SAMUEL HENRY BUTCHER. 859 



was Senior Classic and Chancellor's Medallist. His Fellowship at 

 Trinity (1874) he vacated on his marriage in 1876, to the daughter 

 of Archbishop Trench; and having been elected, without examination, 

 to a Fellowship at University College, he removed to Oxford, where 

 his success as a lecturer led to his appointment, in 1882, to the Pro- 

 fessorship of Greek at Edinburgh, the successor of a long line of dis- 

 tinguished Hellenists who had adorned one of the most important 

 positions in the British Isles. At Edinburgh Butcher won his fame 

 as an interpreter of the Greek spirit, a teacher to whom personality 

 meant always something finer than learning, a teacher to whom the 

 spoken rather than the written word carried with it the breath of life. 



It was at Edinburgh also that Butcher acquired that wide acquaint- 

 ance with the problems of higher education which was to give him, in 

 later years, an almost unique position in the United Kingdom. He 

 took an important part in the government of the University of Edin- 

 burgh, from 1889 to 1896 was a member of the Scottish Universities 

 Commission, and in 1901 a member of the Royal Commission on 

 University Education in Ireland. The writer of the notice in The 

 Times of December 30, 1910, says that " during the last twenty years 

 few changes of moment have taken place in any British University 

 in which he was not concerned ; and few appointments of importance 

 have been made in which he was not consulted." 



In 1903, after twenty-one years of service at Edinburgh, he re- 

 signed his professorship there, and removed to London. Freedom 

 here from the routine of academic duties, so far from affording him 

 increased opportunity for literary work, brought with it increased 

 opportunity for service in other fields. He spent himself freely and 

 gladly in furthering the cause of the Classical Association, the Hellenic 

 Society, the British School at Athens, in founding the British Acad- 

 emy of Letters, of which he was President in 1909, as Trustee of the 

 British Museum, and as member of the Royal Commission on Trinity 

 College, Dublin. In 1906 the' scope of his duties was still further 

 enlarged by his becoming Member of Parliament for the University 

 of Cambridge in succession to Professor Jebb, to whom, in the sphere 

 of his sympathies in classical scholarship, in the forms of graceful and 

 finished composition in which that scholarship found expression, and 

 in the manner and fields of his public service. Butcher presents 

 interesting points of comparison. 



Butcher, as has been said by his intimate friends, possessed an 

 extraordinary faculty of speech for the ordinary purposes of life. 

 An orator he was not in the formal sense of the word; but the writer 



