Dr. Loeb

Cambridge University, last week, conferred upon James Loeb the degree of Doctor of Laws. Gentlemen who receive honorary degrees at Cambridge are formally presented by a public orator who chimes their achievements on the bronze bells of a very dead and very beautiful language. The speaker who so served Doctor Loeb began by quoting Pindar. If he misrepresented the Greek, he said, there was one present who had taken great pains to have all authors truly rendered (here there was the graceful flourish of a gowned arm)-- Mr. Loeb. The bell-ringing orator spoke with as much justice as courtesy. For Mr. Loeb, onetime member of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., famed banking house,* is founder of the Loeb Classical Library, which provides texts and translations of "all that is of value and interest in Greek and Latin literature, from the time of Homer to the fall of Constantinople."

Over 159 volumes of this library, at $2.50 a volume, have been issued in the U. S. by Putnam & Sons; and it is expected that the library, when completed, will contain 500 volumes. The editors are Prof. T. E. Page, Prof. W. H. B. Rouse, eminent English classicists, and Dr. Edward Capps of Princeton. The translations are all beautifully done and printed with the page of the original at the left, balanced by the English version at the right. They are not all new translations. Some are themselves classics, as, for example, Apuleius' Golden Ass in the version which William Adlington made in 1566. No uniform edition of the classics has ever before been attempted on such a scale. The annual loss, a large one, is borne by Mr. Loeb. He, when he had retired from active business to devote himself to literary and archaeological studies, translated two classic dramas from the French.

*Otto H. Kahn, patron of music, is the present senior partner; Mortimer Schiff, golfer, the junior.