MacTutor
Edwin Abbott Abbott
Times obituary
SCHOLAR, CRITIC, AND TEACHER.
We announce with much regret that Dr. E. A. Abbott died yesterday at his residence at Hampstead, at the age of 87. He had been bedridden for more than seven years, and during the past week was attacked by a form of influenza, which brought on the end. Edwin Abbott Abbott was the son of Edwin Abbott, Headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone, described by those who knew him as a man of strong personality. Born in London on December 20, 1838, Edwin Abbott the younger as sent to the City of London School in the early fifties, and left it as captain in 1867, with a scholarship at St. John's College, Cambridge. When, in 1861, he became Senior Classic and Senior Chancellor's Medallist, and W. 8. Aldis Senior Wrangler And First Smith's Prize man, to the City of London School fell quadruple honours such as had never come to any school in a single year. The Classical Tripos over, Abbott turned to Hebrew and New Testament. Greek, and soon after was ordained in the Church of England. He was elected Fellow of St. John's in 1862, and 50 years afterwards Honorary Fellow, a distinction followed in the next year by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy. Other marks of public recognition were offered him, but declined.
His marriage in 1803 with Mary Rangeloy, the daughter of a Derbyshire family, was the beginning of a long and happy wedded life, terminated only by Mrs. Abbott's death on February 5, 1919. A son and daughter maintained their father's high standard of scholarship; and that he was able to bring his great work to completion after 20 years of un-remitting toil was due in large measure to the help he received from his accomplished and devoted daughter. She nursed him with equal devotion in his last years of disabling illness. Abbott was a student and an author from the first. Incidentally he was a preacher, incidentally a schoolmaster, and in both characters eminent; but he gave up preaching to husband his strength, and schoolmastering to husband his time.
AN ORIGINAL HEADMASTER.
For a term or two he was at King Edward's School, Birmingham, but an invitation from Percival drew him to Clifton. Thence, at the call of his own old Headmaster, Dr. G. F. W. Mortimer, he went up to London and was appointed to succeed him at the City of London School. At that time he was a clean-shaven young clergyman of 20, so youthful in appearance that, he was at times mistaken for a junior member of his own Sixth. Twenty-four years of work placed him amongst the acknowledged heads of his profession and made his school famous at the Universities. It has been famous publicly stated that Benson was most anxious to have Abbott as his successor at Wellingtont Rugby also was pressed on him; and it is probable that he could have had any of the great public schools. But he preferred to rotire to Hampstead to devote himself to the work that had attracted his youth and that gave full scope to his remarkable powers of critical and constructive scholarship.
Abbott was undoubtedly a great headmaster. Originality, freshness, and vigour were his in a degree far from common; but his pupils carried away most enduringly from his touching a deep impression of an overmastering intellectual honesty and of the ruthless application available means to the discovery of truth. Abbott was a student of Bacon to some purpose. His direct teaching was confined to the three highest classes, but his influence was felt in every part of the school. He had the gifts of enthusiasm, of penetration into character, of fertility of resource, of clear and incisive speech. It has been truly said of him, "He always made the best of us and got the best out of us"; fus"; but he was sternness incarnate to the "slacker." It was characteristic of Abbott to bring to the solution of every task every tool that he could find or fashion. When he determined to make the study of Shakespeare -- for which special inducements existed in the school -- a real thing, he tackled as a preliminary the apparent chaos of Elizabethan syntax. He published the first edition of his "Shakespearian Grammar in 1870. This work, which involved heavy labour and untiring accuracy, placed him at once among the chief authorities in the matters treated. It was followed by "English Lessons for English People," in which he was assisted by his old friend and schoolfellow, J. R. Seeley. Then came an incomparable guide to teachers of the Bible called "Bible Lessons," and other small but solid and enduring school-room classics. In 1876 Abbott produced the fullest and best edition of Bacon's "Essays" yet published. Some of his views on Bacon's work and character by Spedding, and a battle wore resented by ensued in which the veteran but over-partial Beconian met a discriminating and and well-equipped antagonist. A further book on "Bacon and Essex" was the immediate result, to be followed 10 years later by "An Account of the Life and Works of Francis Bacon".
LIBERAL THEOLOGY.
