448 HENRY WARREN TORREY. 



HENRY WARREN TORREY 



Henry Warren Torrey, Professor Emeritus of Ancient and 

 Modern History in the University at Cambridge, was born in 

 Roxbury, Massachusetts, November 11, 1814. He was the son of 

 John Torrey and Marcia Otis, daughter of Henry and Mary War- 

 ren of Plymouth. He was educated in the Adams Grammar School 

 in Boston, where he received a Franklin Medal at ten years old, 

 losing his father in the same year (1824). He was a pupil of the 

 Boston Latin School under Master B. A. Gould, completing the 

 five years' course in four years, from 1825 to 1829, and gradu- 

 ating from Harvard College in 1833, where he stood second in 

 rank, the late Professor Bowen being first. 



He was usher at the Latin School under Master F. P. Leverett, 

 whom he assisted greatly in the compilation of his Latin Lexicon. 

 The English-Latin part of this book was entirely prepared by 

 him, and the part of it from A to C was an original work, where 

 Mr. Torrey had in sober earnest attempted that almost impossible 

 task, the preparation of a book really worth the name, to assist 

 in translating good English into good Latin. At this stage of 

 the work he was forced to desist, and for the remainder to confine 

 himself to a recasting of "Ainsworth," a task singularly uncon- 

 genial to Mr. Torrey, whose fine mind was one of the first to recog- 

 nize the worthlessness of Ainsworth's Dictionary, — a work to be 

 recast only by being cast into the fire. 



His service on the two Lexicons had practically ruined his eyes; 

 but this loss did not deter him from studying law at New Bedford 

 in the office of his accomplished and ever genial uncle, the Hon. 

 Charles Henry Warren. He was admitted to the bar, but never 

 practised, on account of his eyes. He kept school in Providence 

 for a year and a half, and made a voyage to the Azores with Hon. 

 William W. Swain. This was one of the many vain efforts of 

 that warm-hearted and excellent man to restore health to his son 

 Robert, whose lovely character, tried in the furnace of scarcely 

 intermitted suffering, only seemed to approach nearer to the an- 

 gels with every hour that brought him to his end at the age of 

 twenty-one. 



Mr. Torrey was again instructor in the Latin School in 1842, 

 and Tutor in History and Instructor in Elocution at Harvard Col- 

 lege from 1844 to 1848. For the next eight years he kept a girls' 

 school at No. 5 Hamilton Place in Boston, with his sister, which 



