Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of his province were either lawyers, or smatterers in law. We shall have occasion later on to refer to the importance of the circumstance that lawyers as a class exerted a considerable influence upon many of the colonies. Of the seven institutions of higher education which existed in 1764, three belonged to New England. First and foremost was Harvard, founded in 1636; then Yale, opened at New Haven in 1700; and Brown, established in Warren in 1764. The founding of the first of these institutions, Harvard, took place about sixteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims, when the General Court of Massachusetts agreed to give what was then the munificent sum of £400 toward the founding of a school or college. A year before this the Public Latin School of Boston had been established, and thus acquired the distinction of being the oldest public school in the United States. At the end of the French War the former institution, which subsequently came to be known as Harvard College, had acquired a high renown even in Europe, and had been fostered by liberal donations from English Dissenters. Samuel Adams, John Adams, John Hancock, Jonathan Trumbull, Elbridge Gerry, Joseph Warren, Jeremy Belknap, Timothy Pickering, and a host of others among its graduates, played a prominent part in the Revolutionary era. Yale College, the third of the higher institutions to be established in the American colonies, owed its inception to the ministers of Connecticut, who in 1698 took steps that led to its foundation. In 1718 the institution took its present name of Yale. Throughout the Revolutionary era Yale College was intensely patriotic. Other educational factors of no less importance than the colleges were printing presses, newspapers, and books, in respect of all of which the New England colo...