No More Learning

' He calls Bentley's
, .
work on Phalaris an 'immortal dissertation'4; he is said to have
wept with delight when he found that his own emendations of the
text of Aristophanes had been anticipated by Bentley, and the
correctness of many of these emendations was confirmed by the
subsequent collation of the famous manuscript at Ravenna.
In 1783 he had been invited by the syndics of the Cambridge
university press to edit Aeschylus, but his offer to visit Florence
with a view to collating the Laurentian manuscript was unfortu-
nately rejected, the chairman of the syndics gravely suggesting that
‘Mr Porson might collect his manuscripts at home. ' The syndics
had also unwisely insisted on an exact reprint of the old and
corrupt text of Stanley's edition of 1663, and Porson naturally
declined the task. Porson's partial revision of the text was printed
by Foulis at Glasgow in 1794, but was not published until 1806;
meanwhile, his corrections were surreptitiously incorporated in a
folio edition, fifty-two copies of which were printed by the same
firm in 1795 ; but in neither edition was there any mention of
Porson's name.
His masterly edition of four plays of Euripides began in 1797
with the Hecuba; it was continued in the Orestes (1798) and
Phoenissae (1799), and in the Medea (1801), where the editor's
name appears for the first time. It was from Porson's transcript
of the Medea, still preserved in the library of his college, that
the so-called “Porson type' was cut for the university Press. In
the preface to his edition of the Hecuba, he settled certain points
of Greek prosody in a sense contrary to that of Hermann's early
1 Decline and Fall, chap. XXXVII, notes 117-122.
* Miscellaneous Works, vol. 1, 159.
3 Luard, H. R. , in Cambridge Essays, 1857, p. 169 n.
4 Note on Medea, 139 f.
6 Luard, 1. c. p. 153.
6 David Murray's R. and A. Foulis, 1913, pp. 121 f.


## p. 325 (#349) ############################################

Xv]
325
Porson
treatise on metres, but without complete proof. In 1800 Hermann
produced a rival edition, attacking Porson's opinions; and, in
1802, Porson replied in a supplement appended to the preface of
his second edition. This reply has justly been regarded by Jebb
as ‘his finest single piece of criticism. He here lays down the
law that determines the length of the fourth syllable from the end
of the normal iambic or trochaic line, tacitly correcting Hermann's
mistakes, but never mentioning his name.
Porson spent at least ten months in transcribing in his own
beautiful hand the Codex Galeanus of the lexicon of Photius ; in
1796 the transcript was destroyed by fire in London ; a second
transcript was prepared by Porson and deposited in the library
of his college, and finally published by Dobree in 1822, fourteen
years after Porson’s death.
It is to be regretted that Porson failed to finish his edition of
Euripides, and that he did not live to edit either Aristophanes or
Athenaeus. He would doubtless have achieved far more, if the
sobriety of his life had been equal to the honesty and truthfulness
of his character. Parr, writing to Burney, said : 'He is not only
a matchless scholar, but an honest, a very honest man’? ; and
Thomas Turton, the future bishop of Ely, in vindicating Porson's
literary character against the attacks of an episcopal champion of
an unscholarly archdeacon, declared that Porson ‘had no superior'
in 'the most pure and inflexible love of truth. '?
In the study of Attic Greek, Porson elucidated many points of
idiom and usage, and established the laws of tragic metre. Bishop
Blomfield, after speaking of Bentley and Dawes, says that 'Porson,
a man greater than them all, added to the varied erudition and
universal research of Valckenaer and Ruhnken, a nicety of ear and
acquaintance with the laws of metre, which the former possessed
but imperfectly, and the latter not at all. '? Of himself he modestly
said: 'I am quite satisfied if, three hundred years hence, it shall
be said that one Porson lived towards the close of the eighteenth
century, who did a good deal for the text of Euripides. For
Cambridge and for England, he became the creator of the ideal of
finished and exact verbal scholarship, which prevailed for more
than fifty years after his death.
Among Porson's older contemporaries was Samuel Parr of
1 Parr's Memoirs, vol. vii, p. 403.
? Crito Cantabrigiensis, A Vindication of the Literary Character of Prof. Porson,
1827, pp. 347 f.
3 The Edinburgh Review, vol. XVII, p. 382.
• Rogers, Table Talk, Porsoniana, p. 334.
»4


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326
[CH.
Greek Scholars
Harrow, and of Emmanuel and St John's, who was born twelve
years before Porson, and survived him by seventeen. Head-
master of three schools in succession, he spent the last forty years
of his life as perpetual curate and private tutor at Hatton, in
Warwickshire. He attained considerable distinction as a writer
of Latin prose, closely following Cicero and Quintilian in the long
preface to his edition of a treatise on Cicero written about 1616
by Bellenden, and Morcelli in his stately epitaphs and other
Latin inscriptions. Notwithstanding his extensive erudition, he
accomplished little of permanent value ; but he freely lavished his
advice and his aid on others. Porson spent the winter of 1790—1
at Hatton, enriching his mind with the vast stores of Parr's library
of more than 10,000 volumes. He was described by one who had
surveyed all the literature associated with his life, as one of the
kindest hearted and best read Englishmen’ of his generation? ;
while Macaulay characterised his 'vast treasure of erudition’as
'too often buried in the earth, too often paraded with injudicious
and inelegant ostentation, but still precious, massive, and splendid. '?
Among the minor lights of the age was Gilbert Wakefield,
fellow of Jesus college, Cambridge, whose passion for tampering
with the text of the classics is exemplified in his editions of
Horace, Virgil and Lucretius. His notes on Lucretius are dis-
figured by his attacking 'the most brilliant and certain emendations
of Lambinus' with a vehemence of abuse that would be too great
even for his own errors. '3 His Lucretius was completed in the
same year as Porson's first edition of the Hecuba. Porson "out
of kindness' had forborne to mention certain conjectures on the
text proposed by Wakefield; but his silence led to Wakefield's
1
inditing a violent and hasty ‘Diatribe' teeming with injudicious
and intemperate criticism. In 1799 his treasonable expression of
a hope that England would be invaded and conquered by the
French led to his imprisonment for two years in Dorchester gaol.
During his imprisonment he continued to correspond with Fox on
points of scholarship, and, soon after his release, he died.
Porson had a high opinion of his earlier contemporary, John
Horne Tooke, of St John's college, Cambridge. His reputation
rests on The Diversions of Purley (1786), which certainly excited
a new interest in etymology, and had the merit of insisting on the
importance of the study of Gothic and Old English.
The date of its appearance also marks the birth of the science
1 Baker-Mayor, History of St John's College, vol. 1, p. 540.
2 Essays, p. 642, ed. 1861.
3 Munro's Lucretius, vol. I, p. 19, ed. 1873.
>


