program in English must before long have suffered considerable shrinkage. For in 1865, President Haven moved over to the professorship of logic and political economy. He replaced his course in philology with one in logic. He continued to offer his course entitled General Culture; but that seems to have been from the beginning not a course in English but in comparative literature. Only Allen Jeremiah Curtis (Kalamazoo '60, A.M. Michigan '61), Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, was left to carry on the work. Then in 1867, Tyler came.
The events of the life of Moses Coit Tyler (Yale '57, LL.D. Wooster '75, L.H.D. Columbia '87) are related in biographical sketches and other passages scattered through University publications and in the notable Jones-Casady Life of Moses Coit Tyler, published by the University of Michigan Press in 1933. The Life must be read by anyone who in our time would know Tyler's career, his character, and his place in the history of the University and of American scholarship. In 1939 the Board of Regents named one of the new men's dormitories in the East Quadrangle the Moses Coit Tyler House. In making the announcement the University Record described Tyler as "the man who more than any other individual awakened the country to the study of its own literary history."
That this is not an expression of merely parochial pride is attested by many witnesses. Barrett Wendell of Harvard said in an address to the Massachusetts Historical Society:
The only man who, since Tyler, has done work of comparable importance in the literary history of America is V. L. Parrington, himself a guest member of the Department of English in the summer session of 1927 and known internationally as the author of Main Currents in American Thought. In his bibliography for the period dealt with in Tyler's books he referred to them twice as "invaluable" — a word of praise which he gives to no other book listed. From the Jones-Casady Life, which is always temperate in praise, may be culled such opinions of Tyler as the following:Untiring in research, unfalteringly conscientious to the most minute detail, nor yet ever content until he had so mastered every phase of his subject that he could set forth his results with luminous amenity, Moses Coit Tyler has left for those who follow him through the boundless aridities of our earlier literature only the comparatively agreeable task of generalization. Whatever he actually did was done so well that it need never be done again. (Wendell, 393-94.)
Nor did Tyler have to wait for the acclaim of posterity. Among other evidences of his eminence in the opinion of his contemporaries, the Life tells us that he was included in a list of forty immortals chosen by ballot among the readers of The Critic and Good Literature, outranking Dana, Whipple, Lathrop, Story, and Parkman.He was … the first great historian of the national mind expressed in literature… Tyler may be said to have inaugurated the heroic age of scholarship in American literary history … Tyler's success is a miracle of perseverance and painstaking care… His work remains monumental still… Tyler had written a truly great historical work, generous in its sympathy, revolutionary in its scope and range, brilliant in style — an enduring study, the first great work of scholarship in the field of American literary history.
Tyler was born in 1835 in Connecticut, spent his boyhood in Michigan, and attended the University of Michigan for one year. He completed his undergraduate work at Yale, studied theology there and at Andover, and, though he never went on to a degree in theology, held pastorates for about three years in the
