808 WILLIAM WATSON GOODWIN. 



on rigid accuracy in the understanding of the words of the text as the 

 approach to the larger understanding of the thought — the only true 

 method, if a vapid sentimental enthusiasm is not to be the goal of the 

 appreciation of Greek, or of any other, literature. He laid no special 

 emphasis on formal grammar, but he had taken to heart, perhaps 

 unconsciously, the saying of Godfried Hermann, that without gram- 

 mar there can be no appreciation of literature. Looseness of method 

 Goodwin detested, and as he held us to strict accuracy, so in his range 

 of exposition he confined himself to essentials in comment and illus- 

 tration. His instruction was sound and informing, laying stress on 

 fact rather than on subjective impressions. He managed his large 

 store of knowledge with an ease and a security that awakened at 

 once our admiration and our confidence. In textual criticism, as 

 elsewhere, he abhored supersubtle ingenuity; he permitted no diffi- 

 culty or obscurity, especially in phraseology or historical allusion, to 

 pass unexplained, but he had the sincerity to confess his inability to 

 understand passages corrupt beyond all cure. 



No one who knew Goodwin, no one who has ever listened to the 

 sustained flow of his facile translation of the "Agamemnon," could 

 ever doubt that he had a deep love for Greek literature. But he was 

 temperamentally alien to panegyric ; he would not allow the language 

 of emotional appreciation to trouble the beauty, the calm, the harmony 

 of imagination and reason that give to Greek literature its sempiternal 

 charm. Like the very reticences of that literature, the reticence of 

 its expositor marked his power. He appealed therefore less to the 

 many than to those, who, like himself, needed no spur in their " chase 

 after beauty" — if I may use Plato's phrase in another application. 

 His formative influence may be traced in the temperate and rational 

 style, in the absence of extravagance, exaggeration, and perverse 

 ingenuity, in the work of many of his pupils. 



It is the common fate of men who have devoted themselves with 

 success to the welfare of a beloved college, that later generations should 

 allow the memory of their many labors to pass into forgetfulness. As 

 an Hellenist, however, Goodwin's name will live, for directly and 

 inchrectly, as an interpreter of the literature and language of ancient 

 Greece, he had a large influence on the temper and conscience of classi- 

 cal scholarship in the United States. 



In the middle of the last century our native classical scholarship had 

 scarcely awakened to the possibility of the independence born of 

 original research. A leisurely interest in the classics as the humani- 

 ties, a somewhat torpid belief in their efficiency as a discipline for all 



