Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

Theodore Dwight Woolsey (1801-89), who graduated at Yale in 1820, was in Germany and France from 1827 to 1830, studying with Welcker, and with both Hermann and Boeckh. In 1830 he was present at the ‘Literary Convention’ held in New York, which was the first important American assemblage of professional educators, and was associated with the founding of New York University. Woolsey and others—among them, Francis Lieber—addressed the convention in defence of liberal studies. At Yale he was professor of Greek from 1831 to 1846, and president from 1846 till he resigned in 1871. He edited the Alcestis (1834), the Antigone, and the Electra (1835-37), the Prometheus (1837), and the Gorgias (1842). Like Felton, Woolsey did not train professional philologists, but did much to induct American youth into a liberal education. He exhibits the Yale sobriety and lucidity that is characteristic of his uncle, Timothy Dwight, and of his younger contemporaries, James Hadley and William Dwight Whitney; and like Lieber and Hadley he turned from the classics to political science and law.

Others of this generation worked at lexicography. John Pickering's Lexicon has already been mentioned. Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles (1807-83), born in Thessaly, taught Greek at Yale from 1837 to 1840, and thenceforth at Harvard, where from 1860 he was professor of Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek. He published a Greek grammar in 1838, but what makes him memorable is his compilation of the Greek Ducange, his great Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine periods (1870). To Henry Drisler (1818-97) are due most of the emendations in the second edition (1887) of Sophocles's Lexicon. Drisler, who was a professor of Greek in Columbia College, also prepared American editions of Liddell and Scott (1851) and of Yonge's English-Greek Lexicon (1858). With Howard Crosby (1826-91), he founded in 1857 the ‘Greek Club’ which ended with his life. Forcellini's Latin Lexicon, abridged by Wilhelm Freund (1834-35), was the foundation of a Latin Dictionary (1850) by E. A. Andrews (1787-1858); which in turn was revised and re-edited in 1879 by Charlton Thomas Lewis (1834-1904), an ex-professor of Greek who at the time was practising law in New York, and Charles Lancaster Short (1821-86), professor of Latin in Columbia College.

The next generation turns somewhat decisively to the ideals