as been said, nearly certain that he would have
been a brilliant writer in English on any subject he chose to take up.
But he was a hopeless drunkard, an offensive sloven, rude and aggressive
in society--in short a survival of the Grub Street pattern of the
century of his birth. This period, which was that of Burney, Elmsley,
Gaisford, and other scholars, robust but not very literary (except in
the case of Elmsley, who was a contributor both to the _Edinburgh_ and
the _Quarterly Reviews_), was succeeded by one in which the English
Universities did not greatly distinguish themselves in this department.
Gaisford indeed lived till 1855 at Oxford, and Cambridge produced among
other respectable scholars the already mentioned Malden and George Long
(1800-79), a Lancashire man, who went to Trinity, distinguished himself
greatly, but found such preferment as he met with outside his
university, in America, at University College, London, and elsewhere.
Long was a great diffusion-of-useful-knowledge man, and edited the
_Penny Cyclopaedia_: but he did more germane work later in editing the
_Bibliotheca Classica_, an unequal but at its best excellent series of
classics, and in dealing with the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and
Epictetus. He was also one of the mainstays of the most important
enterprise of the middle of the century in classical scholarship, the
_Classical Dictionaries_ edited by the late Sir William Smith and
published by Mr. Murray; and he wrote an extensive but not
extraordinarily valuable _Decline of the Roman Republic_. Long appears
to have been one of those men who, with great ability, vast knowledge,
and untiring industry, somehow or other miss their proper place, whether
by fault or fate it is hard to say.

About 1860 three remarkable persons illustrated scholarship in the
Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh respectively, with a
combination of literary and linguistic knowledge which had been growing
rarer up to their time, and which has grown rarer still since.

The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born at Boston on
10th August 1825. He went to Rugby and to Magdalen College, Oxford,
whence he migrated to University College, and there obtained a
fellowship, making nearly a clean sweep of the chief University prizes
meanwhile. He became in 1854 the first Professor of Latin, and held the
post till his death in 1869. He edited Virgil, AEschylus (part) and
Persius, translated Horace, H