860 SAMUEL HENRY BUTCHER. 



of this notice heard him speak with ease, clearness, and force in a 

 debate in the House of Commons on the occasion of a discussion of 

 the affairs of the Universities of Ireland. 



The fruitage of Butcher's literary labor is not large, but his every 

 work bears the mark of distinction and of richly dowered culture. 

 His earliest book — the translation of the Odyssey (1S79) made in 

 cooperation with Andrew Lang — may serve in many respects as a 

 model for future translators of Homer who realize that only in prose 

 can the plain meaning of the original be adequately set forth, and that 

 only in a prose of a somewhat antiquated flavor, with a diction sug- 

 gestive of the language of the English Bible, can the simplicity, the 

 nobility and the dignity, though not the impetuousity, of the Greek 

 epic be reproduced. 



It is not matter for wonder that a scholar who was powerfully 

 attracted by the genius of Burke should have been a profound ad- 

 mirer of the greatest of Attic orators. In 1881 Butcher published, 

 in the series of Classical Writers edited by John Richard Green, a 

 brief but valuable account of Demosthenes; and it was to that orator 

 that he returned in the last period of his life in a critical edition of 

 which he lived to complete two volumes (1903 and 1907). Only the 

 professional scholar can venture to estimate, at their true value, the 

 labor and the skill requisite to the preparation of an apparatus criticus, 

 the enforced limits of which hampered the full expression of the 

 editor's unrivalled grasp of the subject. 



Butcher's chief contribution to classical scholarship, and the one 

 by which his name will be longest known in the world of scholars, is 

 his book entitled Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a 

 critical Text and Translatio7i of the Poetics (1895, and in three later 

 editions). Whatever his heresies in the view of the advocates of the 

 traditional interpretation of many vital features of Aristotle's theory 

 of tragic art — and it is not seldom that Butcher disputed current 

 theories — his work corrected many false opinions and shows evi- 

 dence of an acute intellect in its analysis of the creations of the imagi- 

 nation. Nor should it be forgotten that Butcher's sound sense served 

 him well as a guide in the interpretation of a work the limited perti- 

 nency of which to later possibilities of literature he was far from 

 denying. Butcher's study of the Poetics, will, I take it, not be super- 

 seded even by the edition of B^-water whose learning is massed in an 

 exhaustive commentary. 



Butcher, it must always be remembered, never was a commentator; 

 he was first and foremost an interpreter of the spiritual qualities 