## p. 327 (#351) ############################################

Xv] Sir William Jones. Elmsley 327
:
of comparative philology. In that year Sir William Jones, who
had passed from the study of English, Attic and Indian law to
that of the Sanskrit language, made a memorable declaration :
a
The Sanscrit tongue. . . is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the
Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,
yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and
in the forms of grammar, than could have been produced by accident; so
strong that no philologer could examine the Sanscrit, Greek, and Latin,
without believing them to have been sprung from some common source. . . .
There is a similar reason . . . for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtio
had the same origin with the Sanscrit. The old Persian may be added to the
same family1.
Dr Parr, who died in 1825, writes thus in his diary:
England, in my day, may boast of a Decad of literary luminaries,
Dr Samuel Butler, Dr Edward Maltby, bishop Blomfield, dean Monk,
Mr E. H. Barker, Mr Kidd, Mr Burges, professor Dobree, professor Gaisford,
and Dr Elmsley. They are professed critics: but, in learning and taste,
Dr Routh of Oxford is inferior to none.
Martin Joseph Routh, who was born in 1755, died in 1854, in
the hundredth year of his age, after holding the position of presi-
dent of Magdalen for three and sixty years. In 1784 he edited
the Euthydemus and Gorgias of Plato; he lived to produce the
fifth volume of his Reliquiae Sacrae in 1848, and, at the age of
seventy-two, summed up his long experience in the precept: 'I
think, sir, you will find it a very good practice always to verify
your references. '
Edward Maltby, the pupil of Parr and the friend of Porson,
received valuable aid from both in supplementing a useful lexicon
of Greek prosody, founded on Morell's Thesaurus. Educated at
Winchester, and at Pembroke college, Cambridge, he was succes-
sively bishop of Chichester and of Durham.
The Porsonian tradition passed for a time from Cambridge to
Oxford in the person of Peter Elmsley, of Winchester and of
Christ Church, who was born in 1773 and died in 1825. At
Florence, in 1820, he collated the Laurentian manuscript of
Sophocles, and the earliest recognition of its excellence is to be
found in the preface to his edition of the Oedipus Coloneus (1823).
He also edited the Oedipus Tyrannus ; and the Heraclidae,
Medea and Bacchae of Euripides. As a scholar whose editorial
labours were almost entirely confined to the Greek drama, he had
a close affinity with Porson, who held him in high esteem, until he
found him appropriating his emendations without mentioning his
1 Asiatic Researches, vol. I, p. 422 (1786).


## p. 328 (#352) ############################################

328
[CH.
Greek Scholars
name. In all his editions, Elmsley devoted himself mainly to the
illustration of the meaning of the text, and to the elucidation of
the niceties of Attic idiom. He had also a wide knowledge of
history, and, for the last two years of his life, was Camden
professor of ancient history at Oxford.
Elmsley's careful edition of the Laurentian scholia on Sophocles
was published at the Clarendon press by Thomas Gaisford, who
was born only six years later than Elmsley, and survived him by
more than thirty. He was appointed regius professor of Greek
at Oxford in 1812, and was dean of Christ Church for the last
twenty-four years of his life. He first made his mark, in 1810,
by his edition of Hephaestion's Manual of Greek Metre. He
published an annotated edition of the Poetae Minores Graeci;
but almost all the rest of his work was in the province of Greek
prose. Thus, he prepared a variorum edition of Aristotle's
Rhetoric, and also edited Herodotus and Stobaeus, and the great
lexicon of Suidas as well as the Etymologicum Magnum.
A certain deflection from the Porsonian tradition at Cambridge
is exemplified by Samuel Butler, who was educated at Rugby and
St John's, and was headmaster of Shrewsbury from 1798 to 1836,
and bishop of Lichfield for the last three years of his life. For
the syndics of the Cambridge press he edited Aeschylus, after
Stanley's text, with the Greek scholia, and also with the notes of
Stanley and his predecessors, and selections from those of subse-
quent editors, and a synopsis of various readings. ' It was ably
reviewed by Charles James Blomfield, who described it as 'an
indiscriminate coacervation' of all that had been expressly written
on Aeschylus,' and, many years afterwards, said of Butler, ‘he was
a really learned as well as amiable man, but his forte did not lie
in verbal criticism. He was interested in classic travel, and his
Atlas of Ancient Geography, first published in 1822, passed
through many editions, and was reprinted as late as 1907.
The Porsonian type of scholarship, represented at Oxford by
Elmsley, was maintained at Cambridge by three fellows of Trinity:
Dobree, Monk and C. J. Blomfield. The first of these, Peter
Paul Dobree, was indebted to his birth in Guernsey for his
mastery of French. He edited (with many additions of his own)
Porson's Aristophanica, as well as Porson's transcript of Photius.
He was regius professor of Greek for the last two years of his
life (1823—5). His Adversaria on the Greek poets, historians
and orators, as well as his transcript of the Lexicon rhetoricum
Cantabrigiense, and his Notes on Inscriptions, were edited by


