Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/55

 Faith, 1647, Above all, he was a faithful minister of the Gospel. To quote a poet with whom he was clearly familiar:

But riche he was of holy thoght and werk. He was also a lerned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche; His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche.

Devoted as he was in his daily ministrations, his sermons are models of learning and exposition, enriched with wealth of marginal annotation. It is wonderful how he found the time to achieve, besides all this, an edition of Marcus Aurelius, so vast in its compass, so varied and exact in detail.

Readers familiar with the classical commentaries of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will recall the repeated reference to Tho. Gataker, the frequent illustrations drawn from his notes. Ingram Bywater, inaugurating his tenure of the Greek Chair at Oxford, 1893–1908, said: 'the great Greek scholar of the Caroline age (i.e. in England) is, I think, beyond a doubt Gataker, whose Antoninus is to this day a book of unquestioned value and authority'. Bywater had just been speaking of Sir Henry Savile's Chrysostom and of Selden's Marmor Parium. Porson refers to 'our Cambridge Gataker, that scholar of vast erudition', touching characteristically, in passing, on a weak joint in the giant's harness, his defective sense of Greek prosody.

The edition offers a much improved text, conjecturally supplies some gaps in the traditional text, and makes an occasional transposition. It has been criticized as too free in conjecture; but the proposals are always in the margin or the notes, and are not so hazardous as those of Saumaise. In the margin too are careful cross-references, like those xlvii