PORSON. Upon the establishment of the London Institution, his friends obtained for him the very desirable appointment of principal librarian, with a salary of £200 a year, and apartments in the house of the Institution, which was then in the Old Jewry; but although the arrangement was highly honourable to all parties, the librarianship was little more than a sinecure. Porson was, however, in the habit of attending in his place when the reading room was open, and of communicating, very readily, all the literary information that was required, by those who consulted him respecting the object of their researches. Had the inhabitants of Finsbury Square and its neighbourhood been more disposed to classical studies, and had the librarian of the Institution survived, to witness its completion and prosperity, his sphere of utility would, without doubt, have been greatly extended.
But it must ever be lamented that Porson's habits of life had unfortunately been such as to lay a foundation for a multitude of diseases; he suffered much from asthma throughout the year 1808; his memory began to fail him a little; and in the autumn he had some symptoms of intermittent fever. On Monday the 19th of September he had an apoplectic attack in the street, and he was carried to a neighbouring poor house in a state of insensibility: the next day an advertisement appeared in one of the papers, relating the accident, and describing some manuscripts which were found in his pocket, consisting of Greek fragments and algebraical characters: his friends at the London Institution immediately went in quest of him: he was afterwards well enough to appear in the library, and to receive a visit there from Dr Adam Clarke: but his speech was impaired, and his faculties evidently imperfect; he survived only through the week, and died in his 49th year, on Sunday the 25th of September 1808, at midnight.
He was buried at Cambridge, in Trinity College Chapel, near the grave of Bentley, and the monument of Newton. He founded by will an annual prize, to be given to the best Greek translation from an English dramatic author: and several specimens of the successful pieces have been published from time to time in the Classical Journal. His books were sold by auction, and many of them found purchasers at high prices, especially such as were enriched with any of his manuscript notes in their margins; but more than two hundred of these, which appeared to be the most valuable, were withheld from the sale, and were afterwards purchased, together with the whole of his manuscript papers, by the Society of Trinity College, for the sum of a thousand guineas. He left a sister, married to Sidney Hawes, Esq. of Coltishall, Norfolk. His brother Thomas kept a boarding-school at Fakenham, and died, without issue, in 1792: his
second brother Henry was a farmer in Essex, and died young, leaving three children. His father had lived to 74, his mother to 57.
The principal works of Porson are his Letters to Travis, his four plays of Euripides with their prefaces, and the manuscript copy of Photius: the rest, though somewhat voluminous, are chiefly miscellaneous annotations on detached passages of a multitude of ancient authors. We find nothing in the nature of theory, or of the discovery of general laws, except some canons, which he has laid down, chiefly as having been used by the Greek tragedians in the construction of their verses. These are chiefly contained in the preface to the Heuba, together with its supplement. 1. The first is, that when a tragic iambic ends with a trisyllable, or a cretic, this word must be preceded either by a short syllable, or by a monosyllable. For example, an ancient tragedian would not have written the line "Ἔστι δὲ μήποτε ἱὲ ἀπικτοῦ ὄνοματος; though it might have been unexceptionable in a comedy. It seems to have been about the year 1790 that Porson first made this observation; he certainly did not attend to it in his own serious translation of the Epitaph on Alexis: but it was mentioned, in 1791, by one of Porson's intimate friends, in a moment of conviviality, while he was somewhat characteristically attempting to fill his glass out of an empty bottle; and the author of this article observed in answer, that it would certainly sound better, on such an occasion as then occurred, to say, Πᾶν ἐκπίπτικαὶ οὖν ἰστοί κλάζοντες, than ὡς ἔκλειπται κλάζοντες. 2. The second canon is, that an anapaest is only admissible in a tragic iambic, as constituting the first foot, except in some cases of proper names: this indeed had been cursorily hinted by Dawes. 3. The same critic had also remarked, that the Attic poets never lengthen a short vowel before a mute or aspirate, followed by a liquid, or a middle consonant followed by ζ; and Porson more amply confirmed the observation as very generally, though not universally correct. On the other hand, Dawes had cursorily observed that Homer, and the other ancient epic poets, generally lengthened the vowel in such cases, and Porson's great rival, Hermann, has more fully established this distinction, as affording a good criterion of antiquity. 4. There are also some original remarks of Porson on the caesura, in iambics, and trochaics, and anapaests: he showed that the scenic poets do not elide the final iota, and that the tragedians do not employ the preposition πρὶ before a vowel; and some other general laws, of greater importance than these, may probably be found in some of his publications, which it will now be necessary to enumerate in the order of time.