## p. 329 (#353) ############################################

xv] Dobree. Monk. Blomfield. Kennedy 329
his successor, James Scholefield, who, in 1828, produced, in his
edition of Aeschylus, the earliest English attempt to embrace in
a single volume the results of modern criticism on the text of that
poet. While Dobree was a follower of Porson in the criticism of
Aristophanes, he broke new ground as a critic of the Attic orators.
As professor of Greek, Porson was immediately succeeded by
James Henry Monk, of Charterhouse and Trinity, afterwards dean
of Peterborough, and bishop of Gloucester and Bristol. Following
in the steps of Porson and Elmsley, Monk edited four plays of
Euripides, the Hippolytus and Alcestis and the two Iphigenias.
The year of his consecration as bishop was that of the first
publication of his admirable Life of Bentley (1830).
Monk's fellow-editor of Porson's Adversaria in 1812 was
Charles James Blomfield, who edited, with notes and glossaries,
the Prometheus, Septem, Persae, Agamemnon and Choëphoroe.
The Prometheus of 1810 was the first text of any importance
printed by the Cambridge press in the ‘Porson type. ' The best
part of Blomfield's edition of each of these plays was the glossary,
a feature of special value in days when there was no good Greek
and English lexicon. He also edited Callimachus, and collected
(in the Museum Criticum) the fragments of Sappho, Alcaeus,
Stesichorus and Sophron. For the last thirty-three years of his
life, he was successively bishop of Chester and of London.
Among the ablest of Samuel Butler's pupils at Shrewsbury
was Benjamin Hall Kennedy, fellow of St John's, who succeeded
Butler as headmaster, a position which he filled with the highest
distinction for thirty years. Born in 1804, he died in 1889, after
holding the Greek professorship at Cambridge for the last twenty-
two years of his life. His best-known works are his Latin
Primer, and his Public School Latin Grammar. He also pub-
lished, with translation and notes, the Agamemnon of Aeschylus,
the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the Birds of Aristophanes
and the Theaetetus of Plato. His school edition of Virgil was
followed by his Cambridge edition of the text. He produced
many admirable renderings in Greek and Latin verse, as principal
contributor to Sabrinae Corolla, and sole author of Between
Whiles. His younger brother, Charles Rann Kennedy, is re-
membered as translator of Demosthenes.
The senior classic of 1830, Christopher Wordsworth, nephew of
the poet, travelled in Greece, where he discovered the site of Dodona.
He was afterwards headmaster of Harrow, and finally bishop of
Lincoln. Of his classical publications, the most widely known is


## p. 330 (#354) ############################################

330
Greek Scholars
[CH.
- ,
his ‘pictorial, descriptive and historical' work on Greece. Breadth
of geographic and historic interest, rather than minute scholarship,
was the main characteristic of the able edition of Herodotus
produced by his contemporary, Joseph William Blakesley, ulti-
mately dean of Lincoln.
Edmund Law Lushington, the senior classic of 1832, is
represented in literature mainly by the inaugural discourse On
the Study of Greek, delivered in 1839 at the beginning of his
long tenure of the Greek professorship at Glasgow. Wedded
to Tennyson's youngest sister, he is happily described, in the
epilogue to In Memoriam, as wearing all that weight of learning
lightly like a flower. ' The second place in the tripos of 1832 was
won by Richard Shilleto, of Trinity (finally fellow of Peterhouse),
who soon became famous as a private tutor in classics. A con-
summate master of Greek idiom, he produced notable editions
of the speech De Falsa Legatione of Demosthenes, and of the
first and second books of Thucydides, while his genius as an
original writer of Greek verse was exemplified in fugitive fly-
sheets in the style of Aristophanes or Theocritus. His distin-
guished contemporary, William Hepworth Thompson, regius
professor of Greek from 1853 to 1867, and, for the last twenty
years of his life, master of Trinity, produced admirable comment-
aries on the Phaedrus and Gorgias of Plato, and, by his personal
influence, did much towards widening the range of classical
studies in Cambridge. His dry humour is exemplified by many
memorable sayings, while the serene dignity of his presence still
survives in the portrait by Herkomer in the hall of his college.
Thompson had a high regard for the original and independent
scholarship of Charles Badham, of Wadham college, Oxford, and of
Peterhouse, Cambridge. Badham gave ample proof of his ability
and his critical acumen in his editions of three plays of Euripides,
and of five dialogues of Plato. He was specially attracted to the
school of Porson, and of the great Dutch scholar, Cobet, to whom
he dictated a letter written on his death-bed at Sydney, where he
passed the last seventeen years of his life as professor of classics
and logic.
Among Thompson's contemporaries at Trinity was John William
Donaldson, whose New Cratylus and Varronianus gave a con-
siderable impulse to the study of comparative philology and
ethnology. His name is also associated with a comprehensive
work on The Theatre of the Greeks, an edition of Pindar and
a Greek and a Latin grammar. A volume, in which he contended


