Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/40

 452 Scholars George Bancroft' from Germany, the German influence in American scholarship becomes palpable. Bancroft and Cogs- well established the Round Hill School, which in some ways was modelled upon the German gymnasium, and which sent out many boys who afterwards became distinguished. Ban- croft left it in 1829. Cogswell, who remained till 1834, was a rolling stone and did not really find himself until past fifty. In New York in 1838 he became acquainted with John Jacob Astor, and led him to establish the Astor Library, of which, after Astor's death in 1848, Cogswell was appointed superin- tendent. His only important literary monument is the Astor Library Catalogue (1857-66). Everett, after his election to the Eliot Professorship of Greek Literature at Harvard, had gone abroad in 1815 and had achieved the doctorate at Gottingen in 181 7. Thereafter he went alone on the Greek tour which for a while Cogswell and Ticknor had been planning to take with him, and became ac- quainted with Adamantios Koraes just before the outbreak of the Greek war for independence. Returning in 1820 full of enthusiasm for learning and for Greece, he gave lectures which must have been inspiring, else Emerson would not have praised him so highly. ^ But ' ' what avails thorough preparation of the college teacher, if his pupils are unprepared? We need to re- form our secondary schools," Everett had written from Got- tingen; and the want of adequate preparation on the part of his pupils may help explain why he left no school. Moreover, he soon resigned his professorship and his editorship of The North American Review, to enter public life ; and though he was afterward president of Harvard College, he is known no more as an American scholar. His writings show him rather in the attitude of a Roman orator, draped in a toga which to modern taste seems less virilis than prcetexta. ' Of the Gottingen group there remains that one who was on the whole the soundest scholar, and who in time became the first American scholar to achieve a permanent international reputation. George Ticknor was born in Boston in 1791, of parents who were both teachers. Having graduated from Dart- ' See Book II, Chap. xvil. » Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England. 3 See also Book II, Chap. xv.