PROCEEDINGS OF THE REGENTS. Ill 



and in what pertained to all the branches of the literature of the 

 Hellenic race. Yet, like every other scholar, he had his favorite 

 departments of pursuit, while other sides of it had less attraction for 

 him. To linguistics and general philology and to the verbal side of 

 Greek learning he was not so much drawn as to all the manifestation 

 of the Greek mind and life. Here again it was Athens in her palmiest 

 days ; it was her unrivalled dramatic poets, and especially that prince 

 of the ancient comedy, who disclosed to us the life of Athens at the 

 pinnacle of her renown, and when she was sliding down from her 

 eminence — it was this age and these monuments of Greece which 

 had the greatest charms for him. The spirit of Aristophanes lodged 

 in Professor Felton ; he had the same sense of the ludicrous, the same 

 keen judgment of character, the same underlying earnestness of patri- 

 otism, the same political conservatism. 



A mind which had such a strong relish for exhibitions of life in the 

 concrete forms would be apt to convey pleasant and profitable instruc- 

 tion. Professor Felton seems to have been a very genial instructor, 

 clear in his conceptions and explanations, sufficiently strict in gram- 

 matical analyses and in keeping his pupils to their tasks, and yet re- 

 lieving the tedium of the recitation room by lively illustrations of the 

 author read, so that the lesson was not more a task than a pleasure, 

 enriching and beautifying everything by reference to ancient art, as 

 well as by a pure manly taste which went along with its whole schol- 

 arship. 



This cBsthetical power of his mind deserves a more distinct men- 

 tion. He had within him a love of art, and his judgment, natively 

 sound, was improved by devotion to a language and a literature which 

 cultivate the taste more than any other. To him, therefore, the life 

 of Greece consisted not solely in its poets, orators, historians, and 

 philosophers, but in the euphonies of its words, in the rythm of its 

 periods, in its wondrously exquisite and varied poetical metres, in its 

 simple but grand architecture, in those works of its sculptors and 

 founders which immortalized over again the materials of a literature 

 already immortal. 



Here we may add that he had two opportunities of inspecting the 

 monuments of Greek art, and of visiting that land where so many of 

 his thoughts had dwelt. In 1853 and the following year he devoted 

 five months of a European tour to Greece, ancient and modern, to her 

 present life and the remains of her past glory; and again in 1858 he 

 spent part of another summer in the same land. Whatever reminded 

 of ancient days and enabled him to conceive more clearly and under- 

 stand more fully the meaning of the ancient v.-riters, together with those 

 reliques of art which time and barbarism have spared — this naturally 

 claimed bis attention first; but he sympathized also with the free, 

 hopeful, restored Greece of the present; he examined the workings 

 of her political institutions, visited the halls of legislation at the cap- 

 ital, formed an acquaintance with the learned men who adorn the 

 University of Athens, and returned in the faith that modern Greece 

 has a noble destiny before her. He was led by his tours to connect 

 the Greek and the Romaic languages more closely together, to urge 

 the importance of studying the latter, and to advocate the application 



