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About 1860 three remarkable persons illustrated scholarship in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh respectively, with a combination of literary and linguistic knowledge which had been growing rarer up to their time, and which has grown rarer still since. The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born at Boston on 10th August 1825.
"How do you do, Mr. Ferrars?" she said, rising. "I am writing to Sylvia. They are not returning as soon as they intended, and I am to go down to Conington by an early train to-morrow." "I want to see Mr. Rodney," said Endymion moodily. "Can I write anything to him, or tell him anything?" said Imogene. "No," continued Endymion in a melancholy tone. "I can tell you what I wanted to say.
Conington, for example, has frequently done the poet an injustice by assuming that Vergil was in error whenever his statements seem not to accord with what we happen to know. We have now learned to be more wary. It is usually a safer assumption that our observation is in error.
"The interest of this last book," says Conington, "must have centred, at least to us, in the discourse about himself, in which the old bard seems to have indulged in closing this his greatest poem.
Painful pre-eminence! he hears, 'tis true, Fox, North, and Burke, but hears Sir Joseph too. "Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit." In a note he adds: 'Professor Conington calls my attention to the fact that, if this were a genuine classical expression, it would be ornaret.
Conington sanely decides that only one eviction took place, and he places the ninth before the first in order of time. He may be right. The two poems at any rate belong to the early months of 41. The obsequious scholiasts of the Empire have nowhere so thoroughly exposed their own mode of thought as in their interpretations of these two Eclogues.
Philpot, his wife, whose brother, Professor Conington, was then the most illustrious representative of Latin learning at Oxford. We enjoyed, under Mr. Philpot's care, the amplest domestic comforts, and we enjoyed, under our own care, almost unlimited credit at every shop in the town. We had carriages, the hire of which went down in Mr.
Here and there a professor like the late Professor Conington will praise the "unhasting unresting flow" of the translations from Homer; but the next generation will read its "Iliad" in the Greek, or in some future successor to Mr. William Morris or Mr. Way.
No doubt many celebrated poets in France and England have cultivated verse satire; but in most cases they have merely imitated, whereas the prose essay is a true formation of modern literary art. Conington, in an interesting article, regards the progressive enlargement of the sphere of prose composition as a test of a nation's intellectual advance.
John Swanston, a forester at Abbotsford, who did all he could to replace Tom Purdie. Life, vol. x. p. 66. Dr. Ferguson, Sir Adam's father, died in 1816. See Misc. Prose Works, vol. xix. pp. 331-33. See Measure for Measure, Act II. Sc. 1. Æneid v. 194-7: thus rendered in English by Professor Conington:
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