George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[108] year in the silence and desolation of Gottingen, I felt almost as I did when I was cast among the multitudes of London, or as Cato did when he complained of the magna civitas, magna solitudo. But that, of course, is wearing off. I am making acquaintance with the people attached to the University, and thus begin to forget that I am in a trading city, to whose semiannual fair twenty thousand strangers resort . . . . Among the great men of the University whom I have seen, are Hermann, whose treatise on the Metric you know, I suppose, about as well as I do Chitty's treatise on Pleading, and Beck, who is as familiar to you in his capacity of editor of Euripides, as Polluxfen & Co. are to me as editors of Coke, of whom I now recollect nothing but his full-bottomed wig and a long case which I had occasion to look up. . . . . Hermann and Beck are good men, and so is Prof. Schafer, who published Herodotus, though he is obliged to support himself by correcting proof-sheets of books he ought rather to comment, because his person and manner are not sufficiently interesting to fill his auditorium with hearers and his purse with Frederick d'ors. En passant, I will tell you a story of him. You know Porson is the god of idolatry to all the Hellenists of England, great and small, whether Ἀττικώτατος, like Cicero's instructor in rhetoric, or Groeculi esurientes, like Juvenal's, poor fellow!—and if you do not, you can find it out by reading a Life of him in Aikin's Athenaeum. He died one day, and his successor in Cambridge, and another of the present generation of Greek scholars in England, who are no more like Porson than the degenerate heroes of Virgil's poetry were like their more fabulous ancestors, published his Remains under the title of Adversaria, so that the book came out with great circumstance, under the authority, as it were, of the University of Cambridge. The book was certainly, for a collection of disconnected critical remarks, a good book, and Schafer republished it here, taking the liberty to correct some mistakes in the latinity,—a circumstance which he very modestly notices in his preface. This was a tremendous blow to the pride of the English scholars, though poor Schafer, who had been educated in the German notions of the importance of an exquisite latinity, thought it an inconsiderable oversight. It seemed incredible to the classical wits at Cambridge, that a book of Porson's, so carefully and so often revised by those into whose hands his papers came, should contain so vulgar a fault as a grammatical error; and Schaffer was knocked down in the Cambridge Review very unceremoniously for a calumniator and a liar. His friends immediately wrote to him to defend himself, but he simply answered that quarrelling was not a branch of his