attendance on the prince of Wales. His canonical residence bore literary fruit in his Memorials of Canterbury (1854)-four essays, in which that on the well-worn subject the murder of Becket attracted attention; and his eastern tour in his Sinai and Palestine, a historian's book of travel, any defects in which (and it met with censure in certain very high quarters) may be forgiven in consideration of the force with which it brings home to the reader the associations, sacred and other, of the land it describes. This labour of love, generously furthered by aid not less generously acknowledged, was, like the biography with which his literary life had begun, entirely congenial to him. Its success, no doubt, helped to bring about his appointment as professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford (1861). His first course of professorial lectures, dealing with the eastern church, attracted attention by the oriental character-portraits introduced into the account of the council of Nicaea, and by other passages. Then followed two series of lectures on the history of the Jewish church (from Abraham to Samuel, and thence to the fall of Jerusalem), of which his insight into historical character again forms a most attractive feature; for the time had passed when, as in Milman's earlier days, worthy people 'were shocked at hearing Abraham called a sheikh.' At least equally striking in these lectures was the freedom of critical enquiry which they displayed, though the remark that 'what Niebuhr was to Arnold, Ewald was to Stanley' may, perhaps, err on the side of overstatement. In 1872 came out Lectures on the Church of Scotland, delivered at Edinburgh; to Memorials of Westminster Abbey (1867) reference has already been made. The book was criticised, with some severity, by Freeman, whose review was, at first, attributed to Green; on the other side may be remembered, as a notable tribute to the encouragement derived from Stanley by many students, that Green was not only impelled to historical work by Stanley's Oxford lectures, but declared that it was from these that he first learned the principle of fairness. Stanley's successor in his Oxford chair, William Bright, will be remembered, if only for his extraordinary industry in the amassing of materials, which he arranged with so much lucidity that his History of the Church, A.D. 315-451 (1860) has been accepted as a standard manual for theological students. Although this book was composed for the special purpose it has fulfilled, and is unfrequently illuminated by sayings so fine as that concerning Constantine the Great, who, 'while he gave much to his religion, did not give himself,' the author writes with a suppressed, but, at

E. L. XII. CH. XIV.

21

times, caustic, zeal that appears to have been one of his characteristics. His Chapters of Early English Church History (1878), though full of learning, are less attractive. He was, also, a hymnwriter of much power.

From a different point of view than that of Milman, and with an amplitude of detail such as would hardly have commended itself to the historian of later Christianity, or even to him of The Decline and Fall itself, Thomas Hodgkin undertook the task of supplementing the vast enterprise of Gibbon, where it undoubtedly fell short of the historical learning of the present age. Having, like Grote, been trained in the responsibilities of the higher spheres of business, it was not till a relatively advanced stage of his life that Hodgkin first came before the historical public in an attempt to introduce to wider circles the letters of the chief extant authority on Roman life under Gothic dominion, the great Theodoric's circumspect minister Cassiodorus (1886), whose works have found a notable editor in Mommsen. After this, during nearly twoscore years (while some of his earlier publications marked the gradual advance of his labours) he carried out the task which he had set himself, and which covered the entire period from the partition of the Roman empire between Valens and Valentinian to the death of Charles the Great. The eight volumes entitled Italy and her Invaders were complete in 1899. During the execution of this great undertaking his enthusiasm had never deserted him, either in the main course of his narrative or the many side-paths into which his unflagging desire for knowledge diverted his researches, aided by his experiences as a traveller. He was an accomplished archaeologist and a most attractive historical topographer, who had thus good reason for the sympathy which he felt with the genius of Ernst Curtius. His personal preferences, nevertheless, inclined to the medieval type of historical writing, and he was at least a chronicler, something after the manner of Barante, rather than a critical historian, and loved to reproduce at length the flow of the sources of which his learning had enabled him to appreciate the value. Thus, his narrative was wont to run into a lengthiness which was not altogether redeemed by the general charm of his style. Hodgkin, besides publishing some shorter pieces, contributed to The Political History of England a well-written volume on the period before the Norman conquest and composed an interesting monograph on the founder of the religious body to which he belonged and with whose spirit of humankindness he was signally imbued.

CHAPTER XV

SCHOLARS, ANTIQUARIES AND BIBLIOGRAPHERS

CLASSICAL 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 Chantry. 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 Gibbon1, 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.' He calls Bentley's work on Phalaris an 'immortal dissertation'; 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.

3

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".

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, l.c. p. 153.

David Murray's R. and A. Foulis, 1913, pp. 121 f.

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'1; 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.'2

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.

2 Crito Cantabrigiensis, ▲ 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.