§1. Greek Scholars. XV. Scholars, Antiquaries and Bibliographers. Vol. 12. The Romantic Revival. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes. 1907

The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XII. The Romantic Revival.

XV. Scholars, Antiquaries and Bibliographers.

§ 1. Greek Scholars.

EARLY in the nineteenth century the most notable name in the world of classical scholarship was that of Richard Porson. A son of the parish clerk at East Ruston, near North Walsham, in Norfolk, he was born in 1759, and gave early proof of remarkable powers of memory. Thanks to the liberality of his friends, his education, begun in the neighbourhood of his birthplace, was completed at Eton and at Trinity college, Cambridge. He was elected Craven scholar in 1781, and first chancellor’s medallist and fellow of Trinity in 1782. Ten years later, he lost his fellowship, solely because of his resolve to remain a layman; but, once more, his friends raised a fund which provided him with an annual income of £100, and, in the same year, he was unanimously elected regius professor of Greek, the stipend at that time being only £40. He lived mainly in London, where his society was much sought by men of letters. In November, 1796, he married the sister of James Perry, editor of The Morning Chronicle, but he lost his wife in the following April. In 1806 he was appointed librarian of the London Institution, with a salary of £200 a year; and, in 1808, he died. He was buried in the ante-chapel of his college. In the same building is his bust by Chantrey. His portrait by Kirkby is in the dining-room of Trinity lodge; that by Hoppner, which has been engraved by Sharpe and by Adlard, is in the university library.

The first work that made him widely known was his Letters to Travis in 1788–9. Archdeacon Travis, in his Letters to Gibbon, had maintained the genuineness of the text as to the “three that bear record in heaven” (1 St. John V:7). Porson gave ample proof of its spuriousness, partly on the ground of its absence from, practically, all the Greek manuscripts. He thus supported an opinion which had been held by critics from the days of Erasmus, and had recently been affirmed afresh by Gibbon, 1 who regarded Porson’s reply as “the most acute and accurate piece of criticism since the days of Bentley.” 2

This was immediately followed by Porson’s preface and notes to a new edition of Toup’s Emendations on Suidas (1790). It was by a copy of that critic’s Longinus, presented to Porson in his boyhood by the headmaster of Eton, that the great Greek scholar had been first drawn to classical criticism. He also owed much to the influence of Bentley. “When I was seventeen,” he once said, “I thought I knew everything; as soon as I was twenty-four, and had read Bentley, I found I knew nothing.” 3 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. 5

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 unfortunately 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. 6

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 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”; 7 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.” 8

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.” 9 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.” 10 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 Harrow, and of Emmanuel and St. John’s, who was born twelve years before Porson, and survived him by seventeen. Headmaster 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 11 ; 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.” 12

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. His notes on Lucretius are disfigured 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.” 13 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 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 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:

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 philosopher 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 Celtic had the same origin with the Sanscrit. The old Persian may be added to the same family. 14

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 president 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 successively 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 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 subsequent 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 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 published, 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 remembered 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 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 Williams Blakesley, ultimately 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 consummate 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 distinguished 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 commentaries 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 considerable 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 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 Bournemouth. 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. 15 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 headmaster of Ipswich, edited a school-text of Aristophanes, with an exhaustive Onomasticon, and produced elaborate commentaries 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 Greeks 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,” 16 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 Aristarchus—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 star. 17

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 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 succeeded 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 introductions, 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 younger contemporary, Richard Copley Christie, of Lincoln college, and for some years professor in Manchester, wrote a valuable 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. 18

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 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.

Note 1. Decline and Fall, chap. XXXVII, notes 117–122. [ back ]

Note 2. Miscellaneous Works, vol. I, 159. [ back ]

Note 3. Luard, H. R., in Cambridge Essays, 1857, p. 169 n. [ back ]

Note 4. Note on Medea, 139 f. [ back ]

Note 5. Luard, l. c. p. 153. [ back ]

Note 6. David Murray’s R. and A. Foulis, 1913, pp. 121 f. [ back ]

Note 7. Parr’s Memoirs, vol. VII, p. 403. [ back ]

Note 8. Crito Cantabrigiensis, A Vindication of the Literary Character of Prof. Porson, 1827, pp. 347 f. [ back ]

Note 9. The Edinburgh Review, vol. XVII, p. 382. [ back ]

Note 10. Rogers, Table Talk, Porsoniana, p. 334. [ back ]

Note 11. Baker-Mayor, History of St. John’s College, vol. I, p. 540. [ back ]

Note 12. Essays, p. 642, ed. 1861. [ back ]

Note 13. Munro’s Lucretius, vol. I, p. 19, ed. 1873. [ back ]

Note 14. Asiatic Researches, vol. I, p. 422 (1786). [ back ]

Note 15. Cf. ante, Vol. V, p. 312. [ back ]

Note 16. Verrall, A. W., in Biographisches Jahrbuch, Leipzig, 1906, p. 77. [ back ]

Note 17. Jebb’s Bentley, p. 210. [ back ]

Note 18. As to Pattison, R. C. Christie and George Rawlinson, see a later volume of this History. [ back ]