Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement, volume 2.djvu/387

 There was one remarkable novelty in his teaching: on one day in each week he lectured upon modern Greek, which he knew well and spoke with case. He visited Greece in 1878 and explored its archæology, receiving from the King of Greece the gold cross of the order of the Saviour. For the six winter months of each year at Glasgow his teaching work was heavy, but the long summer vacations, which he spent at Cambridge, gave him the opportunity to write; and books came at short intervals from his pen. The first of these was an important work on the 'Attic Orators from Antiphon to Isaeus.' Published in two volumes in 1876, this book was well received in general, but Prof. J. P. Mahaffy, reviewing the book in the 'Academy' (1 April 1876), brought against Jebb a charge of excessive obligation to the work of F. Blass in the same field. Jebb thought it necessary to reply to his critic in 'Some Remarks' (1876), Mahaffy's reply to which elicited a 'Rejoinder' from Jebb (1877). It might have been better if Jebb had relied for his defence upon the evidence of his later books. In 1877 he published a 'Primer of Greek Literature'; in 1878 a further book of 'Translations in and from Greek and Latin Verse and Prose,' in collaboration with Henry Jackson and W. E. Currey; in 1879 a volume of selections from the 'Attic Orators' with an excellent commentary, which he seems to have completed in a single month; in 1880 'Modern Greece,' two lectures with papers on 'The Progress of Greece' and 'Byron in Greece,' and in 1882 a monograph on Bentley in the 'English Men of Letters' series, a model of its kind. 'Homer: an Introduction to the Iliad and Odyssey,' appeared at Glasgow in 1887 (3rd edit. 1888); it was a masterly and concise statement of most complicated questions.

In 1884 Jebb paid a first visit to America, and received the degree of LL.D. from Harvard University. In 1889 he was recalled from Glasgow to Cambridge to take the place of Benjamin Hall Kennedy [q. v.] as regius professor of Greek. He was re-elected at the same time to a fellowship at his old college. These posts he held for the rest of his life. He at once took an active part in instruction and administration of the university. His carefully prepared lectures, which remain unpublished, dealt mainly with the history of Greek literature, and were attended by large audiences of undergraduates. Yet Jebb probably taught more successfully through his books than by means of lectures; his hearers, while admitting the excellence of his matter, were apt to complain of his manner as deficient in life and vigour.

Soon after his return to Cambridge he began to address an audience of a different kind. In the summer of 1891 Henry Cecil Raikes [q. v.], M.P. for the University of Cambridge, died, and Jebb was chosen to succeed him in the conservative interest. He was re-elected in 1892, 1895, and 1900. It may be questioned whether he did wisely in trying to combine the life of politics with the life of study; he carried the double burden with distinction, but not for long. He was not content to follow the example of his most famous predecessor, Sir Isaac Newton, and merely to sit and vote with his party. In discussions concerning education and the Church he spoke fairly often and was favourably heard. For debate he was not well equipped, but few men could be more impressive in a set speech upon a formal occasion. He gave a fine proof of his eloquence in the speech which he delivered at Charterhouse in July 1903, when a cloister was dedicated in commemoration of those Carthusians who had fallen in the recent war. Jebb, besides serving on parliamentary committees, sat on the royal commission on secondary education in 1894, on the London University commission of 1898, and the commission on Irish University education in 1901. He was also a member of the consultative committee of the board of education from 1900. He spoke from the platform at many meetings, political and educational, in different parts of the country. Jebb contrived to carry on his literary work together with this public activity. He delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge in 1890 and the Romanes lecture at Oxford in 1899; the subject of the first was 'Erasmus' and of the second 'Humanism in education.' In 1892 he revisited the United States and delivered at Johns Hopkins University lectures on 'The Growth and Influence of Greek Poetry,' which he published next year. He published an elaborate commentary on the newly discovered poems of Bacchylides in the last year of his life (1905).

Meanwhile Jebb had begun and completed the great work of his life, his edition of Sophocles. He had started on the enterprise in 1880; the first volume, containing the 'Œdipus Tyrannus,' appeared in 1883. He pubhshed a volume upon each of the remaining extant plays—'Œdipus Coloneus' (1885), 'Antigone' (1888), 'Philoctetes' (1890), 'Trachiniæ' (1892), 'Electra' (1894), and 'Ajax' (1896); he intended to publish an eighth volume