BENJAMIN JOWETT 461 



of Doctor of Laws from Edinburgh in 1884, from Dublin in 1886, 

 and from Cambridge in 1890. His service of more than half a cen- 

 tury at Oxford was a memorable one. It may safely be said that no 

 man ever exerted a stronger personal influence upon the undergraduates 

 of Oxford, and no man has ever gone to his rest with the benedictions 

 of a longer line of grateful pupils. His own appreciation of the 

 respect and love which his long and faithful services inspired may be 

 seen in the dedication of the third edition of his translation of Plato, 

 published in 18 ( J1 : " To my former pupils in Balliol College and in 

 the University of Oxford, who during fifty years have been the best of 

 friends to me, these volumes are inscribed in grateful recognition of 

 their never failing attachment." 



Professor Jowett will always be best known to the literary world 

 outside of Oxford by his translation of Plato, which for the last 

 twenty-three years has been a standard classic. This work is addressed 

 to the ''general reader," who is assumed to want to know what Plato 

 wrote and how he expressed it, without caring for minute details of 

 scholarship. With this view, the translator has not hesitated to re- 

 write a passage " as the author would have written it at first if he had 

 not been nodding," or " to supply anything which, owing to the genius 

 of the language or some accident of composition, is omitted in the 

 Greek, but is necessary to make the English clear and consecutive." 

 This process gives brilliant results where it succeeds, but it makes sad 

 work where it fails. All scholars know well the brilliancy of Jowett's 

 Plato as a whole ; and all careful students of Plato are often doubtful, 

 to say the least, whether in a difficult argument it is Plato or his 

 translator who is " nodding." Jowett's translations of Thucydides, 

 published in 1881, and of Aristotle's Politics, published in 1885, follow 

 the same principles, and have the same felicities of style and expression 

 which mark his Plato. 



A generation ago Dr. Jowett was best known to the world as the 

 author of the essay on " The Interpretation of Scriptures," published 

 in the famous volume entitled " Essays and Reviews." It is almost 

 impossible now to understand the furious excitement which this volume 

 aroused in the theological world. It was a bold and vigorous mani- 

 festo of the Broad Church in England against the narrow limits 

 within which it. was maintained English theology had confined itself, 

 as contrasted with the free range of German speculation. The book 

 and all its authors were assailed at once, not merely by arguments, but 

 by abuse and persecution. It is well known that Dr. Jowett's salary 

 as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, for several years after the 



