Ticknor, GEORGE

Ticknor, GEORGE, the historian of Spanish literature, was born in Boston, 1st August 1791, the son of a wealthy New Englander, who was one of the first importers of Merino sheep into the United States. He graduated at Dartmouth College (1807), and was admitted to the bar (1813), but, having practised for a twelvemonth, became convinced that the life of a lawyer would not satisfy his ideas of usefulness or happiness. He accordingly turned his thoughts to plans of study and travel, and, starting for Europe in 1815, for four years resided successively in London, Göttingen, Paris, Geneva, Rome, Venice, Madrid, and Lisbon. Everywhere he mixed in the best society; and his journal is full of the best sort of interviewing, his friends and acquaintances then or afterwards including Joanna Baillie, the Duc de Broglie, Chateaubriand, Miss Edgeworth, Goethe, Guizot, Hallam, Lord Holland, President Jefferson, Jeffrey, Longfellow, Lyell, Macaulay, Metternich, Milman, Prescott, Rogers, Scott, Sydney Smith, Southey, Earl Stanhope, Mme. de Staël, Talleyrand, Thackeray, Daniel Webster, and Wordsworth. Returning to America, he became professor of French and Spanish and of the Belles Lettres in Harvard University. In 1835 he resigned his chair, and went with his family to Europe, where he remained three years, collecting materials for his great History of Spanish Literature (3 vols. New York, 1849), an exhaustive and admirable work, which has been translated into Spanish and German. Other works by him were Lives of Lafayette (1824) and Prescott (1864), with fourteen reviews and minor writings. He received nearly a score of literary distinctions; in 1856 revisited Europe; and died in Boston, 26th January 1871, in his eightieth year. See his Life, Letters, and Journals (2 vols. 1876).