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Blyden was the protégé of Reverend John P. Knox (1855-1882),  pastor of the Reformed Dutch Church in St Thomas, who tried without success in 1850 to see Blyden enrolled at his alma mater, Rutgers College. With little formal training beyond Alexander High School and Liberia College he became in the words of his biographer Hollis Lynch  he was “one of a few Negroes to make a significant impact on the English-speaking literary and scholastic world in the nineteenth century” (Lynch, p.54). A prolific author  his bibliography on a wide range of topics is massive. His interest in languages went well-beyond Greek and Latin to include Arabic and African languages. He impressed or influenced many including black leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore. He admired Charles Dickens, praised Theodore Herzl,  and corresponded for many years with William Gladstone who helped him obtain reading privileges at the British Museum. He was also received by Queen Victoria to whom he presented a copy of his book, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race in 1892. In a letter from February of 1886 he told Gladstone about  his “desire­–very ambitious for one in my circumstance I confess­– to make an edition of Terence with English notes for use in Liberia College” which if he produced it does not exist today (Lynch, p. 72 ). In 1880 he became the second black member of the American Philological Association, and from his position as president of Liberia College in January, 1882 he awarded honorary LL.D.s  to Richard Theodore Greener  (1844-1922) and William Sanders Scarborough (1852-1926) who were respectively the first and third black members of the APA and to Reverend Knox. That same year he declared that the “qualities which make a man succeed in mastering Latin and Mathematics are also those which qualify him for the practical work of life” (Blyden, 1882, p. 23).  He died at age 79 in Freetown. His funeral service was conducted by Reverend J.R. Frederick. of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. The “youth of the “Mohammedan schools” headed a procession to his graveside” (Moore, p. 118). Blyden was buried in Freetown’s Race Course Cemetery.