In an 1893 article Edward Everett Hale suggested "that Harvard College had trained the only men in America who could write the English language and that its ability to do this began with the year 1819 and ended with the year 1851." That statement referred primarily to the tenure of one man, Edward Tyrrell Channing, who held the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory during those thirty-two years. The accomplishments of the students who came under his influence at Harvard testify to his stature as critic and perhaps as one of the most influential teachers of rhetoric and composition in the nineteenth century. The roll of Channing's students includes essayists, historians, poets, editors, lecturers, philosophers, and politicians, and it reads like a who's who of American letters: Charles Frances Adams, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, John L...