## p. 331 (#355) ############################################

Xv] Thompson. Donaldson. Paley.
Cope 331
that the lost book of Jasher formed the religious marrow of
the Scriptures,' caused much excitement in theological circles,
and led to his resigning the headmastership of Bury St Edmunds
school. He subsequently wrote an interesting work entitled
Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning, and translated
and completed K. O. Müller's History of Greek Literature.
Donaldson's younger contemporary, Frederick Apthorp Paley,
of Shrewsbury and St John's, was a man of wide and varied
interests. An eager botanist, and an enthusiastic student of
ecclesiastical architecture, he joined the church of Rome in 1846,
returned to Cambridge as a private tutor from 1860 to 1874 and,
after three years' tenure of a professorship in a catholic college
in Kensington, spent the last eleven years of his life at Bourne-
mouth. His edition of Aeschylus with Latin notes was followed
by an English edition, which is widely recognised as his best work.
He also edited Euripides, Hesiod, Theocritus and the Iliad. An
incidental remark by Donaldson on certain resemblances between
the Iliad and the late epic of Quintus Smyrnaeus led Paley to
maintain that the Homeric poems in their present form were not
earlier than the age of Alexander. In the preface to his Euripides
he protests against the purely textual notes characteristic of the
school of Porson.
Edward Meredith Cope, of Trinity, who was educated under
Kennedy at Shrewsbury, is best known as the author of an
elaborate introduction to the Rhetoric of Aristotle, which was
followed by a comprehensive commentary. William George
Clark, of Shrewsbury and Trinity, published in his Peloponnesus,
in 1858, the results of a Greek tour taken in the company of
Thompson. During his tenure of the office of public orator, from
1857 to 1869, a critical edition of Shakespeare, designed in 1860,
was successfully completed by Clark and Aldis Wright? . Clark's
name has been fitly commemorated by the establishment, at Trinity
college, of the ‘Clark Lectureship in the Literature of England. '
His contemporary, Churchill Babington, of St John's, produced,
in 1851–8, the editio princeps of four of the recently discovered
speeches of Hyperides. He was also interested in botany, and in
the birds of Suffolk, and was Disney professor of archaeology
from 1865 to 1880. Born a year later than Clark and Babington,
Hubert Ashton Holden, fellow of Trinity and afterwards head-
master of Ipswich, edited a school-text of Aristophanes, with an
exhaustive Onomasticon, and produced elaborate commentaries
1 Cf. ante, vol. v, p. 280.
6


## p. 332 (#356) ############################################

332
[CH.
Greek Scholars
6
on three of the treatises of Xenophon, and on eight of Plutarch's
Lives, besides editing Cicero, De Officiis, and two of his speeches.
Kennedy's successor as regius professor of Greek was Richard
Claverhouse Jebb, of Charterhouse and Trinity, who was elected
public orator in 1869, professor of Greek at Glasgow in 1875,
and at Cambridge in 1889. For the last sixteen years of his life
he held the Cambridge professorship, and, for the last fourteen,
was member for the university. He will long be remembered
as the accomplished editor of Sophocles and Bacchylides, and
as the eloquent author of The Attic Orators. His other works
include an annotated text and translation of the Characters of
Theophrastus, an Introduction to Homer, with lectures on
modern Greece and on Greek poetry, and monographs on
Erasmus and on Bentley. A humanist in the highest sense of
the term, he assimilated the spirit of classical literature, and The
Attic Orators revealed to the literary world the fact that one of
the foremost among living Greek scholars was himself an artist
in English prose.
His Sophocles has been justly characterised
as 'one of the most finished, comprehensive, and valuable works,
in the sphere of literary exposition, which this age or any has
produced,' and these consummate qualities were also exhibited in
his latest work, his complete edition of Bacchylides. His powers as
a writer of classical verse had already been proved by his three
Pindaric Odes, to one of which allusion was made by the poet
laureate of the day in his dedication of Demeter. The most
brilliant scholar of his time, he unconsciously portrayed his own
gifts, when, in his admirable monograph on Bentley, he translated
that great scholar's declaration that 'wide reading' and erudite
‘knowledge of Greek and Latin antiquity' are not enough for
the modern critic of an ancient author :
A man should have all that at his fingers' ends. . . . But, besides this,
there is need of the keenest judgment, of sagacity and quickness, of a certain
divining tact and inspiration, as was said of Aristarcbus-a faculty which
can be acquired by no constancy of toil or length of life, but comes solely by
the gift of nature and the happy star2.
As member for the university of Cambridge, Sir Richard Jebb
was succeeded by Samuel Henry Butcher, of Marlborough and
Trinity, professor of Greek in the university of Edinburgh from
1882 to 1903, and ultimately president of the British Academy.
Besides producing a compendious work on Demosthenes, and the
1
>
1 Verrall, A. W. , in Biographisches Jahrbuch, Leipzig, 1906, p. 77.
: Jebb's Bentley, p. 210.


## p. 333 (#357) ############################################

Xv]
333
Jebb.
Butcher. Verrall. Adam
earlier portion of a critical text of that orator, he took part in
a memorable translation of the Odyssey, published a critical text
and translation of Aristotle's treatise on poetry, and was the
author of two volumes of suggestive and inspiring lectures on the
genius and on the originality of Greece.
A masterly review of the great qualities of Sir Richard Jebb,
as scholar and critic, and especially as editor of Sophocles, was
written by Butcher's friend and contemporary, Arthur Woolgar
Verrall, of Wellington and Trinity, who, in his own editions of
plays of Aeschylus and Euripides, and in his essays on the latter
poet, gave proof of a singular aptitude for verbal emendation,
and of acute literary insight. Part of the too brief life of Walter
Headlam, of Harrow and King's, was devoted to emending and
translating Aeschylus, while his Book of Greek Verse gave ample
evidence of his taste as an interpreter and an imitator of the Greek
poets. A volume of admirable translations into Greek verse and
prose was published by Richard Dacre Archer-Hind, of Shrewsbury
and Trinity, who also produced excellent editions of the Phaedo
and Timaeus of Plato. An elaborate commentary on the Republic
was the most notable achievement of James Adam, of Aberdeen
and of Caius and Emmanuel, whose Gifford lectures, entitled
The Religious Teachers of Greece, were followed by a volume of
collected papers under the title The Vitality of Platonism, and
other Essays.
In the age succeeding that of Elmsley and Gaisford, Greek
scholarship was well represented at Oxford by Henry George
Liddell, dean of Christ Church, and Robert Scott, master of
Balliol, joint authors of the standard Greek and English lexicon,
first published in 1843. As master of Balliol, Scott was suc-
ceeded in 1870 by Benjamin Jowett, who, in 1855, had succeeded
Gaisford as professor of Greek. His complete translation of
Plato was achieved in 1871, and was followed by his translations
of Thucydides, and of the Politics of Aristotle. All these three
great works were justly recognised as masterpieces of English ;
the rendering of Plato in particular, with its admirable intro-
ductions, has done much towards popularising the study of that
author in the English world. Jowett's contemporary, Mark
Pattison, rector of Exeter, is remembered by scholars as the
author of Isaac Casaubon, and of Essays on Scaliger. His f!
younger contemporary, Richard Copley Christie, of Lincoln col-
lege, and for some years professor in Manchester, wrote a valuable


