Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 46.djvu/167

 tation—to be raised still higher afterwards—was definitely established.

In 1793 he wrote for the ‘Monthly Review’ a notice of an edition, by Dr. T. Edwards, of the Plutarchic tract on education; and in 1794 a notice of an essay on the Greek alphabet, by R. Payne Knight. The London edition of Heyne's Virgil (4 vols. 1793) appeared with a short preface by Porson, who had undertaken to correct the press. He was blamed for the numerous misprints; but a writer in the ‘Museum Criticum’ (i. 395) says, ‘he has been heard to declare that the booksellers, after they had obtained permission to use his name, never paid the slightest attention to his corrections.’ In 1795 a folio Æschylus was issued from the Foulis Press at Glasgow, with some corrections in the text. These were Porson's; but the book appeared without his name, and without his knowledge. He had sent a text, thus far corrected, to Glasgow, in order that an edition of Æschylus for a London firm might be printed from it; and this edition (in 2 vols. 8vo) was actually printed in 1794, though published only in 1806, still without his name. This partly corrected text was the first step towards the edition of Æschylus which he had meditated, but which he never completed.

In 1796 Samuel Ireland [q. v.] was publishing the Shakespearean papers forged by his son, W. H. Ireland: Kemble acted for Sheridan at Drury Lane in ‘Vortigern and Rowena,’ and shortly afterwards Malone exposed the fraud. Porson wrote a letter to the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ signed ‘S. England,’ setting forth how a learned friend of his had found ‘some of the lost tragedies of Sophocles’ in an old trunk. As a specimen he gives twelve Greek iambic verses (a translation of ‘Three children sliding on the ice’). Among his other contributions to the ‘Morning Chronicle’ at this period, the best are ‘The Imitations of Horace’ (1797), political satires of much caustic humour, on the war with France, the panic as to the spread of revolutionary principles, &c., couched in the form of free translations from the Odes, introduced by letters in prose. In 1797 his edition of the ‘Hecuba’ of Euripides was published in London, without his name. The preface (of sixteen pages) states that the book is meant chiefly for young students, and then deals with certain points as to the mode of writing Greek words, and as to metre. The notes are short, and all ‘critical.’ Gilbert Wakefield, angry at not finding himself mentioned, attacked the book in a feebly furious pamphlet (‘Diatribe Extemporalis’). Godfrey Hermann was then a young man of twenty-five. In 1796 (the year in which he brought out the first edition of his treatise on Greek metres) he had written to Porson, asking for help in obtaining access to the manuscripts of Plautus in England; a request which Heyne supported by a letter from Göttingen. Nothing could be more courteous or appreciative than the terms in which young Hermann wrote to Porson (the letter is in the library of Trinity College); but he was now nettled by Porson's differences from him on some metrical points; and when, after editing the ‘Nubes’ in 1799, he brought out a ‘Hecuba’ of his own in 1800, he criticised the English edition with a severity and in a tone which were quite unwarrantable. There are tacit allusions to Hermann (as to some other critics) in Porson's subsequent writings, and once at least (on ‘Medea,’ v. 675) he censures him by name. As Blomfield observed, traces of the variance between these two great scholars may be seen in the attitude of Hermann's pupils, such as Seidler and Reisig, towards Porson. The ‘Hecuba’ was followed in the next year (1798) by the ‘Orestes,’ and in 1799 by the ‘Phœnissæ.’ Both these plays, like the first, were published in London, and anonymously. But the fourth and last play which Porson edited—the ‘Medea’—came out at the Cambridge Press, and with his name, in 1801. The ‘Grenville’ Homer, published in the same year at the Clarendon Press, had appended to it Porson's collation of the Harleian manuscript of the Odyssey (Harl. MS. 5674 in the British Museum). In 1802 he published a second edition of the ‘Hecuba,’ with many additions to the notes, and with the famous ‘Supplement’ to the preface, in which he states and illustrates certain rules of iambic and trochaic verse, including the rule respecting the ‘pause’ (‘canon Porsonianus’). This ‘Supplement’ may be regarded as, on the whole, his finest single piece of criticism. Here his published work on Euripides ended. A transcript by Porson of the ‘Hippolytus,’ vv. 176–266, with corrections of the text, was in J. H. Monk's hands when he edited that play (1811). As appears from the notes on Euripides in Porson's ‘Adversaria’ (pp. 217 ff.), the ‘Supplices’ was another piece on which he had done a good deal of work; but there is no reason to think that, after publishing the four plays, he had brought any fifth near to readiness for the press. His original purpose, no doubt, had been to give a complete Euripides (preface to the ‘Hecuba,’ p. xiii); but after 1802 his health was unequal to such a task. The ‘Monthly Review’ for October 1802 contained a curious letter, so characteristic of Porson as to deserve mention. Having discovered an over-