state of New York. After a sojourn in Boston, he went to England in 1863, and when he returned to this country, late in 1866, it was as a "lyceum" lecturer and a writer for newspapers and magazines. In 1867 he became Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature in the University of Michigan.
Except for an interval of eighteen months in 1873 and 1874, which he spent very unhappily in New York City as literary editor of Henry Ward Beecher's Christian Union, Tyler taught at the University of Michigan until 1881. In that year Andrew White, his friend of long standing, offered him the new professorship of American history at Cornell, and, as White himself had done years before at Michigan, he left literature for history. The change, however, was not abrupt; though Tyler had done much to stimulate and guide the appreciation of literature as such, he was always primarily the social philosopher, reading books with an eye chiefly to their historical significance. His main interest will appear clearly to anyone who reads in his many essays or in his books. Of the latter, which show also his growing absorption in American as distinguished from British literature and history, the most important are The History of American Literature, 1607-1765; The Literary History of the American Revolution; Patrick Henry (in the "American Statesmen Series"); and Three Men of Letters (Berkeley, Dwight, and Barlow).
Tyler's character is a study in contradictions. Before he came to Ann Arbor he was best known as a health faddist and as a facile popular speaker. A present member of the department remarked recently that he would not be considered now even for a teaching fellowship. Yet it is doubtful if any member of our present faculty has a better record of sound, hard work. The work of some of us may not be referred to half a century hence as "a miracle of perseverance and painstaking care." His industry, however, was like that of another great worker, Samuel Johnson. It was fitful. "The tranquillity of the place," he wrote after his return from New York to Ann Arbor, "is like balm to my brain and nerves." But this spirit was restless, and he could enjoy tranquillity only as long as he was satisfied with the work he was doing; only as long as he could hold himself to it "without remissness and without misgiving." In his public utterances and in his writings, he appeared to share the complacency of nineteenth-century liberalism, and to accept with most of his contemporaries the current myth of progress; but his diary, like Johnson's, records that his mind was troubled by many doubts and uncertainties. Year after year moods assailed him in which he wondered whether he ought not to return to the Christian ministry. In the main, he controlled his tendency to melancholy. He and his family lived happily together, he enjoyed many friendships, and he delighted his students with his easy eloquence and his humor. His work was sometimes interrupted, but its quality was certainly enhanced, by what the Jones-Casady Life calls his "feeling of the dreamlike evanescence of the world."
The influence of such a man as Tyler even in a department of the 1940's would be very great. In his day, he practically was the Department of English, and its history was made by him. At first his teaching, except for one course, was in elocution and rhetoric. He did this work conscientiously, and, according to contemporary evidence, exceptionally well. But his important report to the president in 1872 indicates that it brought him more weariness than satisfaction. He spoke of the "delicate and fatiguing task" of reading essays and listening to speeches. He was searching hopefully for some method of "teaching English literature
