¹ Elijah Backus, Journal of Elijah Backus (typeset transcription), 22. Gen Miss Misc, 752, F-3, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Selections of this journal can also be found in Larned, Ellen D., “Yale Boys of the Last Century,” Connecticut Quarterly 1 (1895), 355–61Google Scholar. See also the reflections of another classmate of Backus's, which confirm the grim contemporary conditions: Macgrane Cox, Chancellor Kent at Yale, 1777–1781 (New York, 1909), 12. For other considerations of collegiate coping mechanisms during the war, see Tucker, Louis Leonard, “Centers of Sedition: Colonial Colleges and the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 91 (1979), 16–34Google Scholar; and J. David Hoeveler, Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges (London, 2002), 241–347.

² Ezra Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, ed. Franklin Bodwitch Dexter, 3 vols. (New York, 1901), vol. 2, 8 July 1778, 280. “Probe scitis, domini, non mea neque amicorum voluntas, sed ψηφισματα vestra, Laboribus hisce literatis advocaverunt.” Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this paper are my own. Whenever possible, I will refer to a published version of Stiles's paper. That being said, there is a large portion of his writings that is unpublished. In such instances, I will simply refer to manuscript folia.

³ Ibid.: “Cumque ni me fama fefellit, Reipublicae literariae totius fere Nov Angliae approbationem vocemque exaudiverim.”

⁴ Ibid., 281: “Itaque Emulatio sit vestra, sitque mea, ut optimarum Artium Studiis, Literarum elegantiorum cultu, solidissimaeque Eruditionis Dignitate Collegii Yalensis Fama tam insignis fieret, ut nulli sorori Academiae de nobis pudeat, quin potius omnes Sodalitatis nostrae honore egloriarentur. Immo omnes academias Literarum Gloria superare conemur—et creditote quod superare potuerimus—adeo ut Universitas nostra inter caeteras Academias americanas splendore eluceat uti Luces inter Luna minores.” The final line is a popular adaptation of Horace, Odes, 1.12: 46–8: “… micat inter omnis / Iulium sidus velut inter omnis / luna minores.”

⁵ Edmund Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727–1795 (Chapel Hill, 1962), 325–43.

⁶ Stiles would publish this oration the same year. Ezra Stiles, Oratio Inauguralis habita in sacello collegii yalensis (Hartford, 1778).

⁷ Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 2: 8 July 1778, 282.

⁸ Caroline Winterer, “Where Is America in the Republic of Letters?”, Modern Intellectual History 9/2 (2012), 597–623. Winterer posits that the not unproblematic notion of Europe itself might encourage early modern Europeanists to think more easily past geographical and national borders. I am inclined to trust that as one factor but would contend there is a more obvious reason for the neglect of research. To research the Republic of Letters requires, first and foremost, a fluent knowledge of Latin. Moreover, as the vernaculars take off in scholarly publications and discourse in the eighteenth century, one must preferably also have a working knowledge of some combination of English, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, and/or Italian. Linguistic expectations for training early Americanists are notoriously more modest compared to those of early modern Europeanists. This is not to point any fingers, but rather to consider more broadly educational resources and access to language training. It cannot simply be a coincidence that the study of the Republic of Letters is thriving, for instance, in the Netherlands, where even an eighteen-year-old student can enter college having been the beneficiary of four to six years’ worth of courses in German, French, Latin, and ancient Greek (plus over a decade of English and Dutch, of course) at her local public school.

⁹ Popper, Nicholas, “The Sudden Death of the Burning Salamander: Reading Experiment and the Transformation of Natural Historical Practice in Early Modern Europe,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1/4 (2016), 464–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, mentions in passing the alchemical work of George Starkey.

¹⁰ Gilman M. Ostrander, Republic of Letters: The American Intellectual Community, 1775–1865 (Madison, 1999); and Catherine O'Donnel Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forms of Citizenship (Chapel Hill, 2008).

¹¹ Karel Davids, “The Scholarly Atlantic: Circuits of Knowledge between Britain, the Dutch Republic, and the Americas in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, eds., Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders (Leiden, 2014), 224–48, at 228.

¹² See Yoshinari Yamaguchi, American History in Transition: From Religion to Science (Leiden, 2020), 27–44; and Yamaguchi, “Collect, Preserve, and Communicate: Jeremy Belknap's Republic of Letters and the Problems of Early American History Writing,” International Journal of the Book 15 (2016), 17–28. Yamaguchi acknowledges that Jeremy Belknap's idea for the Republic of Letters grows out of Enlightenment ideals but is quick to focus only on the strictly national dimension.

¹³ Grafton, Anthony, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies: Francis Daniel Pastorius Makes a Notebook,” American Historical Review 117/1 (2012), 1–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Thomas Keeline and Stuart McManus, “Aenigma Omnibus: The Transatlantic Humanism of Zinzendorf and the Early Moravians,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 82 (2019/20), 315–56.

¹⁴ Even the well-balanced application of the concept in the New World, such as Mark Peterson's scholastic account of the Mather family, only goes up to 1740, precisely around the time (and especially in the ensuing decades) when the intellectual possibilities of early America were expanding beyond Cambridge and Boston. See Mark Peterson, “Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739,” in Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830 (Cambridge, 2009), 329–71.

¹⁵ Grafton, “The Republic of Letters in the American Colonies,” 39.

¹⁶ A recent instantiation of this master narrative about the rise of the research university, which apparently only began to take off seriously in the nineteenth century, is James Axtell, Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (Princeton, 2016). The literature on the importation of nineteenth-century German university practices into America is vast and becoming increasingly varied, as historians like Emily Levine detail not only German influences on America, but American influences on Germany. See Levine, Emily, “Baltimore Teaches, Göttingen Learns: Cooperation, Competition, and the Research University,” American Historical Review 121/3 (2016), 780–823CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Levine, Allies and Rivals: German–American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University (Chicago, forthcoming 2021).

