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Ezra Stiles |
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Known to contemporaries as an erudite Congregational minister whose career culminated in the presidency of Yale College from 1778 to 1795, the Reverend Ezra Stiles still tends to be highly esteemed for his intellect. This longstanding reputation is somewhat overblown; originality of thought and insightful productivity were never part of Stiles's accomplishment. His mind was exceptionally far-ranging, but it was more retentive than fertile, more receptive than creative. Its power was harnessed to a form of bookish learning and insatiable empiricism that produced little which lays claim to modern attention except the copious notes which he took about his daily affairs and the great stir of life around him. His numerous notebooks, diaries, itineraries, accounts, and miscellanea--a sizeable portion of which has been edited and published in the twentieth century--are among the most extensive and informative of private papers to come down from New England during the late-colonial and early-national era: in manuscript, his diary entries for 1769-1795 alone fill fifteen volumes, his Thermometrical Register (1763-1795) fills five others, and by the end of 1788 he notes that he has had bound thirty-one folio or quarter volumes of his assorted jottings, as well as three volumes of letters from other people.
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