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 generation1; 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.'2

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 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.' 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 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. 1, p. 19, ed. 1873.

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 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 Celtic 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 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

1 Asiatic Researches, vol. 1, p. 422 (1786).

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 twentytwo 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 William 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 flysheets 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