In 1877 the publication of "Through Nature to Christ, or Through the Illusion to the Truth," brought down a storm of hostile criticism it defined for the first time that liberal attitude to theology which marked all his subsequent work. The year following he published anonymously a book of singular beauty, "Philochristus, or the Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord," written in Elizabethan English, a style proper to "the highth of this great argument." Two other works of historical imagination followed, one intended to illustrate the spread of the Gospel in the time of St. Paul, and the other to depict the conflict of Christianity with Stoicism: "Onesimus" in 1882, and "Silanus the Christian" in 1906. A long article on "The Gospels," packed with facts, in the ninth edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" was from his pen. To him also was due the plan of the elaborate "Synopticon," which old pupil and life-long friend, W. G. Rushbrooke, afterwards headmaster of St. Olave's, carried out in detail in 1881. With Rushbrooke, also, he produced in 1884 the "Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels." In 1886 a realization of the difficulties presented to the would-be believer by the miraculous elements in the Bible story led to the series of letters to a young friend called "The Kernel and the Husk," dedicated "To the Doubters of this Generation and the Believers of the Next." And even this list does not exhaust the astonishing series of books written during the 24 years of headmastership in which nothing required by the day's business was left undone, nothing done except in the freshest way and after the ripest consideration.
The notable series of erudite books which came from his hand when he left the City of London School was preceded by a long and arduous study of Syriac and of the Rabbinical literature. Yet he found time to deal also with the interesting problems presented by the character and career of John Henry Newman and the varying accounts of the Death and Miracles of Thomas à Becket. The latter subject was an excursion into medieval history made to illustrate, the development of miraculous story; the former was the result of a controversy in which he had become entangled and in which his terse passion for truth led him into what some regarded as unduly polemical iconoclasm.
The "Spirit on the Waters," published in 1897, but written long before, was an aphoristic summary, intended only for students, of the course of the Divine Revelation; it might be called a Manual of Theology for Thinkers. Not till 11 years after his retirement did he put out the first volume of the great work he had taken in hand, and he was then 62 years of age but as there had been no haste, so there had been no rest. This book is called "Clue, a Guide through Greek and Hebrew Scripture," and was followed in rapid sequence by a series of volumes, solid and learned, amply justifying the promise of the first. To these he gave the general title of "Diatessarica."
To find a parallel to such single-hearted devotion to a scholar's task task one must go back to the great scholars of a bygone age. Arnd though little or no official recognition was ever given to Dr. Abbott's work by the authorities of his own Church, from the fit audience of the greatly learned he had ample recognition. On his 80th birthday he received a remarkable tribute in the form of an address signed by the two Archbishops and many Bishops and dignitaries of the Church England as well as the leaders of the nonconforming Churches, the headmasters of most of the great schools of the country, and most of the chief theological professors, besides men and women of eminence in various other pursuits.
Nothing has been said of his vivid and inspiring utterances in the pulpit, which those who heard him cannot forget. Bishop Percival said on one occasion, "Had Edwin Abbott been able to cơntinue preaching, he would have been the greatest preacher in the English Church" and a distinguished contemporary headmaster on another occasion declared, "I never met a mah with so strong a passion for truth as Edwin Abbott." Abbott's greatness as teacher, preacher, and scholar was based on deep and lively human sympathies and an unquerichable passion for truth.
The funeral service will be at Christ Church, Hampstead, on Friday, at 2 o'clock o'clock, and the interment at Hanmp-stead Cemetery, Fortune Green, at 2.30.
SOME REMINISCENCES.
We have received the following reminiscences by an old friend:-
One of Abbott's carllest publications wak a little work entitled "Bible Lessons" (1872), which had the honour of being commended by Bishop Thirlwall as showing "How this difficult duty of imparting a sound religious education may be effected." The book was A characteristic indication of his desire to bring int into their right connexion the two things -- education and divinity -- to which his life was with such rare consistency of purpose devoted. The lines which he chose for the motto of his last book may be deemed to express a fundamental principle of his theology:-
His fixed habit of concentrating his attention and his prodigious powers of work on a few big things gave rise to the reshark that he knew only three books well (if books is the right word): the New Testament, Shakespeare, and Bacon, and that with regard to many matters, both in literature and in life, which are well known to ordinary people, he was almost as ignorant as a clown. In the "Life and Remains of R. H. Quick," edited by F. Storr (1890), the following evidently refers to Albott: "One of the ablest men and best workers I know gets to have a splendid curiosity of knowledge in the subject on which he has worked, but shows astonishing ignorance when you go a step beyond." Elsewhere, Quick compares Abbott with F. W. Walker, the famous High Master of St. Paul's, and proclaims the latter to be the stronger of the two in the arena of controversy, though Abbott might beat him by agility like a lightweight pugilist. Abbott, it appears, expected his sixth-form boys to do at least three hours of work in the evening, after the regular school day. At the same time, his boys have great liberty of study, for they are treated like so many private pupils. Abbott, who relished Walker's half-cynical frankness of opinion, used to relate how the Iatter showed him over his grand new school buildings at Hammersmith, and how, when Abbott expressed his admiration of everything, and especially of the magnificent chemical laboratories, Walker replied: "Yes, they are all very well in their way; but, as we two are alone here, I may venture to say (lowering his voice to a confidential whisper) that you and I know that this sort of thing is not education."
