446 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



monial to the modest scholar, who had done more than any other man 

 of the present generation to exalt the name of England in the depart- 

 ment of ancient learning. 



(August) Immanuel Bekker was born in Berlin, May 21, 1785. 

 He studied at the gymnasium of his native city, and in 1803 he entered 

 the University of Halle, where the great founder of the modern school 

 of German classical philology, Friedrich August Wolf, was at the 

 height of his reputation as a lecturer. Wolf was not long in discover- 

 ing the ability and the persevering patience of his scholar, and the rela- 

 tions between the master and the pupil soon became intimate. Bekker 

 was retained at Halle, after his regular term of study was ended, as 

 assistant to Wolf in the Philological Seminary. While he was a stu- 

 dent, he wrote his review of Heyne's smaller edition of the Iliad, which 

 appeared in the Jena Allgemeine Litteratur Zeitung, in 1806, and 

 was afterwards reprinted, in 1863, in Bekker's Homerische Blatter. 

 The boldness with which he attacked the weak points in Heyne's work 

 is in strange contrast with the gentleness which distinguished the great 

 critic in his later years ; and, on reprinting the review fifty-seven years 

 afterwards, Bekker apologizes for the "jugendliche Keckheit " of his 

 first essay, the tone of which (he says) was approved and encouraged 

 by his master and patron, Wolf. As to Heyne, he confesses that, as a 

 young man of twenty, he knew him only as a grammarian, " den viel- 

 seitigen von Einer, und der schwachen, Seite." His review of Wolf's 

 Homer, published in 1809, in a more respectful but decidedly critical 

 spirit, did not meet the same unqualified approval of his master, if we 

 may judge by a note of Wolf, which Bekker quotes in the preface to 

 the Homerische Blatter. 



In 1810, Wolf was called from Halle to a professorship in the new 

 University of Berlin ; and Bekker soon followed, through Wolf's influ- 

 ence, as extraordinary professor. In the very year of his appointment, 

 Bekker received a leave of absence, to enable him to begin the labor 

 to which no small part of his active life was to be devoted, that of col- 

 lating classic manuscripts. He went first to Paris, and the earliest fruit 

 of his labors appeared in 1811, in the publication of the important 

 grammatical work of Apollonius Dyscolus, De Pronomine, never be- 

 fore printed. In 1812, he was appointed to a full professorship at Ber- 

 lin, which office he held fifty-nine years, until his death in June, 1871. 

 Bekker spent, according to his own estimate, seventeen years of his life 



