious vehicle of scholarly New England thought, the "North American Review." This was modelled on the great British Reviews, the "Edinburgh" and the "Quarterly ;" and under the guidance of such men as William Tudor, Edward Tyrrell Channing, Jared Sparks, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and the late Dr. Andrew Preston Peabody, it maintained its dignity for more than fifty years. The present "North American Review," which has passed by purchase into different control, is, however admirable, entirely changed in character.

Though the American Academy, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenæum, and the old "North American Review" may hardly be taken as comprehensive of the new learning which was springing into life among Boston men bred at Harvard, they are typical of it. In no aspect are they more so than in the fact that none of them was indigenous; all alike were successful efforts to imitate in our independent New England such learned institutions as were among the most salient evidences of civilisation in Europe. What they stand for the real motive which was in the air was an awakening of American consciousness to the fact that serious contemporary standards existed in other countries than our own; and that our claim to respect as a civilised community could no longer be maintained by the mere preservation of a respectable classical school for boys. Our first outbreak of the spirit of learning, indeed, was even more imitative than the contemporary literature which sprang up in New York, or than the oratory which in the same years so elaborately developed itself in Massachusetts.

It was not until a little later that the scholarly impulses of New England produced either persons or works of literary distinction; but the form which the characteristic literature of this scholarship was to take had already been indicated both by

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the early literary activities of this part of the country and by the nature of our most distinguished learned society. From the earliest period of Massachusetts, as we have seen, there was, along with theological writing, a considerable body of publications which may be roughly classified as historical. The "Magnalia" of Cotton Mather, for instance, the most typical literary production of seventeenth-century America, was almost as historical in impulse as it was theological. Earlier still, the most permanent literary monument of the Plymouth colony was Bradford's manuscript " History ;" and such other manuscripts as Winthrop's "History" and Sewall's "Diary " show how deeply rooted in the colony of Massachusetts too was a lasting fondness for historical record. Other than local history, indeed, seems to have interested the elder Yankees chiefly as it bore on the origins and development of New England. A comical example of this fact is to be found in the "Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals," published in 1736, by the Reverend Thomas Prince, minister of the Old South Church. Prince had unrivalled opportunities for collecting and preserving the facts of our first century; but, having thought proper to begin his work by "an introduction, containing a brief Epitome of the most remarkable Transactions and Events ABROAD, from the CREATION," he had the misfortune to die before he had brought the chronology of New England itself to a later period than 1630. A more philosophical work than Prince's was that " History of Massachusetts" by Thomas Hutchinson, which may perhaps be called the most respectable American book before the Revolution. From the foundation of the colony, in short, New England men had always felt strong interest in local affairs and traditions; and this had resulted in a general habit of collecting and sometimes of publishing accounts of what had happened in their native regions.

The temper in question is still familiar to any one who knows with what ardour native Yankees abandon themselves

to the delights of genealogical research. Throughout the nineteenth century it has borne fruit in those innumerable town histories which make the local records of New England so minutely accessible to all who have patience to plod through innumerable volumes of trivial detail. It may fairly be regarded as the basis in New England character of the most considerable scholarly expression which New England developed during its period of Renaissance. For during the nineteenth century there appeared in Boston a group of historians whose work became widely and justly celebrated.

The first of these who occurs to one, although he made a deeper impression on the intellectual life of Boston than almost anybody else, is hardly remembered as of high literary importance. This was George Ticknor, who was born in 1791, the only son of a prosperous but not eminent man of business. He was sent to Dartmouth College, and after graduation prepared himself for the practice of law; but finding this not congenial, and having in prospect fortune enough to maintain himself respectably without a profession, he determined to devote himself to pure scholarship. In 1815 he accordingly went abroad with letters of introduction which combined with his exceptional social qualities to give him during the next four years access to the most distinguished and interesting society in almost every European country. A portion of his stay abroad, which he devoted to serious study, he passed at the University of Göttingen, where Edward Everett came in the same year, 1815. Together these were the first of that distinguished and continuous line of American scholars who have supplemented their native education by enthusiastic devotion to German learning. In 1819, having returned to America, Ticknor became the first Smith Professor of the French and Spanish languages and Belles Lettres at Harvard College; Everett at the same time began his lectures there as professor of Greek. Together they stood for a new principle in our old college,

that instructors ought not only

to assure themselves that students have learned, but actually to teach. Everett relinquished his professorship in 1824, betaking himself to that more public career which is better remembered. Ticknor, the first Harvard professor of modern languages, retained his chair until 1835; and during this time he strenuously attempted to enlarge the office of Harvard from that of a respectable high school to that of a true university. At that period, however, hardly any other New England scholars had had personal experience of foreign learning; and time was not ripe for the changes which Ticknor so ardently advocated. For a while his efforts bade fair to succeed; reaction followed; but it is hardly too much to say that the germs of those modern phases of learning which have distinguished Harvard College during the last thirty years, are discernible in the plans which George Ticknor cherished thirty years before.

Besides this service to professional learning, Ticknor, in later life, had more than any one else to do with the establishment of that great engine of popular education which for some time distinguished Boston from other American cities, the Public Library. Ticknor's private library was in its day among the largest and best selected on this side of the Atlantic; and his enthusiasm in the cause of learning induced him to lend his books freely to any respectable persons who satisfied him that they really wanted to use them. His book-plate, inscribed simply with his name and the words Suum Cuique, pleasantly records this admirable generosity, which is said to have resulted in no considerable loss. This experience, persisting through the renascent period of New England, convinced him that if he could bring the American public into free contact with good literature, the general taste for good reading would increase, and the general intelligence and consequent civilisation would improve, in accordance with the aspirations of human nature toward what is best. idea of a great public library, then, grew in his mind; and in

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1852 he was an eager leader in the movement which estab lished in Boston the first and best public circulating library of America.

As the first learned professor of modern languages in an American university, as the first exponent in our university life of continental scholarship, as the earliest of Americans to attempt the development of an American college into a modern university, and finally as the chief founder of the chief public library in the United States, Ticknor's claims upon popular memory are remarkable. What is more, those who knew him well felt for him a strong personal attachment; and it is probable that no scholar or man of letters was ever more generous in aiding and encouraging whomever he found eager in learning or literature. At least in his later years, however, Ticknor's manners did not impress the public as engaging. His dignity seemed forbidding; his tongue was certainly sharp; to people who did not attract him his address was hardly sympathetic; and his social habits, confirmed by almost lifelong intimacy with good European society, were a shade too exclusive for the growingly democratic taste about him. Yet it is hard to overestimate the difference which Ticknor's personal presence made in the intellectual history of New England, or the diffusion of knowledge which sprang from his generous impulse. .

If Ticknor's chief labours, however, took other than literary form, Ticknor would probably have regarded as his principal claim to recognition the "History of Spanish Literature," which he published in 1849. From the time of his first journey abroad he had been attracted to Spanish matters; his professorship at Harvard, too, was partly devoted by its very terms to Spanish literature; and incidentally he collected, and bequeathed to the Public Library of Boston, a Spanish library, said to be the most complete outside of Spain itself. It was not until thirty years after he began the work of the Smith professorship that he published his history. Fifty years later,