ng as a scholar was that of other Americans of his day, neither
better nor worse; and indeed there was not much to choose between the
chances of town and country. So late as 1813 Mr. George Ticknor, in his
reminiscences, relates his difficulties in undertaking the study of
German in Boston: "At Jamaica Plains there was a Dr. Brosius, a native
of Strasburg, who gave instruction in mathematics. He was willing to do
what he could for me in German, but he warned me that his pronunciation
was very bad, as was that of all Alsace, which had become a part of
France. Nor was it possible to get books. I borrowed a Meidinger's
grammar, French and German, from my friend Mr. Everett, and sent to New
Hampshire, where I knew there was a German dictionary, and procured it.
I also obtained a copy of Goethe's 'Werther' in German (through Mr.
William S. Shaw's connivance) from amongst Mr. J. Q. Adams's books,
deposited by him, on going to Europe, in the Athenaeum, under Mr. Shaw's
care, but without giving him permission to lend them."[2] Mr. Hillard,
in commenting on this, says well that "there are now, doubtless, more
facilities in New England for the study of Arabic or Persian than there
were then for the study of German." But it was not yet even 1813 in
Hartford and its neighborhood, and in the middle of the eighteenth
century the literary resources were meagre in the extreme. Learning was
not concentrated in the towns, but the access to books there was easier.
The country minister, who was the scholar, literary man, and
school-master, fell back largely upon the Greek and Latin classics, and
upon the few books of the day which he could get in his rare journeys to
Boston. In Boston itself there were book-stores, and John Mein,
afterward a royalist refugee, kept a circulating library in 1765 at
what was known as the London bookstore. It numbered some twelve hundred
volumes, and boasted a printed catalogue. It gives some indication of
the condition of the book business in Boston that he advertised, about
ten years before the out-break of the war, a stock of above ten thousand
volumes. If Dr. Perkins, Noah Webster's school-master, went to New Haven
to draw books from the college library, he found there in 1765 "a good
library, consisting of about four thousand volumes, well furnished with
ancient authors, such as the Fathers, Historians, and Classics; many
modern valuable books of divinity, history, philosophy, and mathematics;
but not many