¹⁷ Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut (Chapel Hill, 1999), 230–79; Chiel, Arthur, “Ezra Stiles: The Education of an ‘Hebrician’,” American Jewish Quarterly 60/3 (1971), 235–41Google Scholar; Brian Ogren, “The Zohar in Early Protestant American Kabbalah: On Ezra Stiles and the Case for Jewish-Christianity,” in Ogren, ed., Kabbalah in America: Ancient Lore in the New World (Leiden, 2020), 31–51. Christine DeLucia has also recently traced in detail Stiles's interactions with and (mis)understandings of Native Americans. See DeLucia, Christine, “Fugitive Collections in New England Indian Country: Indigenous Material Culture and Early American History Making at Ezra Stiles's Yale Museum,” William and Mary Quarterly 75/1 (2018), 109–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 160–62. Other brief treatments of the eighteenth-century scholar have been more even-handed, with some even recognizing Stiles as a member of the Republic of Letters, though declining to fully trace what that meant for him. See David D. Hall, “Learned Culture in the Eighteenth Century,” in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, eds., A History of the Book in America: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, 2000), 411–34; Caroline Winterer, American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason (New Haven, 2016), 123–30; and Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy, 230–79.

¹⁹ Literature on the Republic of Letters is vast. To speak only to the anglophone output, the seminal monographs include Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1996); and Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750 (New Haven, 1995). A number of excellent article-length overviews of this imagined scholarly community are also worth consulting. See Dirk van Miert, “What was the Republic of Letters? A Brief Introduction to a Long History,” Groniek 204–5 (2016), 269–87; Anthony Grafton, “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters,” Republics of Letters 1 (2008), at https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/sketch-map-lost-continent-republic-letters; and Marc Fumaroli, “The Republic of Letters,” Diogenes 36 (1988), 129–52.

²⁰ A rich exploration of all sorts of misdeeds that learned men accused each other of can be found in Sair Kivisto, The Vices of Learning: Morality and Knowledge at Early Modern Universities (Leiden, 2014).

²¹ If the goal were to single out an individual whom Stiles attempted to imitate in broad strokes, it would likely be Cotton or Increase Mather, whom Stiles read frequently. Of late, the Mather family has been having a second look, as scholars increasingly are analyzing the intellectual contributions and learned connections of the famed family. Among others see Lydia Barnett, “Giant Bones and the Taunton Stone: America Antiquities, World History, and the Protestant International,” in Paula Findlen, ed., Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in Early Modern Europe (London, 2019), 225–46.

²² Margery Somers Foster, “Out of Smalle Beginnings …” An Economic History of Harvard College in the Puritan Period, 1636–1712 (Cambridge, MA, 1962).

²³ John Franklin Jameson, Narratives of New Netherlands: 1609–1664 (Bedford, 1909), 327.

²⁴ F. M. Caulkins, Memoir of the Rev. William Adams of Dedham, Mass. and of Rev. Eliphalet Adams of New London, Conn. (Cambridge, MA, 1849), 8. Adams eventually attended Harvard, where he graduated in 1671.

²⁵ See James Axtell, The School upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New York, 1976), 166–200, which deals with the tug and pull of appreciation for and animosity towards schooling; John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1986); and Theodore Delwiche, “Vilescunt in Dies Bonae Literae: Urian Oakes and the Harvard College Crisis of the 1670s,” Lias: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 46 (2019), 29–58. Most other scholarship on early American education, especially classical education, is very far removed from contemporary academic sources and tends to miss the tension and conflict in the classroom.

²⁶ Delwiche, “Vilescunt in Dies,” 49–55; and on doctors, Delwiche, Theodore, “Fuit ille non empiricus mercenarius: Apprehensions towards Alchemy in Colonial New England,” Ambix 67/4 (2020), 346–65CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

²⁷ Lucy Downing made this point to her brother and Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop in 1636, namely that some college, no matter how modest or makeshift, would go a long way in reassuring colonists of the New World's learnedness and connection to Old World. See Samuel Eliot Morison, The Founding of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA, 1935), 171.

²⁸ On early modern English learning see Ian Greene, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Farnham, 2009). For case studies concerning the implementation of English and early modern humanism in early American schools see Thomas Keeline and Stuart McManus, “Benjamin Larnell, the Last Latin Poet at Harvard Indian College,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 108 (2015), 621–42; and Delwiche, Theodore, “An Old Author in the New World: Terence, Samuel Melyen, and the Boston Latin School c.1700,” New England Quarterly 92/2 (2019), 263–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Thomas to Nathan Prince, 2 Oct. 1713, Thomas Prince Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

³⁰ Stuart McManus, “Classica Americana: An Addendum to the Censuses of Pre-1800 Latin Texts from British North America,” Humanistica Lovaniensia: Journal of Neo-Latin Studies 67/2 (2018), 421–61.

³¹ Theodore Delwiche, “The Schoolboy's Quill: Joseph Belcher and Latin Learning at Harvard College c.1700,” History of Universities 33 (2020), 69–104.

³² John Winthrop, Commonplace Book 1728–1735, seq. 40, Papers of John and Hannah Winthrop, 172801789, Harvard University Archives, HUM 9, Box 2. As Winthrop notes, the quotation comes from Tanquil Faber, A Compendious Way of Teaching Ancient and Modern Languages, the second edition of which appeared in 1723.

³³ For Caleb Cheeshateaumauk's 1663 Latin letter to Robert Boyle, see Beatrix Dudenshing-Reichel and Wolfgang Hochbruck, “‘Honoratissimi Benefactores,’ Native American Students and Two Seventeenth-Century Texts in the University Tradition,” in Helen Jaskoski, ed., Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays (Cambridge, 1996), 1–15. For the most recent interpretation of the text and an exploration of the Harvard Indian College see Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War (New Haven, 2018), 72–107.

³⁴ James Raven, “Classical Transports: Latin and Greek Texts in North and Central America before 1800,” in Leslie Howsam and James Raven, eds., Books between Europe and the Americas: Connections and Communities, 1620–1860 (New York, 2011), 157–87, at 163.

³⁵ Cotton Mather, “Important Points Relating to the Education at Harvard-College; Needful to be Enquired into, Prepared and Humbly Offered by Some Who Have Newly Pass'd thro’ the First Four Years of Their Being There,” presented in full in Kenneth Minkema, “Reforming Harvard: Cotton Mather on Education at Cambridge,” New England Quarterly 87/2 (2014), 319–40, at 322.

