Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/54

 466 Scholars American Journal of Philology, which from the first took high rank as a repository of solid contributions to philology modern as well as classical, and which published from time to time the results of his own research, both in extenso and in the notes and short reviews which filled his special department, "Brief Men- tion." Gildersleeve's great power of literary appreciation and expression is grounded upon endless interest in the minuti^ of syntax and metre. His Latin Grammar (1867) had already reached a stage of induction which enabled its analysis to stand as the method of the Syntax of Classical Greek (1900, 191 1) still in course of pubhcation. The edition of Persius (1875) shows the combination of these qualities, its Introduction taking high rank as a literary and historical essay, and its notes guiding the student through the intricacies of Persius's lan- guage and allusion. Professor Gildersleeve himself confesses that he used his edition of the Apologies of Justin Martyr (1877) and his edition of Pindar (1885) chiefly as a repository of his syntactical theories — an assertion doubtless flavoured with Socratic irony. His Syntax has recorded and explicated usage without resort to metaphysics. Through his publications he has exercised a very great influence upon many scholars who were not his students, but who acknowledge that they "have all been to school to Gildersleeve." The technical content of most of Professor Gildersleeve's writings has perhaps kept the larger public from appreciating his literary merit. Nor can even so much of his work as might be open to popular appreciation, like the collected Essays and Studies (1890), hope for a very numerous reading pubHc. For it is a work of disillusionment. Just as in his own professional field Professor Gildersleeve has witnessed and partly under- gone "The Oscillations and Nutations of Philological Studies," so he looks upon the general human scene with the eyes of Ecclesiastes. Like that other veteran Hellenist, Professor Mahaffy, he seems to grow weary of the high and central classics (his Pindar is his only edition of any one of them), and to turn with a certain relief to secondary writers, like Persius Virginia, where he followed Gildersleeve as professor of Greek, wove classical stud- ies and English together, considering the study of EngHsh partly " as an Introduc- tion to the Study of Latin and Greek" (1877). He later was professor of English at Columbia University.