JOURNAL OF PROCEEDINGS. 175 



Sallust four times, Cicero's Orations four times, Virgil six times, Dalxel's Grosca Mi- 

 nora five or six times, and the poetry of it till he could repeat nearly all of it from 

 memory, the Annals and History of Tacitus, Justin, Cornelius Nepos, the Anabasis 

 of Xenophon, four books of llobinson's Selections from the Iliad, the Greek Testa- 

 ment four times, besides writing a translation of one of the Gospels, and writing a 

 translation of the whole of Grotius de Veritate, which he brought in manuscript" to 

 college ; also he wrote a volume of about three hundred pages of Latin exercises, and 

 one of about two hundred pages of Greek exercises, and studied carefully all the mathe- 

 matics and geography requisite to enter college. : ' That the severe study necessary in 

 order to do all this in so short a time might be detrimental to his health will bo read- 

 ily believed. He suffered from these overstrained efibrts during his residence in col- 

 lege and afterward. Still he continued his course of earnest study through his college 

 life, devoting a good deal of spare time to extra Greek, and forming an acquaintance 

 with several of the modern languages and with the Hebrew. Besides which he con- 

 tributed to his own support in several ways, especially by keeping school during parts 

 of his sophomore and junior years, and in the latter year by teaching mathematics for 

 six months in the Koundhill school at Northampton, under Messrs. Cogswell and 

 Bancroft. He was prepared, by this introduction into the art of teaching and by his 

 excellent scholarship, for the employment in which he was engaged for two years 

 from the time of his graduation — the charge of a high school at Geneseo, New York, 

 which he undertook in company with two of his classmates. From Geneseo he was 

 called back, in 1829, to his Alma Mater to fill the office of Latin tutor, from which 

 department he was transferred the next year to the Greek. His election to the chair 

 of college professor in 1832, showed the estimation in which he was held by the au- 

 thorities of the University. On the resignation of Dr. Popkin in 1833, who had the 

 chair of Greek literature upon the Eliot foundation, Mr. Felton was appointed his 

 successor, and continued in his professorship until his elevation to the presidency in 

 1860. Thus thirty years of his life were spent in cultivating and teaching Greek let- 

 ters. 



As a Greek scholar, he was not surpassed for breadth and accuracy by any other in 

 the land. His nature was many-sided, and he strove after complete scholarship both 

 in what pertained to the language 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 lin- 

 guistics 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 pin- 

 nacle 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 ludi- 

 crous, the same keen judgment of character, the same underlying earnestness of pa- 

 triotism, 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 instruction. Professor Felton seems 

 to have been a very genial instructor, clear in his conceptions and explanations, suffi- 

 ciently strict in grammatical analyses and in keeping his pupils to their tasks, and yet 

 relieving 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 scholarship. 



This sesthetical power of his mind deserves a more distinct mention. 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 rhythm 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 understand more fully the 

 meaning of the ancient writers, together with those reliques of art which time an/1 



