Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/544

Rh 524 P O R S O N sophistry and to write remarks upon it, without sometimes giving way to laughter and sometimes to indignation, was, to me at least, impossible.&quot; Travis has no mercy shown him, but he certainly deserved none. One is equally struck with the thorough grasp Porson displays of his subject, the amount of his miscellaneous learning, and the humour that pervades the whole. But it was then the unpopular side : the publisher is said to have lost money by the book ; and one of his early friends, Mrs Turner of Norwich, cut down a legacy she had left Porson to &amp;lt;30 on being told that he had written what was described to her as a book against Christianity. During the years that followed he continued to contri bute to the leading reviews, writing in the Monthly Revietv the articles on Robertson s Parian Chronicle, Edwards s Plutarch, and Payne Knight s Essay on the Greek Alphabet. He gave assistance to Beloe in one or two articles in the British Critick, and probably wrote also in the Analytical Review and the Critical Review. In the year 1792 his fellowship was no longer tenable by a layman ; and, rather than undertake duties for which he felt himself unfit, and which involved subscription to the Articles (though he had no difficulty as to signing a statement as to his conformity with the liturgy of the Church of England when elected Greek professor), he determined not to take holy orders, which would have enabled him to remain a fellow, and thus deprived him self of his only means of subsistence. He might have been retained in the society by being appointed to a lay fellowship, one of the two permanent lay fellowships which the statutes then permitted falling vacant just in time. It is said that this had been promised him, and it was certainly the custom in the college always to appoint the senior among the existing laymen, who otherwise would vacate his fellowship. But the master (Dr Postlethwaite), who had the nomination, used his privilege to nominate a younger man (John Heys), a nephew of his own, and thus Porson was turned adrift without any means of support. A subscription was, however, got up among his friends to provide an annuity to keep him from actual want ; Mr Cracherode, Mr Cleaver Banks, Dr Burney, and Dr Parr took the lead, and enough was collected to produce about 100 a year. He accepted it only on the condition that he should receive the interest during his lifetime, and that the principal, placed in the hands of trustees, should be returned to the donors at his death. When this occurred they or their survivors refused to receive the money, and the Porson prize at Cambridge was founded with this sum to perpetuate his name. After the loss of his fellowship he continued chiefly to reside in London, having chambers in Essex Court, Temple, occasionally visiting his friends, such as Dr Goodall at Eton and Dr Parr at Hatton. It was at Dr Goodall s house that the Letters to Travis were written, and at one period of his life he spent a great deal of time at Hatton. While there he would generally spend his mornings in the library, and for the most part in silence ; but in the evenings, especially if Parr were away, he would collect the young men of the house about him, and pour forth from the rich stores of his memory torrents of every kind of literature &quot;pages of Barrow, whole letters of Richard son, whole scenes of Foote, favourite pieces from the periodical press.&quot; The charms of his society are described as being then irresistible. &quot;Nothing,&quot; said one of his friends, &quot; could be more gratifying than a tete-a-tete with him ; his recitations from Shakespeare, and his ingenious etymologies and dissertations on the roots of the English language were a high treat.&quot; &quot; Nothing,&quot; says another, &quot; came amiss to his memory ; he would set a child right in his twopenny fable-book, repeat the whole of the moral tale of the Dean of Badajos, or a page of Athenaeus on cups, or Eustathius on Homer.&quot; An anecdote is told of his repeating the Rape of the Lock, making observations as he went on, and noting the various readings ; of which one of the company said, &quot; Had it been taken down from his mouth and published, it would have made the best edition of that poem yet in existence.&quot; In 1792 the Greek professorship at Cambridge became vacant by the resignation of Mr Cooke. To this Porson was elected without opposition, and he continued to hold it till his death. The duties then consisted in taking a part in the examinations for the university scholarships and classical medals. It was said he wished to give lectures ; but lecturing was not in fashion in those days, and he did far more to advance the knowledge and study of the Greek language by his publications than he could have done by any amount of lecturing. It must be re membered that the emoluments of the professorship were only 40 a year. The authors on which his time was chiefly spent were the tragedians, Aristophanes, Athenceus, and the lexicons of Suiclas, Hesychius, and Photius. This last he twice transcribed (the first transcript having been destroyed by a fire at Perry s house, which deprived the world of much valuable matter that he had Avritten on the margins of his books) from the original among the Gale MSS. in the library of Trinity College. Of the bril liancy and accuracy of his emendations on Aristophanes, the fragments of the other comic poets, and the lexico graphers he had a pleasing proof on one occasion when he found how often in Aristophanes he had been anticipated by Bentley, and on another when Schow s collation of the unique MS. of Hesychius appeared and proved him right in &quot;an incredible number&quot; of instances. In 1795 there appeared from Foulis s press at Glasgow an edition of J^schylus in folio, printed with the same types as the Glasgow Homer, without a word of preface or anything to give a clue to the editor. Many new read ings were inserted in the text with an asterisk affixed, while an obelus was used to mark many others as corrupt. It was at once recognized as Person s work ; he had super intended the printing of a small edition in two vols. 8vo, but this was kept back by the printer and not issued till 1806, still without the editor s name. There are corrections of many more passages in this edition than in the folio ; and, though the text cannot be considered as what would have gone forth if with his name and sanction, yet more is done for the text of ^Eschylus than had been accomplished by any preceding editor. It has formed the substratum for all subsequent editions. It was printed from a copy of Pauw s edition corrected, which is still preserved in the library of Trinity College. Soon after this, in 1797, appeared the first instalment of what was intended to be a complete edition of Euripides, an edition of the Hecuba. In the preface lie pointed out the correct method of writing several words previously incorrectly written, and gave some speci mens of his powers on the subject of Greek metres. The notes are very short, almost entirely critical ; but so great a range of learn ing, combined with such felicity of emendation whenever a corrupt passage was encountered, is displayed that there was never any doubt as to the quarter whence the new edition had proceeded. He expressly avoided the office of interpreter in his notes, which may well be wondered at on recollecting how admirably he did translate when he condescended to that branch of an editor s duties : &quot; si quis erat locus Anglice exhibendus,&quot; says Dobree, &quot; turn vero omnes in stuporem dabat. &quot; His work, however, did not escape attack ; Gilbert Wakefield had already published a Tragosdiarum Delectus ; and, conceiving himself to be slighted, as there was no mention of his labours in the new Hecuba, he wrote a &quot;diatribe extemporalis &quot; against it, a tract which for bad taste, bad Latin, and bad criticism it would not be easy to match. And Gottfried Hermann of Leipsic, then a very young man, who had also written a work on Greek metres, which