1. His first attempts, as an author, consisted of some anonymous articles in Dr Maty's Review, beginning with a part of Schutz's Eschylus, June 1783, Tracts ii. Brunck's Aristophanes, July 1783, Tracts iii.; Mus. Crit. II. 113; written in a day. In Latin, by Schäfer, Class. Journ. V. 136. Weston's Hermesianas, April 1784, Tracts iv. Huntingford's Apology for his Menostrophics, August 1784, Tracts v. Account of the Learned Pig, April 1785,
Tracts vi. Note, with letters of Le Clerc and Bentley, April 1786, Tracts vii.
2. He added some Notes to an edition of Xenophon's Anabasis, published by Nicholson, at Cambridge. 4to and 8vo. 1786. They are addressed Lectori si quis erit.
3. Three Panegyrical Epistles to Sir John Hawkins, Gent. Mag. Aug. Sept. Oct. 1787. Tracts ix.
4. Notes on Toupii Emendationes in Suidam. 8vo. Oxf. 1790. Written in 1787.
5. Letters on the Three Witnesses, Gent. Mag. Oct. Dec. 1788. Feb. April, May, June, Aug. 1789. Feb. 1790. The last reprinted, Tracts xix.; most of the others in the collection of Letters to Mr Archdeacon Travis, in answer to his defence of the Three Heavenly Witnesses, 8vo. Lond. 1790. These letters are generally considered, by critics of all parties, as finally decisive of a question, which had often been agitated before, but never so learnedly argued, nor so satisfactorily discussed in all its bearings.
6. In the Monthly Review, Robertson's Essay on the Parian Chronicle, Jan. 1789, Tracts xiii.; satisfactorily answering the principal part of the objections alleged against the authenticity of that monument. Edwards's edition of the work attributed to Plutarch, on Education, July 1793, Tracts xxi. Payne Knight's Greek Alphabet, Jan. 1794, Tracts xxiii. Pybus's Sovereign, Dec. 1800; an article affording a good specimen of his talent for humour.
7. He is supposed to have written some Remarks on an Essay upon the Transfiguration, but never expressly acknowledged them. Tracts xv.
8. He added a few short Notes to the London edition of Heyne's Virgil, 8vo. 1793; for which he made an agreement with the bookseller to correct the press: but he complained that his corrections were disregarded; and in fact several hundred errors, of no great importance, were suffered to disfigure it.
9. He corrected the Greek text of Eschylus for the Glasgow editions, the folio of 1795, and the two volumes octavo, printed in 1794, but only published London, 1806. The folio is said to have appeared surreptitiously. There are more than two hundred original corrections, and a further number of passages pointed out as corrupt.
10. In the Morning Chronicle he published, at different times, a variety of spirited articles of a temporary nature. One of the most amusing was the Nursery Song in Greek iambics, 13th April 1796; called A Fragment of Sophocles, and signed "S. England," in ridicule of Ireland's pretended discoveries.
11. Imitations of Horace. Spirit of the Public Journals, 1797. Class. Jour. IV. 97.
12. The first four plays of Euripides appeared separately at different periods. The Heecuba, 8vo. London, 1797, Cambridge, 1802, with a Supplement and additional notes; which were also published separately, London, 1808. Orestes, London, 1798, 1811. Phoenissae, London, 1799, 1811. Medea, Cambridge, 1801; London, 1812. The four together, London, 1822.
