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 Jowett of London and Isabella Lang home. The family originally came from Manningham, near Bradford in Yorkshire, where at one time they owned land. Benjamin was born in the parish of Camberwell on 15 April 1817. He is said to have been a pale delicate-looking boy of unusual mental precocity, and when he learned Greek with the tutor of his cousins, the Langhornes, 'they had no chance against him in their Greek lessons' (Life and Letters, i. 30). His chief companion in these years was his elder sister Emily; 'the two would shut themselves up in a room with their books and study for hours.'

On 16 June 1829 he was admitted to St. Paul's school. The high master at the time was Dr. [q. v.] of Wadham College. Here he acquired two methods of study which he always impressed on his pupils at a later time; he learned large quantities of Greek and Latin poetry by heart, and he constantly retranslated into Greek or Latin passages which he had previously translated into English. Among his contemporaries at the school were [Baron] C. E. Pollock, [Lord] Hannen, and A. S. Eddis of Trinity College, Cambridge.

In November 1835 he gained an open scholarship at Balliol College. About a year afterwards (October 1836) he came into residence. Among the scholars of the time were [Dean] Stanley, [Vice-chancellor] Wickens, Stafford Northcote [Lord Iddesleigh], J. G. Lonsdale, [Dean] Lake, and [Dean] Goulburn; and among the fellows [Archbishop] Tait, [Dean] Scott, and W. G. Ward. In Dr. Sleath's opinion Jowett was 'the best Latin scholar whom he had ever sent to college,' and this opinion was confirmed when in the spring of 1837 he gained the Hertford (University) scholarship for Latin. In the next year he obtained a success even more brilliant, being elected a fellow of the college while still an undergraduate (November 1838). In the following summer he obtained a first class in literæ humaniores. Already he had begun to take private pupils, the first of whom were [q. v. Suppl.] and his brother Oliver. He graduated B.A. in 1839, and M.A. in 1842. In 1841 he obtained the chancellor's prize for the Latin essay, and in 1842 he was appointed by Dr. Jenkyns, the master, to a tutorship in the college, a post which he retained till his election to the mastership in 1870. He took deacon's orders in 1842, and priest's in 1845. Jowett had been brought up amid evangelical views, which were traditional in his tamily. He now found himself in the midst of the Oxford movement, and was greatly attracted by [q. v.], with whom he was brought into daily contact. Years afterwards, when the two friends met after a long separation, Jowett said: 'Ward reminded me that I charged him with shallow logic, and that he retorted on me with misty metaphysics. That was perhaps not an unfair account of the state of the controversy between us.' In February 1841 Newman's tract on the articles—the famous 'No. XC.'—appeared. It was at once attacked and condemned, and the controversy had a peculiar interest for the Balliol common room. For Tait was one of the first to move in the attack, and Ward, who supported the tract, was dismissed from his lectureship at the college in the following June (, Oxford Movement, c. xiv., esp. pp. 252 ff.) It appears that Jowett was somewhat bewildered by the shifting currents around him. 'But for the providence of God,' he said at a later time, 'I might have become a Roman Catholic.' In 1844 the crisis in the movement came. Newman had retired from St. Mary's to Littlemore, and Ward published his 'Ideal of a Christian Church.' Jowett, with A. P. Stanley to lead, fought on the side of toleration, and both were present at the scene of Ward's degradation on 13 Feb. 1845, a day which Dean Church regards as the birthday of Oxford liberalism (l. c. p. 340).

Meanwhile Jowett was working earnestly with pupils in college, travelling on the continent in the long vacations. In 1844 he made the acquaintance of some of the most distinguished German scholars of the time, G. Hermann, Bekker, Lachmann, and Ewald, and consulted Erdmann, the historian of philosophy, on the best method of approaching the philosophy of Hegel, by whose teaching he was now becoming fascinated. For some years he remained an eager student of Hegel's writings, and even translated a good deal of the logic in conjunction with[Archbishop] Temple (Life, i. 120, 129, 142). He seems also to have been greatly stimulated by Hegel's 'History of Philosophy' in the lectures which he was now giving as tutor, on the 'Fragments of the Early Greek Philosophers' lectures in which he first gave proof of his peculiar powers. From 1846 onwards his position as tutor was assured; he was the centre of a number of pupils, who were devoted to him, and proved the value of his teaching by their success in the schools. In 1848 he began the practice, which he continued till near the end of his life, of taking pupils with him