³⁶ Jasper Danckaerts and Peter Sluyter, Journal of Jasper Danckaerts 1679–1680, trans. Bartlet James and J. Jameson (New York, 1913), 266–7. Samuel Eliot Morison speculated that the problem may have rested chiefly in different pronunciations of Latin. This might actually be a factor, as recent scholarship has shown almost the exact same Latin language barrier between Dutch visitors attempting to visit Oxford in the seventeenth century. See Esther van Raamsdonk and Alan Moss, “Across the Narrow Sea: A Transnational Approach to Anglo-Dutch Travelogues,” Seventeenth Century 35/1 (2020), at www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0268117X.2018.1487877.

³⁷ David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, 1997), especially 209–75.

³⁸ Jonathan Mayhew, Clerk's Book, seq. 12–13, HUD 3511.55000, Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA: “illud unâ cum mandatis vestris, me adeo incitarunt, quod suavi fretus vestri favoris zephyro, humanitate et candore (quae a perefectis vestris ingeniis super alios tam longe elatis, numquam abhorruere) verbis quod abilitatem consequar, meipsum cuique rei, Remp. Ubicumque terrarum literariam, hocce, et quocumque modo, promoventi, omnes adhibere conatus oportere.”

³⁹ Ibid., seq. 15: “Sicuti ex fiduciâ mutuâ mutuoque auxilio in vita martiali res magnae oriuntur, et alii Heroes in aliorum pectoribus ardorem exemplo vicissim augent, usquedum nactâ victoriâ beatâ et florenti, tempora ardua laurus martialis vinxerit; haud aliter in Republica Literarum cum simili fiducia, similique auxilio scientiae cupidi scientiae cupidis alternatim manum auxiliarem porrigunt, et alii alios stimulant indicia ad nova tentanda, in rebus naturae, in vitâ morali, civile, piâ, et vita literatâ, donec placidae scientiae palmâ coronati erint.”

⁴⁰ For another example of an eighteenth-century student evoking the Republic of Letters see Thomas Foxcroft, Oratio Salutatoria 1714, Papers of Thomas Foxcroft, Harvard University Archives, HUM 68, Box 1, Folder 8. Though the original 1749 Latin composition appears lost, there is also mention of the Republic of Letters in a nineteenth-century translation of a student's oration. See Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch, translation of Thomas Bulfinch's 1749 valedictory oration, Harvard University Archives, HUC 6749.10.

⁴¹ Ezra Stiles to John Winthrop, 2 April 1759, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Gen MSS 1475, Box 17, Folder 1401.

⁴² “Literature: Curious Anecdotes of the Recovery of Ancient Manuscripts,” American Apollo, 2 Nov. 1792, 1.

⁴³ McManus, “Classica Americana,” 434.

⁴⁴ Among many others see Ezra Stiles, Oration Habita ad Pupilos, 8 Sept. 1750, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 45, Folder 1860.

⁴⁵ Ezra Stiles, Oratio Semi-saecularis, 20 Sept. 1752, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 45, Folder 1897. An earlier, perhaps separate, oration of his does trace the history of Yale specifically in more detail. See Ezra Stiles, Oratio Quinquagenaria, 20 April 1752, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 45, Folder 1891.

⁴⁶ Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 360: “The inhabitants of universities have always fostered the ceremonies and trappings by which men assure themselves of their own importance: robes, rituals, secret societies, hierarchies, titles of honor. Stiles loved the whole business.”

⁴⁷ Ezra Stiles, Oration on Benjamin Franklin, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 46, folder 1915, [1]: “Scientiae ideo apud Europaeos olim, nuper autem apud nos ex<c>oluntur: quod academiae abunde monstrant americanae. Testis est Cantabrigia, Testis Neo-Limen, Testis Neo-Caesaria, Philadelphia immo, et Williamsburg, & quae iam vero pullulat Neo-Ebeoracensis academia.” It should be noted that “Neo-Limen” is not a common translation for “New Haven,” almost always rendered as “Novus-Portus.” The only other attestation of this usage I have been able to find is in John Hubbard, The Benefactors of Yale-College: A Poetical Attempt (Boston, 1733). Here a footnote is provided: “I think every Reader will readily own that Neolimen sounds better even to an English Ear than New-Haven, which, I hope, will justify the Use of it in this place.” Ibid., 2. Thankfully, Stiles omitted this rather obscure geographic and poetic point in future drafts of his oration.

⁴⁸ Ezra Stiles, Oration on Benjamin Franklin, Dec. 1754, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 46, Folder 1916 [1]: “Tuae Laudes Orbem jam inde pervolaverunt: triumphans percurris Mundum, et inter LITERATOS Telluris, et omnium Gentium OPTIMATES Fama \singulari/ tua gloriaris.” I have decided to quote from this version of the speech because Stiles wrote “read” at the top of his manuscript. As in all my quotations from Stiles's manuscripts, I have employed the Leiden conventions to render the Latin text.

⁴⁹ Ibid., [2].

⁵⁰ Ibid., [5]: “Literae enim, et Literarum Maecenates, nuper tantummodo inter haec Deserta, Solitudines hasce americanas extitere. Cum vero Literae ab Europa advectae, Atlanticum mare transvolavere primo, Infantuli fuimus diu; nunc autem Viri adstamus, immo in te gloriantes, magni. Nec dubitamus quin cito Newtonos, Halleios, Berkeleios, Lokeiosque habuerimus. Namque qui Americam perspiciat, praesertim anglicanam, bonarum Artium Studia, \Scientias/ non mediocri Fructu inter nos excoli et efflorere viderit … Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia Regna.”

⁵¹ See, for instance, L. B. T. Houghton, Virgil's Fourth Eclogue in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, 2019), 173–326.

⁵² Ezra Stiles, Oration on Benjamin Franklin, Dec. 1754, [5]: “Ut praetermittam caeteras Academias in America, \inter/ Provincias Gallicas et Hispanienses, adlocatas, illas nempe ad Quebec et Quito positas.” The college in Barbados that Stiles refers to by name was Coddrington College. On the history of Codrington see George C. Simmons, “West Indian Higher Education: The Story of Codrington College,” Caribbean Quarterly 18/3 (1972), 51–72.