13. Collation of the Harleian manuscript of the
Porsen. Odyssey for the Grenville Homer, 4to, Oxford, 1800; with some short notes. Reprinted, Class. Jour. IX.
14. Of the Review of Wakefield's Lucretius, in the British Critic for May 1801, the principal part appears to be Porsen's.
15. A Letter signed J. N. Dawes, Monthly Mag. Dec. 1802; on some Greek constructions; admitting also an inaccuracy of his own with respect to a hiatus, pointed out by Mr C. Falconer.
16. A Letter to Professor Dalzel, dated Sept. 1803; Mus. Crit. I. p. 326; in answer to some remarks published in the Professor's Collectanea Majora; with an Epigram respecting Hermann in Greek and in English.
17. Herodotus, Edinburgh, 1806. Porsen corrected the press for the first volume.
18. Supplement to some Indices, Tracts xxxvi.
19. It is well known that Porsen bestowed considerable pains on the restoration of the text of the Rosetta Stone: his Supplements were added to the plates engraved by the Society of Antiquaries: they also appear among his Tracts, xxxvii. In Dr Clarke's Greek Marbles, 8vo. Cambridge, 1809, we find a translation of this inscription, communicated to the editor by Porsen, and printed from "a corrected copy in his own beautiful hand writing;" but we may here venture to apply Porsen's favourite remark on the facility of transposition, and to read, "a copy corrected in his own writing," that is, on the margin of Mr Gough's translation, as published in Duane's Coins: for the whole is very negligently performed; and it is not a little remarkable that this translation, which was at least approved by Porsen, is decidedly less accurate than the Latin translation of Heyne, as appears from the investigation of the enchorial inscription, published in the sixth number of the Museum Criticum.
20. A variety of Porsen's fugitive and miscellaneous pieces have reappeared at different times in the Classical Journal. Authors cited by the Scholiast on Plato, II. 619, Tracts xxxviii. The Epitaph, III. 233; more correctly than in the Tracts, but still with a gross error in the punctuation of the last line, which stands, in a manuscript copy of his own, ΤΙΣΜΕ, ὃ δὲ τὰς ἀνὰ ἀνὰ ἐῖ γὰρ; this reading, though not very elegant, is at least more defensible, than to make τὰς ἀνὰ alone signify to die, and a phrase to end with ὃ δὲ! A Charade in Latin, VII. 248. Some Notes on Æschylus, VII. 456, VIII. 15, 181, X. 114. A property of the lines employed in the 47th proposition of the first book of Euclid, p. 401. Notes on Apollonius Rhodius, XVIII. 370.
21. Adversaria, 8vo. Cambridge, 1812. Consisting of Notes on the Greek Poets, selected from his manuscripts, and arranged by Professor Monk and C. J. Bloomfield, M. A. The first article is an interesting Lecture on Euripides, delivered upon his appointment to the Greek Professorship: it is followed by a few miscellaneous observations, and by a large collection of Notes on Athenaeus, on Euripides, on the Fragments of the Tragic and Comic Poets, on Stobaeus, and on a variety of poets of miscellaneous descriptions. The volume was reprinted at Amsterdam, without any alteration, but the sale of
VOL. VI. PART I.
the foreign edition has never been permitted in Great Britain.
22. Tracts and Miscellaneous Criticisms, collected and arranged by the Rev. T. Kidd, M. A. 8vo. London, 1815. Besides the articles already noticed as reprinted in this volume, there are a few Notes on Dawes's Miscellanea Critica, not before published, No. xli. Some supplementary pages of Simplicius and Cebes, reprinted by Porsen, for the use of his friends, as restored by Schweighäuser: the want of this leaf of the manuscript of Simplicius had given rise to the mistaken assertion that Xenophon was proclaimed a public benefactor at the Olympic Games, on occasion of the return of the ten thousand. There are also some miscellaneous Notes on Athenaeus, Menander, and Philemon, Aristides, Pausanias, and the lexicographers, and some Indices of authors quoted by Scholiasts.
