Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/47

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Ticknor's Successors 459 this country. ' Similarly, a direct connection between Ticknor's teaching and the later teaching of modern languages and litera- tures would be difficult to trace. Longfellow never studied under him, and took his own scholarship according to his own poetic temper. Ticknor retired from Harvard when Lowell was a sophomore; and there was no sympathetic contact be- tween the two in later years. Charles EKot Norton came to Harvard after his "Uncle Ticknor" had gone, and his studies in Dante give no sign of contact with those of his kinsman. The impulse after 1850 toward the study of the modern languages and literatures was due rather to the immigra- tion which had been set up by the European troubles of 1848, and which brought many cultivated Germans and Frenchmen to the United States.' Hindered by our own political disturb- ances during the fifties and sixties, and helped by the "scien- tific" and utilitarian opposition to the classics, it reached self-consciousness and scholarship in the seventies, with the foundation of the Johns Hopkins University (1876), which pro- posed a scientific philology, impartial whether ancient or modern. Professor Gildersleeve having founded the American Journal of Philology in 1880, his colleague A. Marshall EUiott (1844- 1910) soon interested a sufficient number of advanced teachers of the modern languages to found in 1883 the Modern Language Association of America, " of which he was the first secretary, and of whose Publications, also suggested by him, he was the first editor (1884-92). For twenty-five years, also, until his death, he edited Modern Language Notes, now continued by his former colleague, James Wilson Bright. The progress of "modern philology" in America thus belongs to the university era, and is detached from Ticknor. University production obtained its other great successes in the philology of the classics, of general linguistics, of English, and of the fine arts. The University of Virginia opened with several foreign teachers whom Jefferson's friend Francis W. Gilmer had en- gaged abroad. Its first professor of the Ancient Languages (1825-28) was George Long, who is best known for his transla- » See Romera-Navarro, 135. ' Charles Francis Adams's address, A College Fetich, delivered at Harvard in June, 1883, independently excited public interest in the subject.