omer, and Virgil, and did a certain amount
of miscellaneous literary work. He was neither a very exact nor a very
great scholar: his scholarship indeed took rather the character of that
of foreign nations, other than Germany, than the dogged minuteness of
German, or the large but solid strength of English study of the
classics. But he was an exceedingly stimulating professor; and coming at
the time when it did, his work was valuable as a reminder that the
classics are live literature, and not so much dead material for science.

Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, a native of Elgin, where he was born in
1819, a Shrewsbury boy and a scholar and fellow of Trinity College,
Cambridge, who became Professor of Latin there in 1869 and died in 1882,
was an incomparably greater verbal scholar than Conington, and may
fairly be said to have taken up the torch of Bentley and Porson. His
great edition (with a less great translation) of Lucretius, his work on
Horace and Catullus, and his scattered papers, all come up to a very
high standard; and in the delightful art of Greek and Latin composition
in verse, where England has long stood paramount, and which, since she
has abandoned it, remains uncultivated throughout Europe, he was almost
supreme. But Munro, though he never surrendered wholly to the
philological heresy, was affected thereby; and some of his Lucretian
readings were charged with a deficiency in ear such as that with which
he justly reproached his German predecessors.

The most strictly literary of the three has yet to be mentioned. William
Young Sellar, born near Golspie in the same year as Conington, was
educated at the Edinburgh Academy, at the University of Glasgow, and (as
a Snell exhibitioner) at Balliol. After holding an Oriel fellowship for
some years, and doing professorial or assistant-professorial work at
Durham and St. Andrews, he became in 1863 Professor of Humanity at
Edinburgh, and remained so till his death in 1890. In the year of his
election to the professorship appeared his _Roman Poets of the
Republic_, quite the best book of its kind existing in English; and this
was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and
Propertius--good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the
Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more strictly
poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus. Attempts, too few but
noteworthy, have since been made to handle classical literature in the
style of the _Ro