Biography
He was born in Fairfield, New York, where his father was professor of chemistry at Fairfield Medical College. At the age of nine, a knee injury left him lame for life. He received his early instruction at the Fairfield Academy, and also acquired some scientific knowledge from his father. He became assistant at the Academy, and later graduated from Yale University in 1842, having entered the junior class in 1840. He was then a resident graduate at Yale for a year, after which he entered Yale's theological seminary, where he spent two years.
April to September 1845, he was a tutor in Middlebury College. He was a tutor at Yale in 1845–1848, assistant professor of Greek in 1848–1851, and professor of Greek, succeeding President Woolsey, from 1851 until his death in New Haven, Connecticut.
As an undergraduate, he had shown himself an able mathematician, but the influence of Edward Elbridge Salisbury, under whom Hadley and William Dwight Whitney studied Sanskrit together, turned his attention toward the study of language. He knew Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Armenian, several Celtic languages and the languages of modern Europe; but he published little, and his scholarship found scant outlet in the college classroom.
Hadley was well versed in civil law. His course of lectures on civil law was included in the curriculum of the Yale Law School, and was likewise delivered at Harvard. He was a member of the American Committee for the revision of the New Testament, and was president of the American Oriental Society (1871–1872).
Read more about this topic: James Hadley (scholar)
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)