⁵³ “To Benjamin Franklin from Yale College: Degree of Master of Arts, 12 September 1753?”, Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-05-02-0015. Original source: Leonard W. Labaree, ed., The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 5, July 1, 1753, through March 31, 1755 (New Haven, 1962, p. 58. “… quo toto Orbe Literato Fama inclaruit, et de Republica Literaria Laude et Honore summo dignari meritus est.”

⁵⁴ Ezra Stiles, Oration on Benjamin Franklin, 9 Feb. 1755, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 46, Folder 1917. It should be noted that the catalog information here is erroneous in two respects. First, the catalog appears to date the item to the title page of the manuscript, which reads “nonis Februarii A.D. 1755.” This, however, is not 9 but 5 February. Still, it would not make sense to automatically date this manuscript to any day in February 1755, in other words the month of the speech. On one page (11) of the manuscript, Stiles does list a date in the upper right-hand corner, 13 Dec. 1765, which is probably the correct date.

⁵⁵ As far as I have discovered, the earliest publication of this item in full was in William Temple Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2 (London, 1818), 289–96.

⁵⁶ Ezra Stiles, “A Plan for Making the Tour of Europe in Less than Three Months, with the travel of Less than Two Thousand English Miles,” Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 54, 2336, [3]. Those interested in Stiles's fascination with Hebrew and contemporary Rabbis and Jewish practices will find much material to work with in this itinerary.

⁵⁷ Ibid., [6].

⁵⁸ Ezra Stiles, “Letter of Introduction for Henry Marchant,” Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 11, Folders 888–91. Stiles copied this letter into his diary, which has been edited and published. See Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1: 187–9. “Clarissimis Reverendissimisque Viris Facultatis Theologicae Professoribus in Academia sive Leidensi, sive Ultrajectina, sive Genevensi, sive denique in aliqua Universitate Reformatorum, ubi D. Marchant itineribus suis transierit: Ezra Stiles S.T. D. [sacra theologiae doctor] Non. Anglus Americanus, S.P.D. [salutem plurimam dicit].” It should be noted that Stiles was neither the first nor the only North American to communicate with Dutch universities. For an endearing, albeit somewhat nostalgic account of John Adams's contacts in the Netherlands, see Jan Postma, “John Adams en zijn Leidse Vrienden,” Leids Jaarboekje, 2011, 81–108.

⁵⁹ These were Chauncey Whittelsey (1717–87), a graduate of Yale who served as a minister in New Haven, and Noah Welles (1718–76), another graduate of Yale and minister in Stamford.

⁶⁰ Stiles's diary alone reveals a deep interest in the Protestant International. Stiles read and transcribed a 1659 Latin letter that thirty-five New England ministers sent to John Dury proposing Protestant unity. A translation of the original letter appeared in 1664. See John Dury, A Copy of the Letter Returned by the Ministers of New England to Mr. John Dury (Cambridge, 1664); and, for the original Latin, a copy preserved in the Samuel Hartlib Papers Online, at www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?docset=main&docname=40_06_01. Stiles was also interested in researching the history of Protestant missionary efforts, such as in Tranquebar, India. For more on these missions and the Protestant International see Katherine Engel, “Connecting Protestants in Britain's Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Empire,” William and Mary Quarterly 75/1 (2018), 37–70; Jan Stievermann, “A ‘Syncretism of Piety’: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle,” Church History 89 (2020), 829–56; and Edward Andrews, “Tranquebar: Charting the Protestant International in the British Atlantic and Beyond,” William and Mary Quarterly 74/1 (2017), 3–34.

⁶¹ Charles Chauncy to Ezra Stiles, 7 Feb. 1761, in Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies of Ezra Stiles, L.L.D. 1755–1794 With a Selection from His Correspondence, ed. Franklin Bowditch Dexter (New Haven, 1916), 438–9.

⁶² Stiles, “Letter of Introduction for Henry Marchant,” 189: “Nos quoque rogamus Honores academicos erga veram Literaturam libere & e longinquo fluentes, non venales, nec ulla suspitione pretii aurive contaminatos.” Stiles referred specifically to the sixteenth-century German Martin Bucer. It is unclear how widely known Bucer's attitudes about honorary degrees would have been, but it appears that Stiles did faithfully cite his sentiment. See Martin Bucer, “Oratio Martini Buceri Cantabrigiae in Celberrima Academia Angliae Habita,” in Martini Buceri Scripta Anglicana Fere Omnia (Basil, 1577), 184–90.

⁶³ Marchant's travels are less pertinent for this discussion. Still, interested readers may find recent examinations of Marchant's travel logs in David S. Lovejoy, “Henry Marchant and the Mistress of the World,” William and Mary Quarterly 12/3 (1955), 375–98; and Sally Hadden and Patricia H. Minter, “A Legal Tourist Visits Eighteenth-Century Britain: Henry Marchant's Observations on British Courts, 1771 to 1772,” Law and History Review 29/1 (2011), 133–79.

⁶⁴ Ezra Stiles, Oration on Benjamin Franklin, 9 Feb. 1755, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 46, Folder 1917.

⁶⁵ After all, Franklin helped Stiles secure his own honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. See Benjamin Franklin to Ezra Stiles, 5 July 1765, Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-12-02-0095. Original source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 12, January 1, through December 31, 1765, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven and London, 1967), 194–6.

⁶⁶ As is the case with just about any aspect of the university, there is debate over who was the first to originate any practice, in this case to award an honorary degree. See Pieter Dhondt, “Pomp and Circumstance at the University: The Origin of the Honorary Degree,” European Review of History 20/1 (2013), 117–36.

⁶⁷ Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1: 71–2, 2: 494.

⁶⁸ These statistics are based on an online database kept by Yale's Office of the Secretary and Vice President for University Life. See https://secretary.yale.edu/programs-services/honorary-degrees/since-1702 (accessed Oct. 2020).

⁶⁹ Ezra Stiles to John Adams, 13 Sept. 1788, Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-0422. See also Ezra Stiles to Thomas Jefferson, 8 Dec. 1786, Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-10-02-0442. Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, 22 June–31 December 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, 1954), 584–6.