## p. 334 (#358) ############################################

334
Greek Scholars
[CH.
life of Étienne Dolet, the Martyr of the Renaissance. By the side
of Pattison and Jowett should be mentioned George Rawlinson,
fellow of Exeter, who produced in 1858 a standard translation of
Herodotus, with notes and essays, followed by a series of important
volumes on the great oriental monarchies ! .
An excellent edition of the Ethics of Aristotle, with an English
commentary and illustrative essays, was first published in 1857
by Sir Alexander Grant, fellow of Oriel; and two accurate
editions of the Politics were simultaneously produced in 1854
by J. R. T. Eaton, of Merton, and Richard Congreve, of Wadham.
As regius professor of Greek, Jowett was succeeded by Ingram
Bywater, fellow of Exeter, who held that office from 1893 to his
resignation in 1908. The most important of the works of this
admirably accurate scholar was his commentary on the Poetics.
His valuable collection of some of the choicest specimens of
ancient and modern Greek literature was left to the Bodleian.
Among Jowett's pupils at Balliol was William Gunion Rutherford,
ultimately headmaster of Westminster school. He made his mark
mainly by his New Phrynichus, which, under the guise of a
commentary on the grammatical rules of the Atticists of the
second century A. D. , was really a comprehensive treatise on the
characteristics of Attic Greek.
John Conington, afterwards better known as a Latin scholar,
edited, in the early part of his career, the Agamemnon and
Choëphoroe of Aeschylus, and afterwards completed the Spenserian
rendering of the Iliad by Philip Stanhope Worsley, translator of
the Odyssey. A good translation of the Iliad into blank verse
was published in 1864 by the earl of Derby. Rather earlier,
in 1858, William Ewart Gladstone produced Studies on Homer
and the Homeric Age, the greater part of the results of which
were summed up eleven years later in his Juventus Mundi.
He also published, under the title Homeric Synchronism, 'an
enquiry into the time and place of Homer,' besides producing
a primer on Homer. The Homeric poems were the constant
theme of the devoted labours of David Binning Monro, provost
of Oriel for the last twenty-three years of his life. His Grammar
of the Homeric dialect, published in 1882, was ultimately followed
by his edition of the second half of the Odyssey, with important
'appendices, including a masterly discussion of the history of the
Homeric poems. The Homeric question was also ably discussed
1 As to Pattison, R. C. Christie and George Rawlinson, see a later volume of this
History.
3/
A
is zo'rnaer, sis, 11. 376,64777. com
Paltison,
R. at
tark. e. Christe, ind.


## p. 335 (#359) ############################################

Xv]
335
Latin Scholars
As pro-
by John Stuart Blackie, professor of Greek in Edinburgh, and was
more minutely studied by Sir William Duguid Geddes, professor
of Greek at Aberdeen, who also produced an interesting edition
of Plato's Phaedo.
Among Latin scholars, mention may be made of Thomas Hewitt
Key, of St John's and Trinity, Cambridge, professor of Latin at
University college, London, from 1828 to 1842, and of comparative
grammar from 1842 to 1875. His Latin Grammar was com-
pleted in 1846, while his Latin Dictionary was posthumously
published from his unfinished manuscript in 1888.
fessor of Latin, he was succeeded by George Long, who edited
Cicero's Orations in 1851-8, and produced translations of
thirteen of Plutarch's Roman Lives, and of the Meditations
of Marcus Aurelius, and the Manual of Epictetus. His latest
work was his History of the Decline of the Roman Republic
Meanwhile, he had contributed numerous articles on Roman law
and other subjects to the great series of dictionaries planned
by William Smith, who was knighted in 1892, and who deserves
to be remembered as a great organiser of learned literary labour.
The dictionaries of Greek and Roman antiquities (1842, etc. ),
biography and mythology (1843, etc. ) and geography (1857)
were followed by dictionaries of the Bible and of Christian
antiquities and Christian biography. The Latin and English
dictionary of 1855, founded on Forcellini and Freund, has its
counterpart in the English and Latin dictionary of 1870, com-
piled with the aid of Theophilus D. Hall and other scholars.
Among the Latinists of England, the foremost place is due to
Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, of Shrewsbury and Trinity,
whose masterly edition of Lucretius, with critical notes and a
complete commentary, and a vigorous rendering in English prose,
was first published in 1864. Five years later he contributed a
revised text, and a critical introduction, to the edition of Horace,
with illustrations from ancient gems selected by the learned
archaeologist, Charles William King. His other works include an
edition of the Aetna of an unknown poet, and Criticisms and
Elucidations of Catullus. His Translations into Latin and
Greek Verse are justly held in high esteem. A masculine vigour
is the main characteristic of all his work-of his Latin verse
compositions, not less than of his Criticisms of Catullus, and his
translation of Lucretius.
The professorship of Latin vacated by Munro's resignation in
See ante, p. 307.


