864 THOMAS DAY SEYMOUR. 



of 1872 he was in Italy and Greece. During his first semester abroad 

 he came, with rare independence, to the grave decision not to stand 

 for the doctorate in philosophy. He could not spare time, he said, 

 to make special investigations, embody them in a thesis, and prepare 

 himself for examination in certain subjects that he did not think it 

 was profitable for him to study. Later in life he was honored by great 

 universities with the degree of Doctor of Laws: Western Reserve in 

 1894, Glasgow in 1901, and Harvard in 1906. He was elected to 

 membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Class HI, 

 Section 2) in May, 1900. 



In 1880 he was called to Yale, and in 1884, on the death of Professor 

 Lewis Packard, he was elected Hillhouse Professor of Greek. The 

 range of his teaching during his twenty-seven years in New Haven was 

 remarkable. Undergraduates read with him in elective courses 

 Homer, Pindar and the lyric fragments, Greek Tragedy, Thucydides, 

 Plato and Aristotle, Demosthenes and Isocrates, Theocritus, and the 

 Septuagint and the New Testament. The subjects offered to graduate 

 students were epic poetry, lyric poetry, the Greek historians, the 

 drama, Plato, the orators, the bucolic poets, the Greek dialects, Greek 

 inscriptions, and the history and encyclopedia of Greek studies. 

 Aeschylus engaged his interest deeply, Plato was his constant com- 

 panion. He carried some part of the text of Plato with him when he 

 travelled and read him wherever he happened to be. His studies in 

 Greek oratory were quickened by the investigations of Friedrich 

 Blass, his intimate friend for more than twenty years. The two 

 scholars were singularl^^ alike in many ways : unostentatious in their 

 lives; unwearied in study; impatient of error; accurate, learned, and 

 fruitful. Se>mour, like his father was a student of the Bible. This 

 was his other constant companion. In teaching it he applied, with 

 due regard to the change in period, precisely the canons of interpreta- 

 tion that he had found valid in his study of the Greek orators. He 

 was an indefatigable worker. One year he taught twenty-four hours 

 each week, and the hours for one of the courses were from ten o'clock 

 until midnight. The five graduate students in this course eventually 

 succumbed, and he reluctantly changed the time to eight o'clock. 

 When the students withdrew at ten, he cheerily bade them good-night 

 and turned to other occupations. One of his colleagues speaks of his 

 "joyous industry." The tale is current that he never refused service 

 on a committee — and that, too, although member of a faculty that 

 has the envied reputation of initiating and executing policies of its 

 own. Nor was he idle in the summer time — he was never idle. He 



