Professor Gildersleeve

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve died at Baltimore, Jan. 9. He war "America's greatest classical scholar," and one of the world's greatest scholars in any field. He had been Professor of Greek at Johns Hopkins since 1876, but had retired from active service in 1915 because of failing eyesight and hearing. He was 92.

His career was as picturesque as his personality, about which innumerable legends survive. He was always a prodigy. Born at Charleston, S. C., in 1831, he translated Anacreon at 12, graduated from Princeton with high honors at 18. He studied in Germany, at Berlin, Bonn, Gottingen, and upon his return became Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, in 1856. He was called to organize a department of Greek at Johns Hopkins 20 years later, and it was during his 47 years of residence in Baltimore that he made his reputation as a man of prodigious learning and irrepressible wit.

Pindar was the Greek author upon whom he lavished most affection and attention. His edition of the poet is a masterpiece of annotation and, incidentally, is a poem in itself. He collected many of his essays and reviews into volumes which became famous for their profundity and their humor, but his most solid achievement was his Historical Syntax of Classical Greek, the first Greek grammar on strictly scientific principles. For years he had expressed himself informally on every subject under the sun in the back pages of the American Journal of Philology, which he founded. His department, called "Brief Mention," became among other things a hall of fame--it was a distinction to be mentioned there, even unfavorably, as often happened.

He was a great teacher, and always a man of immense activity. After he lost his eyesight, readers kept him abreast of developments in learning and literature. He was an insatiable reader in other languages than that which he taught. In his last year someone heard him recite practically the whole of Faust in German, and one of his former students says that he learned more about Latin, German, Italian and French from Professor Gildersleeve than he learned from his Latin, German, Italian and French teachers. Latterly, he amused and occupied himself by writing sonnets reminiscent of his early life.

There are many tributes to his wit, which certain persons trace to his French blood. Edward Lucas White, classicist and novelist, says: . "I re-call one of Professor Gildersleeve's lectures on The Uses of the Greek Dative. I took notes on the lecture with my right hand while with my left hand I wiped away the tears that ran down my cheeks, so amusing did Professor Gildersleeve make that lecture." At a recent dinner in his honor, when he was told that his name was a household word around the globe, he replied with characteristic modesty: "And yet, when my wife goes shopping they send the things home addressed to 'Mrs. Gildensnoot.'"