23. Notae in Aristophanem, quibus Plutum comœdium adjecit P. P. Dobree, 8vo. Cambridge, 1820.
24. Gaisford Lectiones Platonicae. Accedunt R. Porsoni Notae ad Pausaniam, 8vo. Oxford, 1820.
25. Photii Lexicon, 8vo. Cambridge, 1822.
To attempt to form a just estimate of the merit of such a man as Porsen, without servilely following the dictates of common fame, or blindly adopting the opinions of others, is a task of no small difficulty, even to one who had the advantage of his personal acquaintance for the last twenty years of his life. But it may safely be conceded to common fame and to partial friendship, that he was one of the greatest men, and the very greatest critic, of his own or of any other age. "Nothing came amiss," says Mr Weston, "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 Badajoz, a page of Athenaeus on cups, or of Eustathius on Homer, even though he did every thing to impair his mental faculties." It cannot, however, be denied, that the talents, and even the industry, that he possessed, might have made him a much greater man, had they been employed in some other department of human intellect. He might probably have been as great a statesman or as great a general as he was a scholar, and in these capacities his acquirements would have affected the interests of a much greater multitude of his fellow creatures, than can ever be benefited by the fruits of his erudition; and he might possibly have gained more popularity as an orator or a poet, than his refined investigations of grammar and prosody could ever procure him, although it is not by any means certain that his fancy and invention could have been rendered by any cultivation at all comparable to his memory and acuteness. But as far as regards the possession of a combination of the faculties which he did cultivate, he appears to have been decidedly the most successful of any man on record in the same department. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the subjects of his pursuits were in their nature incapable of raising a man to the first rank among the permanent benefactors of the human race; and, if we calmly consider the ultimate objects of prosody and metre, it will appear almost unfair to allow the discoverer of the prosodiacal rules,
u u
adopted by the ancient poets in their melodramas and choruses, to rank so very high among the luminaries of an age, and yet to look down, with so much contempt as we are accustomed to do, on the character of a modern Dieu de la danse, notwithstanding that he thought himself the third great man of his day, with Voltaire and the King of Prussia, for having given soul and sentiment to the measures and movements of the choric representations of the present times. Among the talents of Porson, however, which were so far superior to the importance of the objects on which they were employed, we ought not, perhaps, to consider his remarkable strength of memory as the most to be envied, since many persons who have been possessed of singular and almost miraculous, not to say morbid, memories, have been but little distinguished by any other faculty; and it appears to be possible that a memory may in itself be even too retentive for real practical utility, as if of too microscopic a nature; and it seems to be by a wise and benevolent, though by no means an obvious arrangement of a Creative Providence, that a certain degree of oblivion becomes a most useful instrument in the advancement of human knowledge, enabling us readily to look back on the prominent features only of various objects and occurrences, and to class them and reason upon them, by the help of this involuntary kind of abstraction and generalisation, with incomparably greater facility than we could do, if we retained the whole detail of what had been once but slightly impressed on our minds. It is thus, for example, in physic, that the experienced practitioner learns at length to despise the relation of individual symptoms, and particular cases, on which alone the empiric insists, and to feel the value of the Hippocratic system of "attending more to the prognostic than the diagnostic features of disease;" which, to a younger student, appears to be perfect imbecility. And it is perhaps for some similar reason that many persons, besides Barnes, "of happy memory," have had to wait long in darkness for "the day of judgment." But it must be repeated, that Porson's judgment and acuteness were really almost paramount to his memory, and with the addition of these faculties, his memory naturally rendered him capable of much that would have been impossible without it.