⁷⁰ Ezra Stiles, “Advertisement,” Connecticut Journal, 14 June 1786, [3]. Stiles's friend and correspondent, Joseph Willard, then president of Harvard, had actually asked Stiles a few months earlier to review the particular textbook. See Joseph Willard to Ezra Stiles, 27 April 1786, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 17, Folder 1365.

⁷¹ Ezra Stiles, Oration for Yale College Commencement 1792, Gen MSS 1475, Box 60, Folder, 2691, [6]: “Avete itaq[ue] sorores Academiae Americanae; aveto Cantabria, materna illa sedes cui ultro cedatur primas honoranda; aveto Guilelme Maria; cunctae avete ceterae universitates, ubiq[ue] per Europam ubiq[ue] per totam Literaturae Rempublicam!”

⁷² I based this on previous research into a set of roughly a dozen commencement orations left behind by Harvard presidents Urian Oakes (1631–81) and John Leverett (1662–1724). Oakes, of course, could not have made references to other universities in British North America, considering that at the time Harvard was the only such institution. But he very well could have appealed to the Republic of Letters or to universities in Europe, both of which he did not do. John Leverett appealed to English monarchs, local and regional governmental officials, and judges, but not other university presidents, which there were in eighteenth-century North America. The closest example to Stiles's constant invocation of other schools is a 1758 Latin commencement speech of Columbia (then King's University) College president Samuel Johnson, a friend and correspondent of Stiles. Johnson approvingly relayed the history of schools in North America and exhorted his audience to look towards Europe for examples of erudition and learning. See Samuel Johnson and Leo M. Kaiser, “Oratio Comitalis,” Classical Outlook 46/10 (1969), 113–15.

⁷³ Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3: 492.

⁷⁴ For two instances of Stiles being kept abreast of schools, the first example concerning Philadelphia and the second Portugal, see John Ely to Ezra Stiles, 20 July 1789, in Ezra Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies, 482–5; and David Humphreys to Ezra Stiles, 14 Feb. 1792, in ibid., 514–16.

⁷⁵ Stiles's diary is littered throughout with such notes. Some of these notes, including maps of various colleges, can be found in Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies.

⁷⁶ Ezra Stiles to John Wheelock, 12 Jan. 1781, Mss 781274, Dartmouth Library Archives and Manuscripts.

⁷⁷ Stiles, The Literary Dairy of Ezra Stiles, 2: 1048. This count does mean sixteen different institutions, to be clear. Some of these universities go through multiple presidents.

⁷⁸ Philip Lindsley, Works of Philip Lindsley, vol. 1, Educational Discourses (Philadelphia, 1859), 161. Reference courtesy of Axtell, Wisdom's Workshop. Stiles kept up to date on some colleges that have not survived to the day, such as Cokesbury College or Liberty Hall College.

⁷⁹ Ezra Stiles, Map of Locations of Colleges in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 87, Folder 3204.

⁸⁰ Dating as far back as 1759, there is record of Stiles corresponding with others about plans to unify curricula across colleges. See Francis Allison to Ezra Stiles, 27 May 1759, in Stiles, Extracts from the Itineraries and Other Miscellanies, 422–4. Allison alluded to “proposals to unite the several Colleges on this continent, as near as might be, in the same plan of Education, to govern them nearly by the same laws, & to admit none in one college that were expelld or denyd admittance in another, without previously consulting the heads of the college from whence the student was expelld, &c.”

⁸¹ Ezra Stiles to John Wheelock, 15 April 1780, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 16, Folder 1295, [4]. True to form, after first invoking the Republic of Letters, Stiles cut to his point: “It is my sincere wish that all the Ameri[can] Coll[eges] may ever cultivate a mutual & hon[orable] respect for one another: & that there may be a fraternal connec[tion] among the heads of these seats of learning.” For positive responses to this proposal see Joseph Willard to Ezra Stiles, 5 Oct. 1785, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 83, Folder 3120. “I sincerely meet you, sir, in your wishes, that the utmost harmony and friendship may subsist between the literary societies of Cambridge and New Haven. I think, sir, while you and I continue in our present stations, no sinister methods will ever be taken, to advance one at the expense of the other.”

⁸² Ezra Stiles to James Madison, 12 July 1780, “Correspondence of Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, and James Madison, President of William and Mary College, 1780,” William and Mary Quarterly 7/4 (1927), 293–4.

⁸³ This fixation with numbers is characteristic of Stiles, as he was convinced that the more quantifiable and the more numerous a population, the better. See Winterer, American Enlightenments, 123–9.

⁸⁴ James Madison to Ezra Stiles, 27 Aug. 1780, as published in Stiles and Madison, “Correspondence of Ezra Stiles, President of Yale College, and James Madison, President of William and Mary College, 1780,” 293–4.

⁸⁵ Nationalism and cosmopolitanism, however incompatible they might seem, often went hand in hand in Stiles's speeches. See Ezra Stiles, Yale College Commencement 1781, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 57, Folder 2525, [12]: “harmoniam volamus, et simus omnino in hocce, quod nostrum cultu<s> in sylvanis hisce academiis, literaturae ad culmen perfectionis perveniat: ut palma ab europaeis aisatiisque universitatibus proripiatur” (“Let's wish for harmony and be agreed in this regard, namely that our culture of literature in these sylvan academies reach the height of perfection, so that the badge of victory can be snatched away from the European and Eastern universities”). Likewise, Stiles often proposed ambitious topics for students to expound in commencement performances. In 1788, one student responded affirmatively to the proposition “An academica educatio Americana, pro civibus nostris, Europeae praestet” (“Whether American university education on behalf of our citizens surpasses Europe”).

⁸⁶ Lorraine Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment,” Science in Context 4/2 (1991), 367–86, at 381.

⁸⁷ Laurence Brockliss, “Starting-out, Getting-on and Becoming Famous in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters,” in Andre Holenstein, Hubert Steinke, and Martin Stuber, eds., Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18^th Century, vol. 1 (Leiden, 2013), 71–100, at 80.

⁸⁸ A famous example of student discontent is historian Edward Gibbon's jaundiced reflection on his Oxford Days. In his autobiography, The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon, Esq. (New York, 1846), Gibbon flatly dismissed the fourteen months he spent at Magdalen college as “the most idle and unprofitable of my life … The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are still tainted with the vices of their origin.” Ibid., 106. In the New World, a particularly precocious youth, like Harvard-educated alchemist George Starkey, might reject in his published works the early science instruction at the college, even as he employed the methods of that very education. On this see William R. Newman and Lawrence M. Principe, Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry (Chicago, 2002), 156–207.

