Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/235

 kept by a Mr. Richardson, and afterwards from several private tutors, the last of whom was the Rev. Thomas Scott, perpetual curate of Gawcott, Buckinghamshire, and father of Sir George Gilbert Scott [q. v.] Thompson entered Trinity College as a pensioner in 1828, his tutor being the Rev. George Peacock [q. v.] A lifelong friendship resulted from this early association with one whom he used to describe as ‘the best and wisest of tutors.’ Connop Thirlwall [q. v.] was junior dean and Julius Charles Hare [q. v.] one of the assistant tutors. Thompson derived great benefit from Thirlwall's lectures. In 1830 he was elected a scholar of his college, and in 1831 he obtained one of the members' prizes for a Latin essay. He proceeded to the B.A. degree in 1832, being placed tenth senior optime in the mathematical tripos. He was subsequently fourth in the first class of the classical tripos, and obtained the second chancellor's medal for classical learning. In 1834 he was elected fellow of his college, and in the following year proceeded to the M.A. degree.

Thompson's classical attainments marked him out for work in college, but, as there was no immediate prospect of a vacancy among the assistant tutors, he accepted in 1836 the headmastership of an experimental school at Leicester, called the collegiate school. In 1837, on the appointment of E. L. Lushington to the Greek chair at Glasgow, he was recalled to Trinity College and became one of the assistant tutors. He was ordained deacon in 1837 (4 June) and priest in 1838 (27 May). In 1844 he was appointed a tutor. In that capacity Thompson followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, George Peacock. In days when undergraduates were kept at a distance by their seniors, he made his pupils feel that he really stood to them in loco parentis. He could be severe when discipline required it, but he was always inflexibly just and untrammelled by pedantic adherence to tradition.

Thompson remained tutor of Trinity till 1853, when he was elected regius professor of Greek, and was appointed to a canonry at Ely, at that time annexed to the professorship. After his election as Greek professor, he was nominated one of the eight senior fellows of his college, under the belief that the statutes, as revised in 1844, permitted the Greek professor to remain a fellow. A chancery suit was, however, instituted against him by the Rev. Joseph Edleston, the fellow next below him on the list, and, judgment having been given against Thompson by the lord chancellor on 4 March 1854, he became a nominal fellow only, retaining his rooms in college and residing there when not at Ely. In the spring of 1856, in company with William George Clark [q. v.], he visited Greece, and spent some months in studying Athens and the Peloponnese.

Thompson's lectures were modelled upon those of his early teachers, Hare and Thirlwall, while containing characteristics peculiar to himself. ‘It would be difficult to speak too highly of his scholarship,’ wrote Dr. Henry Jackson in the ‘Athenæum’ for 9 Oct. 1886. ‘He had read widely and deeply, yet his strength lay not so much in the amount of his reading, or in his command of it, as in his sure judgment and fine tact. His criticisms were appreciative and sympathetic, those of a lover of literature rather than of a grammarian.’ His translations reflected the original with exact fidelity, while they had a literary flavour and distinction of their own. His views on the direction of classical study exercised a powerful influence on the university.

The author of his choice was Plato; and, though his over-fastidious temper prevented him from publishing either a complete edition or a translation, both of which he is said to have once meditated, he has left behind him much that is valuable. Of his published works the most considerable are his editions of the Phædrus (1868) and the Gorgias (1871). These are admirable specimens of interpretative exposition. The notes are learned and judicious, and the introductions masterly. Of his minor works, the most important is the dissertation on Plato's ‘Sophist,’ read before the Cambridge Philological Society on 23 Nov. 1857 (‘Trans. Cambr. Phil. Soc.’ x. 146; reprinted in ‘Journal of Philology’). This paper was directed against Whewell, who, after Socher, had called in question the genuineness of the dialogue. But Thompson did not confine himself to this polemical issue. He made it the occasion for a singularly acute investigation of the logical bearings of Eleaticism, and of the influence of the Zenonian logic upon the history of Greek philosophy. The paper on the ‘Philebus’ (1855) is a brilliant fragment (‘Journ. of Phil.’ xi. 1882). In general accord with the theory of Schleiermacher, Thompson held that the Platonic dialogues, with all their diversity of style, treatment, and subject, rest upon and present a definite system of philosophy.

In March 1866, on the death of Dr. William Whewell [q. v.], Thompson was appointed master of Trinity College. Soon afterwards he married the widow of George Peacock. He resigned the professorship of