WTLT.TAM WATSON GOOmVTN. SOO 



mental dispositions, which was tempered but rarely hy ineiirsjons into 

 the larger meanings of Hellenic literature, sufficed with hut r;ire 

 exceptions for the generation under which Goodwin grew to manhood. 

 In the year when, at the age of twenty-nine, he succeeded Felton in 

 the Eliot Professorship, Goodwin gave evidence with a certain brilliant 

 audacity that he had severed himself from the past. The year ISOO 

 may well be taken as the mark of the appearance of a new spirit in 

 our classical scholarship. In that year Hadley at Yale published his 

 "Greek Grammar" based on the work of Georg Curtius; at Harvard, 

 Goodwin brought out the book with which his name will be longest 

 associated — the " Svntax of the Moods and Tenses of the Greek 

 Verb." 



I cannot discover that Goodwin had occupied himself especially 

 with the problems of sj'stematic Greek grammar in any of its aspects 

 during his residence at the universities of Gottingen, Bonn, and Berlin; 

 but the "Moods and Tenses" is itself a witness to the quickening 

 spirit exercised by European masters upon the American philologists 

 who, about the middle of the last century, began to cross the ocean in 

 search of the inspiration they could not find at home. Yet the work, 

 alike in its first form and when rewritten and greatly enlarged thirty 

 years afterwards, owes relatively little to European research for its 

 essential distinction. Not that Goodwin was not indebted, as he 

 himself gladly acknowledged, to the labors of the great Danish scholar 

 Madvig, or that some of his positions had not already been occupied 

 by German syntacticians. But at the very outset of his career he 

 had learned to think for himself — " Librum aperi, ut discas quid alii 

 cogitaverint ; librum claude, ut ipse cogites." It was due to his 

 native and trained sense and knowledge of language as the instrument 

 of the most delicate and refined expression that he was enabled to 

 safeguard the subject of the modal and temporal relations of the Greek 

 verb from the twofold danger that menaced it at the time. On the 

 one hand, metaphysical subtlety exercised a malign influence in 

 disturbing a clear understanding of the facts and their interpretation; 

 on the other hand, comparative grammar, a science at that time in its 

 infancy, by the very width of its horizon and the insecurity of its basis, 

 threatened to carry back to the primitive home of the Aryans many of 

 the problems that pertained in the first instance to the history of the 

 Greek language on Greek soil. 



It was Goodwin's clarity of judgment — with characteristic modesty 

 he called it "common sense" — that saw the truth when the Germans 

 had generally failed to release themselves from the intricacies of philo- 