⁸⁹ Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor: A Sermon Preached Before His Excellency Jonathan Trumbull (New Haven, 1783), 94.

⁹⁰ Peter Burke, “Erasmus and the Republic of Letters,” European Review 7/1 (1999), 5–17, at 9. On the reputation and practices of scholarly research at early modern Leiden more broadly, see Anthony Grafton, “Civic Humanism and Scientific Scholarship at Leiden,” in Thomas Bender, ed., The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present (Oxford, 1988), 59–79; and, more broadly, William Otterspeer, Groepsportet met Dame: Het Bolwerk van de Vrijheid: de Leidse Universiteit 1575–1672 (Amsterdam, 2000).

⁹¹ As biographers like Abiel Holmes would note after Stiles's death—to be discussed later in this article—Stiles was a fellow of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Connecticut Society of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

⁹² Walter C. Bronson, The History of Brown University 1764–1914 (Providence, 1914), 14–27.

⁹³ Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 384–5; David W. Robson, “College Founding in the New Republic, 1776–1800,” History of Education Quarterly 23/3 (1983), 323–41. Stiles was sometimes asked directly for suggestions for presidents of newly founded universities, like St. John's College in Annapolis. See Ezra Stiles to Jesse Dewees, 28 Oct. 1790, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 4, Folder 283.

⁹⁴ Cora E. Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Library,” Yale University Library Gazette 56 (1981), 13–21; and Francis Parsons, “Ezra Stiles of Yale,” New England Quarterly 9/2 (1936), 286–316.

⁹⁵ Ostrander, Republic of Letters, 5.

⁹⁶ The place of women in the early modern intellectual world has been the subject of rich research. Among others see Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 1986); Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2012); and Dirk van Miert, “Structural Impediments for Women to Participate in the Republic of Letters (1400–1800),” in Rosemarie Buikema, Antoine Buyse, and Antonius C. G. M. Robben, eds., Cultures, Citizenship, and Human Rights (London, 2019), 197–214.

⁹⁷ Ezra Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor, 19.

⁹⁸ Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 1: 293, 3: 504. On Macaulay see J. G. A. Poccock, “Catharine Macaulay: Patriot Historian,” in Hilda L. Smith, ed., Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), 243–59; and Catherine Gardner, “Catharine Macaulay's Letters on Education: Odd but Equal,” Hypatia 13 (1998), 118–37.

⁹⁹ Alethea Stiles to Ezra Stiles, 7 Oct. 1754, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 11, Folder 899. Marcy writes in continuous blocks without punctuation. I have preserved all of her spelling and wording, but, in the interest of readability for a modern audience, have added punctuation.

¹⁰⁰ For one such depiction, see the broadside “Miss Jenny Cameron in a Military Habit,” National Library of Scotland, Jacobite prints and broadsides, 133, Blaikie.SNPG.15.3 A. And, for a wider discussion, Carine Martin, “‘Female Rebels’: The Female Figure in Anti-Jacobite Propaganda,” in Allan I. Macinnes, Kieran German, and Lesley Graham, eds., Living with Jacobitism, 1690–1788: The Three Kingdoms and Beyond (London, 2014), 85–99.

¹⁰¹ Alethea Stiles to Ezra Stiles, 22 Dec. 1755, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 11, Folder 900.

¹⁰² Alethea Stiles to Ezra Stiles, 1 March 1756, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 11, Folder 901. The only mention of Alethea Stiles in scholarly literature that I have been able to track down deals with her needlework. In keeping with the character we encounter in the letters, Stiles signed and dated her work, apparently a very unusual move. See Carol Huber, Stephen Huber, Susan P. Schoelwer, and Amy K. Lansing, With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley, 1740–1840 (Old Lyme, CT, 2011), 54, Plate 32.

¹⁰³ Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 217–22.

¹⁰⁴ Caroline Winterer, “The Female World of Classical Reading in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Heidi Brayman Hackel and Catherine E. Kelly, eds., Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Philadelphia, 2008), 105–23. In her trailblazing research of the past two decades, Winterer has fruitfully explored the ways women engaged with classical culture beyond just reading and writing. See Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, 2007); and, to a lesser extent, Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780–1910 (Baltimore, 2002).

¹⁰⁵ This conclusion stems from the fact that Stiles wrote directly on the epistles both the dates he received them, and those he answered them.

¹⁰⁶ Ezra Stiles, Yale College Commencement 1781, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 57, Folder 2525, [11].

¹⁰⁷ Stiles, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, 3: 10. Reference courtesy of Cora E. Lutz, “Ezra Stiles and the Education of Women,” Yale University Library Gazette 71 (1996), 49–55.

¹⁰⁸ Ezra Stiles (1727–95) (Yale 1746). Testimonial concerning the educational achievements of Lucinda Foote (MVP #846A), 22 Dec. 1783, Yale University Library Manuscripts and Archives, Yci 818 +C8: “Vobis notum sit: quod Dominam Lucindam Foot Aetat[is] 12. Examine probavi, eamque in linguis edoctis, Latina et Graeca, laudabilem progressum fecisse; eo ut familiariter et reddidisse & tractasse reperivi, tum verba tum sententias, alibi in Aeneide Virgilii, in selectis Ciceronis Orationibus, et in Graeco Testamento. Testorque omnino illam, nisi Sexus ratione, idoneam ut in classem Recentium in Universitate Yalensi Alumna admitteretur. Datum e Bibliotheca collegii Yalensis, 22 die Decembris, Anno Salutis MDCCLXXXIII. Ezra Stiles President.”

¹⁰⁹ This is not to say that Foote was unhappy with the honor. The fact that the piece of parchment survives to this day hints at some degree of importance placed upon the object.

¹¹⁰ Samuel Whittelsey Dana, Oratio Gratulatoria, Ezra Stiles Papers, Box 57, Folder 2487, [9]: “Occasio dabitur, ut speramus instituendi morem, amplifacndi—peregrinis cum academiis commercium inibitur epistolarium, cumque munificis literarum amicis ubique gentium.”