The respect that is justly due to classical learning has frequently been exaggerated in this country, partly, perhaps, on account of the awe which is naturally entertained, by an ingenuous mind, for its instructors in the earliest studies, by which it is advanced towards maturity: and classical learning having most wisely been placed by our ancestors the foremost, in the order of a liberal education, which is most commonly adopted in Great Britain, a personal as well as a general respect has been involuntarily paid to the characters of the individuals concerned, and to the dignity of all those who are engaged in similar occupations; besides that, the means being, by a most frequent inattention of the human mind, confounded with the end for which they are sought, the words and syllables, and the phrases and measures of the Greek and Latin authors have been often the almost frivolous occupation of a valuable life, instead of that of a few of the years of boyhood, which it
was intended to devote to them, and which could not have been so well engaged in any other way. It is, however, wholly unjust to stigmatize the study of the classics, and of languages in general, as being confined to words instead of things: for it is utterly impossible that words can be learned, without the acquisition of a considerable degree of knowledge of the things to which they relate, and of the historical facts which they have been employed to express, and without an involuntary modelling of the mind to the elegance and elevation of sentiment, which pervade the works of those authors who are habitually put into the hands of boys in the course of their elementary studies: an acquirement which is of still greater value to the orator and the statesman, than the command of language, and facility of expression, and beauty of imagery, and power of reasoning, which he derives from a perfect familiarity with the great masters of antiquity. But granting all the respect that can possibly be claimed, for ancient literature, we cannot but lament that such a man as Porson should have lived and laboured for nearly half a century, and yet have left little or nothing to the world that was truly and originally his own.
After the full admission of the very high rank which is due to the comparative merits of Porson's talents and acquirements, it may be thought almost idle, if not invidious, to dwell on any trifling exceptions to their magnitude. But it is, in fact, of high importance to the progress of human knowledge to be aware of the degree in which the first of mankind are liable to error. The admission of the few errors of Newton himself is at least of as much importance to his followers in science, as the history of the progress of his real discoveries; and it is with reason that the detection of an error in such a man is considered as almost paramount to the establishment of a new fact. The English critics have been reproached, and not without some foundation, as paying too servile a deference to Porson's opinions, and it seems to have been very generally believed among them, that it was scarcely possible for him to commit an error or an oversight.
Although Porson was in many respects irregular, and often idle, or even intemperate, yet what he did perform as a critic may be allowed to leave a large balance, at the end of his life, in favour of his general industry, when compared with that of most of his countrymen. It has indeed been asserted, and perhaps with truth (Classical Journal, XXI.), that "with things Porson appears to have possessed but a very inconsiderable acquaintance, and not a trace is to be found amidst his writings of that combination of universal encyclopaedical knowledge with language learning, which is so abundantly found in the Dissertation on Phalaris, and the countless pages of Scaliger, Salmasius, and Casaubon." Certainly, however, neither Salmasius nor Casaubon, with all their learning, much less Scaliger, with all his industry and parade, nor even Bentley himself, with all his talent and acuteness, was at all comparable to Porson in his own department, that is, as a sound and accurate and refined Greek critic.
But it must be confessed, that at Cambridge, even although Porson had resolved to make the classics
Porson. his principal study, and although there had not yet been many instances of senior wranglers, who were also senior medallists, it was scarcely reputable for a man, with his undeniable abilities, to be only the twenty first of his year in mathematics. Among the literary objects, also, which afterwards engaged his attention, he might easily have found time for the study of some of the modern languages, and he might have derived essential benefit from it on many occasions of critical research. He had, indeed, read a good deal of French, but very little Italian: he had studied the Anglo-Saxon, but he knew nothing of the kindred dialects of the North of Europe, in which it is preserved almost entire; and he was wholly unacquainted with Oriental literature. He might have profited materially by some of these studies, in deriving from them a clearer conception of the distinctions of the tenses than he seems to have possessed, and he might have enlightened us in no small degree, with respect to the history of languages and of nations, by such etymological investigations, as his comprehensive mind, thus employed, would have rendered him peculiarly capable of pursuing with success.