## p. 336 (#360) ############################################

336
[ch.
Latin Scholars
1872 was filled for the next twenty-eight years by John Eyton
Bickersteth Mayor, of Shrewsbury and St John's, university
librarian from 1864 to 1867. His Juvenal was first published in
1853. Not a few of the comprehensive notes in this work
(especially in its later editions) are recognised as signally
complete summaries of the literature of the subject concerned.
The stamp of his profound learning is also impressed upon all
his other works. Among those directly connected with classical
scholarship may be mentioned his First Greek Reader, and his
editions of Cicero's Second Philippic, and of the third book of
Pliny's Letters. In 1863–9 he contributed to the Rolls series
the two volumes of his learned edition of Richard of Cirencester.
Nearly one hundred and fifty pages of the preface to the second
volume are devoted to the examination of a work ascribed to
Richard under the title De Situ Britanniae, proving it to be the
work of a forger alike contemptible as penman, Latinist, historian,
geographer, critic'; it was never mentioned until 1747, and its
author was Charles Bertram, of Copenhagen. Mayor's activity, as
editor and biographer, continued to the last, and extended into
many paths of historical and antiquarian research? ; while what-
ever he published was annotated with a minute and exhaustive
erudition which is generally reserved for the leading representa-
tives of classical literature.
Five years younger than Mayor was the scholar, educational
reformer and legal writer, Henry John Roby, senior classic of
1853, fellow and ultimately honorary fellow of St John's, where
he began his career as a college lecturer and a private tutor for
the seven years between 1854 and 1861, making his first public
appearance in 1858 as the author of a pamphlet on college
reform. His brief experience as a master at Dulwich convinced
him of the need for improvements in the Latin grammar then in
vogue, and led to his producing in 1862 his Elementary Latin
Granmar, which profoundly modified Kennedy's revised version of
the authorised text-book. This was followed, ten years later, by the
first of the five editions of bis Latin Grammar from Plautus to
Suetonius, in which the principles of phonetics and physiology
were for the first time applied to the life and growth of the Latin
language. Meanwhile, at the end of 1864, he had been appointed
secretary to the Endowed Schools commission, and wrote two
of the chief parts of its report. His experience in 1866–8 as
professor of jurisprudence at University college, London, ultimately
1 See bibliography.


## p. 337 (#361) ############################################

Xv] Conington. Nettleship. Ellis. Sellar 337
XV
bore fruit in 1884 in the two volumes of his Introduction to
Justinian's Digest, and, again, in 1902, in the two volumes entitled
Roman Private Law in the Times of Cicero and the Antonines,
and in his Essays on the Law of Cicero's Private Orations. He
was member for the Eccles division of Lancashire from 1890 to
1895, when he left Manchester and settled at Grasmere for the
last twenty years of his life. A standard edition of Cicero, De
Oratore, was prepared for the Oxford press by Augustus Samuel
Wilkins, of St John's college, Cambridge, for many years professor
of Latin and comparative philology in Manchester. He also edited
Cicero's Speeches against Catiline, and Horace's Epistles, besides
taking part in the translation of George Curtius's Principles of
Greek Etymology, and of his work entitled The Greek Verb.
The first professor of Latin at Oxford was John Conington,
who was elected in 1854 and held the professorship for the last
fifteen of the forty-four years of his life. He is widely known as
the editor and translator of Virgil and Persius. His translation
of Horace into English verse was regarded by Munro as 'on the
whole perhaps the best and most successful translation of a
Classic that exists in the English language. ' Edwin Palmer filled
the Latin chair from 1870 to 1878. Palmer's successor, Henry
Nettleship, planned a great Latin dictionary, and published a
tenth part of the proposed work under the title Contributions
to Latin Lexicography. He was an able critic of the ancient
Latin poets and grammarians, and many of his best papers have
been collected in the two volumes of his Essays. In 1893 he was
succeeded by Robinson Ellis, best known as the learned editor of
Catullus. His metrical version of that author has many touches
of true poetry. He was also known as the editor of Velleius
Paterculus, Avianus and Orientius, of the Ibis and the Aetna
and of the Appendix Vergiliana. An unswerving and unselfish
love of Latin learning, for its own sake, was the leading charac-
teristic of his work from first to last.
Meanwhile, in Scotland, the professorship of humanity in
Edinburgh was held by Conington's contemporary, a fellow of
Oriel, William Young Sellar. Immediately before his appoint-
ment in 1863, he produced, in his Roman Poets of the Republic, a
masterpiece of literary criticism, which was followed in due time
by similar works on Virgil, and on Horace and the elegiac poets.
Among Latin scholars in Ireland, mention should be made of
Henry Ellis Allen, who, between 1836 and 1856, produced able
22
E. L. XII.
CH. XV.


## p. 338 (#362) ############################################

338
Classical Archaeologists [CH.
critical editions of Cicero's philosophical works; and of James
Henry, whose Aeneidea, of 1873 to 1889, includes many important
contributions to the interpretation of the poet's text. In the next
generation, textual criticism was the forte of Arthur Palmer,
professor of Latin at Trinity college, Dublin, who was specially
interested in the criticism of the elegiac poets and of Plautus.
His contemporary, Robert Yelverton Tyrrell, who may fitly be
described as doctus sermones utriusque linguae, edited the
Bacchae of Euripides during his tenure of the professorship of
Latin, and the Miles Gloriosus of Plautus on his promotion to
the professorship of Greek. In 1879, he undertook an extensive
commentary on the correspondence of Cicero, which, with the
learned aid of Louis Claude Purser, he brought to a successful
conclusion in 1900. He also published a critical text of Sophocles.
His devotion to ancient and modern drama was combined with
a keen wit and a felicitous style; and his appreciation of great
writers was enhanced by his own delight in literary form.
CLASSICAL ARCHAEOLOGISTS
An interest in classical archaeology was fostered by the founda-
tion of the society of Dilettanti at the close of 1733. The society
produced a splendid series of archaeological publications, includ-
ing Richard Chandler's Antiquities of Ionia (1769 and 1797)!
Learned travel was also represented by Edward Dodwell's Classical
and Topographical Tour through Greece (1819), and by his
work on Cyclopian remains in Italy and Greece (1834); also by
Sir William Gell's works on Troy and Ithaca, his itineraries of
Greece and the Morea, and his Pompeiana (1817-32).
One of the foremost of the Greek topographers of the nine-
teenth century was William Martin Leake, who, on retiring from
active military service in 1815, devoted all his energies to the
cause of classical learning. In his Researches in Greece (1814) he
gives an elementary grammar of modern Greek, with a list of
neo-Hellenic authors. This was followed by an important work
entitled The Topography of Athens, and by Travels in Asia
Minor, in the Morea, and in Northern Greece. In his Numismata
Hellenica he described his great collection of Greek coins, which
was afterwards acquired by the university of Cambridge.
The geographical and historical elucidation of Thucydides was
largely promoted by Thomas Arnold's edition of 1830—5, whose
i See further in bibliography, 11.