¹¹¹ This estimate is based not only on the Beinecke Library's Ezra Stiles Papers but also those at the New Haven Colony Historical Society (The Ezra Stiles Collection 1682–1795 MF #9). I extend the warmest of thanks to both institutions for providing high-quality scans since travel proved prohibitive during the COVID-19 pandemic.

¹¹² Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 465–72 provides a brief but information-rich account of the Stiles papers. We know that many of Stiles's letters are missing because of an inventory kept in his will. Undoubtedly looking after his own reputation, Stiles had many of his manuscripts collected and bound during his lifetime. Some of those volumes, however, have been lost.

¹¹³ There is a modest but serious set of scholarship examining the intellectual aspirations of Ebeling in their own right. See Gordon Stewart, The Literary Contributions of Christoph Daniel Ebeling (Amsterdam, 1978); Stewart, “Christoph Daniel Ebeling: America's Friend in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Monatshefte 68/2 (1978), 151–61; and Christoph Daniel Ebeling and William Coolidge Lane, “Letters of Christoph Daniel Ebeling,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 35/2 (1925), 272–451. In German-language scholarship see also Jürgen Overhoff, “Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741–1817): Forschungsbericht zu einem weit über Hamburg hinaus bedeutsamen Aufklärer, Amerikanisten, Pädagogen, Publizisten, Musikkritiker und Bibliothekar,” Mitteilungen des Hamburger Arbeitskreises für Regionalgeschichte 43 (2004), 69–82; and Overhoff, “Ein Literat als Lehrer an der hamburgischen Handlungsakademie: Die politische Ökonomie des Christoph Daniel Ebeling,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 32 (2008), 255–71.

¹¹⁴ The first volume appeared in 1793, with six more to follow by 1816. Volume 1 covered New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Volume 2 Rhode Island and Connecticut, Volume 3 New York, Volume 4 Pennsylvania, Volume 5 Delaware and Maryland, Volume 6 Pennsylvania, and Volume 7 Virginia.

¹¹⁵ On several ceremonial occasions, Stiles appointed Barlow to deliver addresses and poems. For a colonial student, this was one of the most sought-after honors.

¹¹⁶ Joel Barlow to Ezra Stiles, 27 May 1794, in Ezra Stiles Letters 1794–1795, MS am 825, Houghton University Library, seq. 19. On Barlow's travels and life see Richard Buel Jr, Joel Barlow: American Citizen in a Revolutionary World (Baltimore, 2011); and Clifford L. Egan, “On the Fringe of the Napoleonic Catastrophe: Joel Barlow's Letters from Central and Eastern Europe, 1812,” Early American Literature 10/3 (1975), 251–72.

¹¹⁷ Christoph Ebeling to Ezra Stiles, 26 June 1794, in Ezra Stiles Letters 1794–1795, MS am 825, Houghton University Library, seq. 22. at https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:444171648$22i.

¹¹⁸ Ibid., seq. 23.

¹¹⁹ Ezra Stiles to Christoph Ebeling, 20 Feb. 1795, in Ezra Stiles Letters 1794–1795, MS am 825, Houghton University Library, seq. 69.

¹²⁰ Ibid., seq. 71.

¹²¹ Christoph Daniel Ebeling to Thomas Jefferson, 30 July 1795, Founders Online, National Archives, at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-28-02-0331. Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 28, 1 January 1794 – 29 February 1796, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton, 2000), 423–28. Ebeling framed his work as a clear complement to Jefferson's history of Virginia, of which an abridged German version, Jeffersons Beschreibung von Virginien, had appeared earlier in 1788. Ebeling called this abridgement “very well made, but rather too short.”

¹²² Christoph Ebeling to Ezra Stiles, 26 June 1794, seq. 23.

¹²³ Jozef Ijsewijn and Dirk Sacre, “The Ultimate Efforts to Save Latin as the Means of International Communication,” History of European Ideas 16 (1993), 51–66.

¹²⁴ Stiles, Oratio Inauguralis, 6.

¹²⁵ Stiles, The United States Elevated to Glory and Honor, 51–2.

¹²⁶ Ezra Stiles to Christoph Ebeling, 20 Feb. 1795, seq. 84. Stiles cleverly incorporated (without explicit citation) these quotations from Plutarch (Lives (Solon), Ch 31) and the Old Testament (Ezra 7:10). The accentuation I have provided is from modern editions, not that of Stiles's. Many thanks to Elbert van Wijk for graciously helping me make sense of the Hebrew.

¹²⁷ Christoph Ebeling to Ezra Stiles, 26 June 1794, seq. 26. Ebeling provided tallies of the number of German works that were published on various subject matters in the recent years.

¹²⁸ Ezra Stiles to Christoph Ebeling, 20 Feb. 1795, seq. 84.

¹²⁹ Morgan, The Gentle Puritan, 134.

¹³⁰ In the days and weeks following Stiles's death, a number of newspapers printed death notices and obituaries. Among others were the Connecticut Journal, the Argus & Greenleaf's New Daily Advertiser (New York), the Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), the Boston Gazette, the New Hampshire Gazette, the United States Chronicle (Providence), and Spooner's Vermont Journal.

¹³¹ Anon., “Biographical and Panegyrical: President Stiles,” The Mercury (Boston), 26 May 1795, [1].

¹³² James Dana, The Heavenly Mansions: A Sermon Preached May 14, 1795 (New Haven, 1795), 30.

¹³³ Abiel Holmes, The Life of Ezra Stiles, D.D. LL. D. (Boston, 1798), 107. Interestingly, Holmes notes that “the curious enquirer will naturally wish to know the replies to many queries, taken from the President's letters to the Literati in foreign countries,” but that “no replies have been discovered.” Ibid., v.

¹³⁴ See, for instance, anon., “Half-Yearly Retrospect of American Literature,” Monthly Magazine or British Register 9 (1800), 647; and anon., “Historischen Wissenschaften,” Intelligenzblatt der Allgem. Literatur-Zeitung182 (1802), 1478.

¹³⁵ Thomas Robbins, Diary of Thomas Robbins, D.D. 1796–1854, vol. 1 (Boston, 1886), 103.

