The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
VOLUME XVIII. Later National Literature, Part III.
§ 16. Classical Philosophy
University production obtained its other great successes in the philology of the classics, of general linguistics, of English, and of the fine arts.
The University of Virginia opened with several foreign teachers whom Jefferson’s friend Francis W. Gilmer had engaged abroad. Its first professor of the Ancient Languages (1825–28) was George Long, who is best known for his translations of Marcus Aurelius (1826) and of Epictetus (1877). Upon his recall in 1828 to the chair of Greek at the newly established University College, London, he named as his successor his pupil Gessner Harrison (1807–62), with whom he remained in correspondence and to whom he sent copies of the earlier portions of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar as they appeared from 1833 onward. Harrison thereupon applied the comparative method to his own studies and teaching long before it had been practised elsewhere in America, or in England, or had been generally accepted even in Germany
Among classical scholars in America as elsewhere two types are distinguishable; the one indulging its æsthetic appreciation, historical and archæological associations, and a philosophical discursiveness about the ancients, and the reconstitution of antiquity as a whole—Boeckh’s ideal of Altertumswissenschaft; the other inclining towards minute grammatical, textual, and metrical investigations—the ideals rather of Hermann and Curtius. Two scholars of the first type are Cornelius Conway Felton and Theodore Dwight Woolsey.