## p. 339 (#363) ############################################

Xv]
339
Leake.
Newton
History of Rome is noticed in another chapter", where reference
is also made to the chronological researches of Henry Fynes
Clinton, of Christ Church, Oxford, the learned author of Fasti
Hellenici and Fasti Romani. His younger contemporary William
Mure travelled in Greece in 1838, and, in his Critical History
of the Literature of Ancient Greece, showed a special interest in
Xenophon. An Enquiry into the Credibility of Early Roman
History was published in 1855 by Sir George Cornewall Lewis,
who also translated Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens, edited
Babrius and wrote on The Astronomy of the Ancients.
Lycia was traversed in 1838 and 1840 by Charles Fellows, the
discoverer of the Xanthian marbles, and, in 1842, by Thomas Abel
Brimage Spratt and Edward Forbes. Nineveh was excavated in
1845 by (Sir) Austen Henry Layard. Crete was explored in 1851-3
by Spratt, and, more than half a century later, by (Sir) Arthur
Evans, whose investigations, in and after 1893, resulted in the
discovery of the pre-Phoenician script, and, finally (in 1900-8),
in the excavation of the prehistoric palace of Cnossos. The
necropolis of Cameiros in Rhodes was excavated by Salzmann
and Biliotti in 1858 and 1865; Cyrene was explored in 1860—1 by
(Sir) Robert Murdoch Smith and E. A. Porcher ; the antiquities
of Egypt were investigated by the aid of the Egypt Exploration
Fund, and also by that of the Research Account founded by
William Matthew Flinders Petrie in 1894, and enlarged as the
British School of Archaeology in Egypt in 1905.
Charles Thomas Newton, of Shrewsbury and of Christ Church,
began in 1840 the long series of services to the British Museum
which ended in 1885, when he completed the twenty-four years
of his tenure of the office of keeper of Greek and Roman
antiquities. That appointment marked the dawn of a true
interest in classical archaeology in England. Newton's name had
already been associated with the recovery of the remains of the
Mausoleum of Halicarnassus in 1856. In 1880 he published a
collected edition of his Essays in Art and Archaeology, including
an excellent paper on Greek inscriptions. He was among the
first to welcome the opening of the museums of classical archae-
ology at Cambridge and Oxford. At the inaugural ceremony at
Cambridge in 1884 the cast of the figure of Proserpine, which he
had himself discovered at Cnidos, prompted him to describe the
occasion as the ăvodos of archaeology, so long buried in England. '
In the study of Greek architecture an eminent position was
1 See ante, p. 303.
22-2


## p. 340 (#364) ############################################

340 Classical Archaeologists [CH.
6
>
>
attained by Newton's contemporary, Francis Cranmer Penrose,
who, as 'travelling bachelor of the university of Cambridge,'
studied architecture in Rome and in Athens, where he was led by
the theories of Pennethorne to determine the hyperbolic curve of
the entasis of the columns of the Parthenon. The results were
published in his Principles of Athenian Architecture in 18511
The study of classical archaeology has been fostered in England
by the foundation of the societies for the Promotion of Hellenic
and Roman Studies in 1879 and 1911, and by the institution of
the British Schools of Archaeology at Athens (of which Penrose
was the first director) in 1886 and at Rome in 1901.
Fragments of Epicurus and Philodemus, discovered at Hercu-
laneum in 1752, were published at Oxford in 1824 and 1891.
Many remnants of Greek literature have been recovered from
the sands of Egypt. Three of the speeches of the Attic orator,
Hyperides, were discovered in 1847, and his Funeral Oration in
1856. Part of another oration was found in the series acquired
by the British Museum in 1890, which also included Aristotle's
Constitution of Athens, and the Mimes of Herodas, followed in
1896—7 by the Odes of Bacchylides. Among the literary papyri
since published by the Graeco-Roman branch of the Egypt Ex-
ploration Fund have been the Paeans and Partheneia of Pindar,
a large part of a satyric drama of Sophocles and numerous
fragments of the Greek Bible.
Among English editors of the Greek Testament, Christopher
Wordsworth, afterwards bishop of Lincoln, published in 1856–9
a commentary on the Greek Testament which teems with citations
from patristic literature. The German commentators are more
fully noticed in the edition produced by Henry Alford, dean of
Canterbury. Several of the Pauline epistles were elaborately
edited by Charles John Ellicott, afterwards bishop of Gloucester
and Bristol, and, with a higher degree of success, by Joseph Barber
Lightfoot, bishop of Durham, who was also the editor of Clement
of Rome, and of Ignatius and Polycarp. Critical texts of the
Greek Testament were produced by Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, by
Frederick Henry Scrivener, and, in 1881, by Brooke Foss Westcott,
afterwards bishop of Durham, and Fenton John Anthony Hort.
Of these last, the former published commentaries on the Gospel
and the epistles of St John, and on the epistle to the Hebrews.
English and American scholars joined in the revision of the
1 For other works on classical archaeology see bibliography.