¹³⁶ Samuel Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 (New York, 1803), 302. Reference courtesy of Floris Solleveld, “Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5 (2020), 82–116.

¹³⁷ Miller, A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, 397 n.

¹³⁸ James Kent, An Address Delivered at New Haven before the Phi Beta Kappa Society (New Haven, 1831), 44.

¹³⁹ Christoph Ebeling, “Todesfälle merkwürdiger Personen, nebst einigen Nachrichten von ihren Lebensumständen,”Amerikanisches Magazin (Hamburg, 1797), 172–4, at 172.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 173: “… muß ich aus eigener Erfahrung hinzusetzen, daß auch ich den Verlust dieses würdigen Mannes beklage, weil ich Gelegenheit hatte, seinen Werth durch thätige Beweise kennen zu lernen.”

¹⁴¹ Ibid., 172: “Mit den Gelehrten in Nordamerika, wie auch mit verschiedenen in England, unterhielt er einen ausgebreiteten Briefwechsel; auch war er Mitglied der vornehmsten gelehrten Gesellschaften in den V. St.”

¹⁴² Eskildsen, Kasper, “How Germany Left the Republic of Letters,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65/3 (2004), 421–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴³ Ebeling, “Todesfälle merkwürdiger Personen,” 173: “40 Seiten worin er eine Art Übersicht aller Wissenschaften zu geben sucht.”

¹⁴⁴ Ibid.: “Die Latinität dieser Rede ist von der klassischen ziemlich entfernt.” In regard to this question of classical Latinity, I, for one, do not find Stiles to stray far from classical standards like those of Cicero. The few infelicities in the Latin are more due to printing errors or small mistakes than to stylistic decisions. Based on evidence from having examined over a dozen unique copies of his printed inaugural oration, it appears that Stiles also personally corrected the same few slips in Latin spelling or grammar. Nonetheless, the perceived problem of Stiles's Latinity seems to have persisted. In his biography of the deceased Yale president, Abiel Holmes included a lengthy and learned footnote about Renaissance attitudes towards departing from classical Latinity. See Holmes, The Life of Ezra Stiles, 28–9.

¹⁴⁵ Ebeling, “Todesfälle merkwürdiger Personen,” 174: “Nach unseren Begriffen von Beredsamkeit ist diese Rede zu überladen mit Belesenheit, und zu abhandelnd.”

¹⁴⁶ Ibid.: “In welchen Wissenschaften Stiles sich am meisten umgesehen hatte, läßt sich aus diesen Schriften nicht entscheiden. In den Sammlungen der gelehrten Gesellschaften, von welchen er Mitglied war, finden sich keine Aufsätze von ihm.”

¹⁴⁷ Ezra Stiles, Oratio Funebris Pro Exequiis Celebrandis Viri Perillustris Johnathan Law Armigeri (Novi-Londini, 1751); and Stiles, A History of the Three Judges of King Charles I (Hartford, 1794). Ebeling mistakenly believed that the latter had not yet been published before Stiles died.

¹⁴⁸ Several decades later, a much fuller bibliography of Stiles's work did appear in S. Austin Allibone, A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (London, 1870), 2259.

¹⁴⁹ François Rozier to American Philosophical Society, 24 Jan. 1773, as quoted in James E. McClellan III, “The Scientific Press in Transition: Rozier's Journal and the Scientific Societies in the 1770s,” Annals of Science 36 (1979), 425–49, at 444.

¹⁵⁰ Ibid.

¹⁵¹ Louis-Mayeul Chaudon, Dictionnaire universel, historique, critique, et bibliographique, vol. 11 (Paris, 1812), 513. Thanks are due to Anna Delwiche for help with the French.

¹⁵² Derk Buddingh, De Kerk, School, en Wetenschap in de Vereenigde Staten van Noord-Amerika (Utrecht, 1853), 182.

¹⁵³ For the European editions of Franklin's select epistles see Benjamin Franklin, Private Correspondence of Benjamin Franklin, ed. William Temple Franklin (London, 1817); Franklin, Gedeknschriften van Benjamin Franklin Bestaande in Uitgelezen Briefen (Haarlem, 1817); Franklin, Correspondance inédite et secretè du. Docteur B. Franklin (Paris, 1817); and Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Franklin's Nachgelassene Schriften und Correspondenz (Weimar, 1817). Fittingly enough, the one letter of Stiles included in each of these collections featured him evoking the Republic of Letters (“de letterkundige republiek,” “la république des lettres,” or “Republic der Wissenschaften”).

¹⁵⁴ Anon., “Janson's Stranger in America,” Edinburgh Review 10 (1807), 103–16, at 114.

¹⁵⁵ Ibid., 115.

¹⁵⁶ Anon., “Hints on the State of American Literature,” Monthly Register, and Review of the United States, 1 Dec. 1807, 1–21, at 1.

¹⁵⁷ Ibid., 17.

¹⁵⁸ Ibid. The writer adds that Stiles's friends supposedly tried to prevent him from publishing one of his works “lest it should injure the worthy President's former reputation, as a man of letters, and an author.”

¹⁵⁹ Philopolis, A Letter to the Editor of “The Scotsman, or “Edinburgh Political and Literary Journal” (London, 1825), 37, original emphasis.

¹⁶⁰ Ibid.

¹⁶¹ Americanus, “Remarks on American Criticism,” Monthly Magazine, and American Review, Sept. 1800, [3], original emphasis. The reference is to fantastical creatures of Jonathan Swift's creation. See Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (London, 1726). For discussions of Swift's influence and readership in eighteenth-century America see Gates, Flory Perkins, “James Otis and Jonathan Swift: Comments upon Their Literary Relationship,” New England Quarterly 5/2 (1932), 344–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fiore, Jordan D., “Jonathan Swift and the American Episcopate,” William and Mary Quarterly 11/3 (1954), 425–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yvette R. Piggush, “‘A Very Dangerous Talent’: Wit for Women in Hannah Webster Foster's The Boarding School,” New England Quarterly 92 (2019), 46–74.

¹⁶² George Ticknor, Life, Letters, and Journals of George Ticknor, vol. 1 (New York, 1909), 100.

¹⁶³ Winterer, American Enlightenments, 251.