TICKNOR, GEORGE (1791-1871). An Ameri can literary critic and historian, born in Boston. Educated in a scholarly home, a graduate of Dartmouth (1807), admitted to the Boston bar in 1813, he gave up the legal profession for litera ture, went to Europe in 1815• studied four years at Gottingen and in other Continental cities, and returned in 1819 with a valuable library to a professorship of modern languages and literature in Harvard College. Here he devoted himself especially to French and Spanish, and attracted hearers beyond the university circle. He resigned his professorship in 1835, passed three years in Europe and eleven further years in elaborating his greatest work, History of Spanish Literature (1849), which was translated into German and Spanish and came to be regarded as•a standard work, even in Spain. It was reissued in 1S54, and again reedited and enlarged in 1S63. A fourth edition embodies his latest revisions. Ile
published also a Life of William !tickling Pres cott (1864) and several minor works. His Life, Letters, and journals are collected in two volumes (1876). Other letters describing his life as a German student may be found in W. P. Trent's English Culture in Virginia (Johns Hopkins University Studies). His library, containing one of the best collections of Spanish literature in existence, was bequeathed to the Boston Public Library. As an educator Ticknor was in ad vance of his generation; as a citizen he repre sented the best traditions of Boston; as a scholar he held his own with the erudite men of his day. His greatest work, however, does not in its style represent the personality of the man so much as it does the conscientiousness of the scholar, and it is slowly losing its prestige.