George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

Jacob Bigelow, the eminent and acute physician, the shrewd and witty companion, and James Savage,¹ warm-hearted, loyal, indefatigable, faithful to every obligation of friendship from youth to age; the exact and enthusiastic genealogist; quaint, vehement, and the very soul of integrity, of whom Mr. Webster once wrote, ‘He is as true a man as I know of; he would appear very awkward if he were to make trial—and try his best—to think wrong or to feel wrong’;—these both were among his earliest friends, and contributed their quota to his resources of enjoyment, as well as of intellectual stimulus.

Established in his father's house, and surrounded by an ample and well-selected library, which he had purchased with labor and care in Europe,² Mr. Ticknor entered with zeal on the discharge of many duties, and the immediate preparations for his professorship in Harvard College. He persevered in his habit of early rising, and devoting his whole morning to study. Domestic and social claims, a wide correspondence, and the multiplied casual interests that demand the attention of a character like his, filled the remaining hours of the day to overflowing.

His formal induction to the Professorships of the French and Spanish Languages, and of the Belles-Lettres, his appointment to which has already been mentioned, took place in the church at Cambridge, on the 10th of August, 1819, scarcely more than two months after his arrival from Europe. Mr. Norton entered on the same day, and with the same ceremony, the Dexter Professorship of Sacred Literature, and each of the new professors delivered an inaugural address before a cultivated and sympathetic