646 SAMUEL ELIOT. 



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SAMUEL ELIOT. 



Samuel Eliot, son of William Havard Eliot, whose wife was Mar- 

 garet Bradford, was born in Boston on the 22d of December, 1821. 

 In 1839 he was graduated from Harvard College. After a little 

 experience of business life, be went abroad for a while. On his return 

 he engaged in some schemes of charitable education, and in historical 

 writiug. In 1849 he published the first volume of his " History of 

 Liberty"; the second followed in 1853 ; and in 1856 came his popular 

 " History of the United States from 1492 to 1850." In this same year 

 he became Professor of History at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. 

 Of this College he was President from 1860 to 1864. In 1872, having 

 returned to Boston, where he lived thenceforth, he became master of 

 the Girl's High School there. From 1878 to 1880 he was Superin- 

 tendent of the Boston Public Schools ; and afterwards, from 1885 to 

 1888, he was a member of the Boston School Committee. 



His activity in charitable and other philanthropic work meanwhile 

 was constant. To mention only a few of his services, he was for jears 

 a Trustee of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and during most of 

 the time chairman of the board ; for twenty six years he was President 

 of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind ; 

 and for twenty-one years President of the Massachusetts School for the 

 Feeble Minded. He was President too of the Boston Episcopal Chari- 

 table Society. In more purely educational matters, and the like, he was 

 equally active. For more tlian forty years he was a Trustee of St. 

 Paul's School, at Concord, New Hampshire ; for many years he was 

 President of the Boston Athenaeum ; and from the foundation of the 

 Boston Museum of Fine Arts until his death he was one of its Trustees. 

 From 1866 to 1872 he was an Overseer of Harvard College. In brief, 

 it is hard to name any position of educational or philanthropic trust in 

 Boston which he was not called on to fill, and which he did not fill with 

 unobtrusive distinction. 



In 1863, while still President of Trinity College, he received from 

 Columbia College the degree of LL. D.; and in 1880 he received the 

 same honor from his own College, Harvard. In 1865 he became both 

 a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and a Fellow of the 

 American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1853 he married Emily 

 Marshall Otis, daughter of William Foster Otis, of Boston. Their two 

 sons died, the younger in childhood, the elder at the age of twenty ; 



