Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/569

 by Thomas George (afterwards Baron) Shaughnessy. From 1888 to 1899 he was president of the company, and from 1899 to 1910 chairman of the board of directors.

Van Horne became a naturalized Canadian in 1888, and in 1894 was created an honorary K.C.M.G. From 1883 onwards he lived in Montreal, but he travelled so constantly that he claimed to have covered more miles than any other living man. From time to time he intervened in Canadian political life, and he was influential in the defeat of reciprocity with the United States in 1891 and 1911. From 1900 till his death he was increasingly interested in the development of Cuba, was president of the Cuba Company, and was largely responsible for the railway law of that island. He died in Montreal 11 September 1915, after an operation for an internal abscess.

Van Horne was tall and strong, with great physical vitality and power of work. In his later years he became very corpulent, but his energy never slackened. After a hard day's work he would spend the night at chess or poker, and turn to the next day's work with unexhausted ardour. His interests were very wide; he had great natural talent as a water-colourist, and made large collections of old masters, pottery, and palaeontological specimens. He was a member of the Unitarian body.

Van Horne married in 1867 Lucy Adaline, only daughter of Erastus Hurd, civil engineer, of Galesburg, Illinois, who survived him. They had one son and one daughter.

 VERRALL, ARTHUR WOOLLGAR (1851–1912), classical scholar, was born at Brighton 5 February 1851, the eldest of a family of three brothers and two sisters. His father, Henry Verrall, was a well-known solicitor, for many years clerk to the Brighton magistrates; his mother was Anne Webb Woollgar. In October 1864 Arthur Verrall gained a scholarship at Wellington College, where he became a favourite pupil of Edward White Benson, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. In 1869 he was elected scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. He had a distinguished undergraduate career: was Pitt university scholar (1872), was bracketed second classic and chancellor's medallist (1873), and became fellow of his college (1874). For the next three years he lived in London, reading for the bar at Lincoln's Inn; he was called in 1877. He had gained the Whewell scholarship for international law in 1875. In October 1877 he returned to Cambridge, where for thirty-four years he lectured at Trinity College until, in 1911, he was chosen to be the first King Edward VII professor of English literature.

Verrall's reputation as a teacher grew year by year. He had remarkable powers of exposition; he held large audiences spell-bound with the novelty and ingenuity of the problems which he propounded, and he would captivate them, as in his Clark lectures, with his gift of reading aloud. As his pupil, Mr. F. M. Cornford, put it, ‘To him teaching was the means of expression in which he felt the passion and the joy of an artist; a lecture by him was definitely a performance prepared down to small details with an orator's sense of effect.’

The long series of Verrall's published works begins with his edition of the Medea (1881). His originality, meticulous care, and audacity in pushing principles to logical conclusions, are as conspicuous here as in any of his later works. His Studies, Literary and Historical, in the Odes of Horace (1884) was a series of brilliant hypotheses; to take an instance, a new turn was given to the Ode to Lamia (iii, 17) by treating it as a jest, the slave Lamia being playfully assumed to belong to the noble house of that name. Other Latin studies followed—of Martial, of Statius, and, above all, of Propertius. These, however, were but interludes: the Greek drama was his main theme. The first of his editions of Aeschylus was the Seven Against Thebes (1887); the Agamemnon (1889) he dedicated to (Sir) Richard Claverhouse Jebb; the Choephori (1893) to Samuel Henry Butcher; long afterwards appeared the Eumenides (1908). Verrall's treatment of the text was conservative. Others might emend: his ampler resources were lavished upon the task of interpretation. These editions established Verrall's fame and at the same time provoked fierce opposition. For subtlety and cogent argument the Agamemnon has no equal. It divided critics into two opposing camps, which thirty years have not reconciled. In his Euripides the Rationalist (1895), his Essays on Four Plays of Euripides (1905), and his edition of the Bacchae (1910), Verrall achieved more unequivocal success. Here he began with the invaluable aid of Aristophanes in the Frogs. His main contention is that Athens enjoyed a play by Euripides the rationalist almost in proportion to his skill in wrapping up heresy in orthodox make-believe. The 543