## p. 341 (#365) ############################################

xv]
341
Oriental Scholars
Authorised Version of the New Testament from June 1870 to
November 1880.
ORIENTAL SCHOLARS
. و، ناران
The Cambridge Hebraists of the nineteenth century include the
names of Samuel Lee, professor of Hebrew and Arabic ; William
Hodge Mill, who is better known as a theologian; Frederick Field,
whose edition of Origen's Hexapla placed him in the front rank
of Hebrew and Syriac scholars; Peter Hamnett Mason, author ú?
of a Hebrew grammar and a rabbinical reader ; Andrew Bruce
Davidson, author of a Hebrew grammar and syntax, and of com-
mentaries on the book of Job, and on several of the prophets;
and Charles Taylor, master of St John's, editor of the Hebrew
Sayings of the Fathers. William Aldis Wright, besides editing
a commentary on the book of Job from a MS in the Cambridge
library, was secretary of the Old Testament revision company
from 1870 to 1885. At Oxford, the professorship of Hebrew was
held for fifty-four years by Edward Bouverie Puseył, author of
A Commentary on the Minor Prophets and of Lectures on the
Prophet Daniel; and, for thirty years, by Samuel Rolles Driver,
author of An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament,
,,,
and of commentaries on many parts of it, as well as joint author
of a Hebrew-English lexicon.
qyte
Meanwhile, in London, Christian David Ginsburg had, among
his many important works, produced translations of The Song of
indi
Songs and of Ecclesiastes, and had published the Massorah,
a at ganolex
a 'Masoretico-critical' edition of the Hebrew Bible, with an
introduction, and Facsimiles of MSS of the Hebrew Bible.
his common
William Cureton, of Christ Church, published a Syriac MS of The
Epistles of St Ignatius in 1845—9, the Syriac version of The Festal
Letters of Athanasius, and remains of the Syriac Gospels from a MS and Cinsi. com?
A congé, eral
of the fifth century; Robert Payne Smith, dean of Canterbury, began,
in 1868, the publication of an important Syriac lexicon ; and Robert
Lubbock Bensly, fellow of Gonville and Caius, who was the first to
publish, in 1875, from an Amiens MS of the ninth century, the
missing fragment of the Latin translation of the fourth book of Ezra,
spent the last year of his life in deciphering the Syriac MS of
the Gospels discovered in 1892 at St Catharine's, on mount Sinai.
Bensly’s discovery of the fragment of the fourth book of Ezra
had been anticipated, in 1826, by John Palmer, fellow of St John's,
OPY
*****
N
1 Cf, ante, pp. 262—3.


## p. 342 (#366) ############################################

342
[CH.
Oriental Scholars
professor of Arabic from 1804 to 1840, whose discovery was not
published until 1877.
Arabic was ably represented in the nineteenth century by
Edward William Lane, author of the great Arabic lexicon, and
translator of The Arabian Nights ; by William Wright, professor
of Arabic in Cambridge from 1870 to 1889, author of an
excellent Arabic grammar, and a distinguished Syriac scholar;
and by Edward Henry Palmer, lord almoner's reader in Cam-
bridge, who showed the highest genius for the acquisition of
oriental languages, travelled in the Desert of the Exodus' in
1868–9, and finally died in Arabia in the service of his country
during the rebellion of Arabi in 1882. His successor in the
readership, William Robertson Smith, a scholar of singular
versatility, besides studying physics with distinction in Aberdeen,
and becoming prominent as an advanced theologian, devoted
himself to oriental languages, and was appointed librarian of the
university of Cambridge, and, subsequently, professor of Arabic.
In Turkish, one of the leading authorities was Sir James
William Redhouse, author of a grammar and dictionary of the
Ottoman language. Turkish, Arabic and Persian were successfully
studied by Elias John Wilkinson Gibb, author of a History of
Ottoman Poetry; and Persian, many years previously, by Sir
William Ouseley, and by his younger brother, Sir Gore Ouseley.
The cuneiform inscriptions of Persia, Assyria and Babylonia were
deciphered between 1837 and 1851 by Sir Henry Creswicke
Rawlinson, and, in 1849, by Edward Hincks, fellow of Trinity
college, Dublin. In 1876, all the inscriptions relating to the
Creation, which had been found in Assyria by George Smith, of
the British Museum, were published in his Chaldaean Genesis.
Among English Egyptologists special mention is due to Sir
John Gardner Wilkinson, whose admirable Manners and Customs
of the Ancient Egyptians, first published in 1837, attained its final
form in 1878. Samuel Birch, of the British Museum, produced, in
1867, an Hieroglyphical Grammar and Dictionary, and a transla-
tion of The Book of the Dead, and, in 1858, a History of Ancient
Pottery, a new and revised edition of which appeared in 1873.
Among Chinese scholars, the most eminent have been the three
missionaries—Robert Morrison, author of the first Chinese-English
dictionary (1815—23), who translated the Bible with the
coopera-
tion of William Milne; Walter Henry Medhurst, translator of the
Bible, and author of an English-Japanese, as well as a Chinese-
English and English-Chinese, dictionary; and James Legge,
>


## p. 343 (#367) ############################################

Xv]
343
Arabic. Chinese.
Sanskrit
canon.
translator of some Taoist classics, and of the whole of the Confucian
The last of these scholars was the first holder of the
chair of Chinese founded at Oxford in 1875, while at Cambridge
an honorary professorship of that language was held until 1895
by Sir Thomas Francis Wade, who presented to the university
his valuable library of Chinese literature.
The first Englishman who worked at Sanskrit to any purpose was
Sir Charles Wilkins. He began his study of the language in India
in 1778, encouraged by Warren Hastings, and, besides translating
the Bhagavadgītā and the Hitopadesa, produced a Sanskrit
grammar in 1808. In 1786 (as we have already seen) Sir William
Jones had pointed out the affinity of Sanskrit with Greek, Latin,
Gothic and Celtic, and, in 1789, its connection with Zend.