chool of oratory which found its models in Demosthenes and
Cicero. Everett became Professor of Greek in 1815; and George Ticknor,
Professor of Belles-Lettres in 1816. Prescott graduated in 1814, Palfrey
in 1815, and George Bancroft in 1817,--all three to add to American
historiography works of enduring excellence. In 1817, young Ralph Waldo
Emerson entered college.

It was Boston, however, rather than Harvard College, which
created the atmosphere that these young scholars--all from Boston
families--breathed: for the Athenaeum, the American School of Arts and
Sciences, and the Massachusetts Historical Society had begun to exercise
an increasing influence on the younger generation. Harvard College, like
all colleges of the day, was hardly more than a species of higher
academy whither boys went at a tender age to continue their study of the
classics and mathematics, and incidentally to cultivate rhetoric and
_belles-lettres_.

The liberation of the American mind from time-honored traditions and
conventions appeared markedly in the ecclesiastical revolts and
religious revivals of the age. Unitarianism took its rise quite as much
in protest against the teaching of Calvinism, that man was brought into
the world hopelessly depraved, as against the orthodox conception of
Christ's nature. The definite separation of Unitarianism from
Congregationalism dates from 1815 when William E. Channing published his
memorable letter to the Reverend Samuel C. Thacher. The writings of
Buckminster, Channing, and other theological liberals have a distinct
place in the annals of American intellectual life. Universalism also
took its rise at this time and spread with remarkable rapidity under the
lead of Hosea Ballou. In western Pennsylvania and Virginia, the
Campbells, father and son, led a departure from the established
Presbyterian order. The Society of Friends was also rent by the
teachings of Elias Hicks.

Revivals had been a recurring feature of New England religious life
since the latter years of the seventeenth century. That they stimulated
many forms of religious activity appears in the annals of missionary
enterprises at home and abroad. In 1810 the American Board of Foreign
Missions and in 1814 the American Baptist Missionary Union were founded.
In 1812 four young missionaries went out to India; and five years later
other devoted young men began their labors among the Cherokees and
Choctaws of the Southwest. There is something at on