HIS LIFE The Bancrofts have been settled in America since 1632. Among the historian’s ancestors were men of marked traits of character. Bancroft’s grandfather, a farmer of Essex County, Massachusetts, had such a reputation for piety and judgment that he was called on to act as an umpire in the bitter dispute between Jonathan Edwards and his church at Northampton. The father of the historian, Aaron Bancroft, a pioneer of American Unitarianism, was for fifty years pastor of the Second Church of Worcester. His distinguishing trait was ‘a deep-seated abhorrence of anything like mental slavery.’ He was an ardent student of American history and the author of an _Essay on the Life of George Washington_ (1807), a popular book in its own day and well worth the reading in ours. George Bancroft thought ‘that his own inclination toward history was due very much to the influence of his father.’ There is a story (probably apocryphal) that in his youth Aaron Bancroft fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. During Shays’s Rebellion, when the insurgent officers proposed to quarter themselves in private houses at Worcester, the minister guarded his own door and told a group of officers who approached that they were rebels, and that ‘they would obtain no entrance to his house but by violence.’ The officers immediately rode away. George Bancroft was born at Worcester on October 3, 1800. He prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and was graduated at Harvard in 1817. Edward Everett, the newly appointed professor of Greek, who was then studying at Göttingen, urged President Kirkland to send some graduate of marked powers to Germany with a view to his preparing himself to teach at Harvard. The choice fell on Bancroft. He spent two years at Göttingen and obtained his doctorate. Among his professors were Heeren, Dissen, Eichhorn, and Blumenbach; Heeren’s influence was the most profound and the most lasting. His range of studies was wide, including, as it did, history, German literature, Greek philosophy, natural history, Scripture interpretation, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian. From Göttingen, Bancroft went to Berlin, where he heard the lectures of Savigny, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, and made the acquaintance of Voss, W. von Humboldt, and F. A. Wolf. He had the fortune to meet Goethe once at Jena, and again at Weimar. After leaving Berlin he studied for a time at Heidelberg under Von Schlosser. In Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and A. von Humboldt. He travelled in Switzerland and Italy, and spent the winter of 1821–22 at Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Niebuhr and Bunsen. At Leghorn the following spring he was one of a party of Americans who gathered to meet Byron when the poet visited the ‘Constitution,’ the flagship of the American squadron. Bancroft afterwards called on Byron at Montenero, and was presented to the Countess Guiccioli.