It has been candidly and very truly admitted by a rival critic in Germany, that Porson committed fewer errors than almost any other person; but it is right to be aware that he has now and then committed some errors, even where he would have been expected to be the most correct. There is, for example, a very strange oversight in one of the criticisms contained in his early review of Weston's Hermesiananax, which implies a palpable blunder with respect to the gender of a participle, Ζωδὶ μετὰ τοῦ δὲ πυρρὸς Ἀνδρὸν ἢ ὕδω, "the cup of purple glass, which measured the fragrant wine;" and even in a subsequent correction of the same passage, published in his Adversaria, he has changed the gender of an adjective in a way that is at least very unusual, if not wholly without example, μετὰ δὲ ὑδω. A mere omission, in a criticism on another author, would scarcely be called an error in an ordinary person; but in such a critic as Porson, it is very remarkable that he should have neglected to notice, in his catalogue of the Errors of Le Clerc, omitted by Bentley (Adv. p. 291), the grossest of all Le Clerc's blunders, which is the quotation of the word Hypophauli, or semibarbarous, from Pollux, with the translation Sartagines, or frying pans: while the real text of Pollux simply and plainly states that the Teganismi, or fricassations, in the Hippocampus of Menander, is a semibarbarous word. These instances, which have occurred in a very cursory perusal of some of Porson's works, would certainly not deserve to be noticed, in a general sketch of his character, any otherwise than as exceptions to his perfect infallibility.
It can scarcely be considered as an imperfection in the constitution of Porson's mind, that he wanted that amiable vanity, which is gratified by the approbation even of the most inconsiderable, and which delights to choose for its objects the most innocent and the most helpless of those who are casually present in society. It has been observed that he would neither give nor take praise; and when he was told
that somebody had called him a giant in literature, he remarked, that a man had no right to tell the height of that which he could not measure. In fact, having learned "to know how little can be known," it is not surprising that he found himself "without a second, and without a judge," and that he was unwilling to affect a community of sentiment, and an interchange of approbation with those whose acquirements and opinions he felt that he had a right to despise. It might have been wiser, in some instances, to conceal this feeling; but, on the other hand, he had perhaps occasion for something of the habit of retreating into his conscious dignity, from his deficiency in those general powers of ephemeral conversation, which are so valuable in mixed societies: for, with all his learning and all his memory, he was by no means prominent as a talker. He had neither the inclination nor the qualifications to be a fascinating story teller, or to become habitually a parasite at the tables of the affluent; but he was the delight of a limited circle of chosen friends, possessing talent enough to appreciate his merits, and to profit by the information that he afforded them.
There has not yet been a life of Porson that has collected all the particulars that would deserve to be recorded by a biographer, who undertook the task on an extensive scale; but of detached documents there is no deficiency. Mr Kidd has pointed out almost every work in which his name has been mentioned: the most material articles relating to him will be enumerated here.
Morning Chronicle, 6th October 1808. A short Account of the late Mr Richard Porson, with some particulars relative to his extraordinary talents: By an admirer of great genius (the Rev. S. Weston), Μητίς πάππου ἕξεν, Look for nothing beyond him. 8. Lond. 1808. Republished, with some additions, under the title of Porsoniana, or Scraps from Porson's rich feast, 8. Lond. 1814. Bloomfield's Sapphic Ode, Class. Journ. I. 1. Some anonymous Iambics, p. 81. Sale of his Library, p. 385. Athenaeum, IV. 426, 521, v. 55. Class. Journ. IX. 386. Savage's Librarian, I. 274. Gentleman's Magazine, LXXVIII. Monthly Magazine. Dr Adam Clarke's Narrative. Class. Journ. II. 720. Correspondence of Wakefield and Fox, 8. Lond. 1813. Greek Epitaph, Class. Journ. XXIII. 179; making Porsonum equal to Newtonus. Aikin's General Biography, X. 4. Lond. 1815. Kidd's Imperfect Outline. Tracts, 1815. Chalmers's Biographical Dictionary, XXV. Lond. 1816. (R. T.)