Among those who in certain ways influenced Abott -- for the most part he was singularly independent, while generous in acknowledging obligations -- was the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, an intimate and lifelong friend. Abbott's father was Davies's church warden at Christ Church. E. A. Abbott was for many years a member of the congregation and sometimes preached. He had a natural gift of extemporaneous utterance, and his sermons were always listened to with keen interest. He showed in them the power of persistent exposition and popular appeal, of which he afterwards gave clear proof in his "Philochristus" and other works, and which is often found in combination with minute and profound learning. He was debarred from making full use of his faculty of eloquent speech in the pulpit or elsewhere by a chronic deliency of the throat, which rendered it imprudent for him to add to the strain which his school work necessarily imposed upon his volition. In earlier days, when Abbott lived in St. John's Wood, his garden was the scene of little Saturday afternoon tennis parties, of which some of his younger friends had pleasant recollections. This was the only form of bodily exercise or recreation, it is believed, in which Abbott could ever be induced to indulge.
People who took him out of school sometimes wondered whether the shy little man, as he seemed to be, could possess that power of keeping order and commanding respect without which other talents are almost useless to a schoolmaster. In point of fact, he was a strict and highly efficient disciplinarian; it was a case of the triumph of mind the vivida vis animi -- over matter. One could hardly imagine how a noisy little mob of boys around the class room would suddenly hushed into awe-struck stillness at the sound of the voice of the proaching headmaster:
______________________________________________
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir,
Is a very old memory of Abbott worth preserving? I was one year senior to him at St. John's, Cambridge.
My friend, W. E. Mullins, afterwards of Marlborough, and I agreed that we would both call on the two freshmen whom we picked out at the first chapel as the most reverent and attractive. We found that we had both chosen Abbott. We ascertained his name and rooms, and so began a long, intimate friendship at Cambridge, and continued while we were both engaged in school work. His work as a pioneer and scholastic in theology was of great value to students of 30, 40, and 50 years ago, and he lived to see some of the fruits of his work. May I, in the name of his few surviving contemporaries, thank the writer of the excellent obituary notice in your columns of today?
JAMES M. WILSON. Steep, Petersfield, Oct. 13.
_________________________________________
A FORMER PUPIL'S TRIBUTE
Sir,
As one who had the high privilege of being trained at the City of London School from 1866 to 1874 under Edwin Abbott, I would like to pay to his memory the tribute of a few grateful words; for when a great man passes, the few who know how great he was should speak out.
Your excellent obituary account conveys a sufficient impression of his extraordinary achievement in varied lines of work—literary, scholarly, theological, and educational. One may say that he was not only the greatest headmaster of his day, but also that no headmaster ever produced so much for the world of letters. His greatness as an educator was partly that of the organizer and originator of new methods and systems. He was the pioneer of many new departures in school curriculum. Having a reverence for physical science not often found among the classical scholars of his day, he made an elementary acquaintance with chemistry compulsory throughout the upper school. Caught by the enthusiasm then prevalent at Cambridge for the study of comparative philology, at that time in its interesting and easy-going youth, he provided better teaching in it for the scholars of his sixth form than they could find for many years afterwards in the lecture rooms of Oxford; for this purpose, he even introduced his advanced classical pupils to the study of Sanskrit, and thus started on his life's career the distinguished Sanskritist Professor Bendall, a contemporary of mine.
Perhaps his greatest special achievement as an educator was that in his devotion to the masterworks of English literature he made these an integral part of the form of teaching from the Lower School upwards; and his sixth terminally studied a play by Shakespeare as they studied a Greek play; and thus the language and the soul of one great world helped to interpret those of the other. It was Abbott's enthusiasm for English studies, his masterful exposition of the secrets and principles of style that opened to many of us a treasure house that has enriched our lives and inspired pupils such as Bullen and others who have won fame as English scholars and men of letters.
But apart from any of his special interests and reforming ideas, it was his whole personality that inspired and controlled us. The strong soul-power within him meant he could impart to others; and this is the mark of the spiritual leader. He was awed with intellectual energy, and he kindled those who were under him. He never drove us or overtasked us; but he made intellectual effort a kind of religion for us, and his deep and serious reprobation of intellectual slackness and unveracity was such a spur to us that his sixth form became a most stimulating palaestra for the eager and receptive spirits, while for some, perhaps, the tonic was an overstrain. But he was by no means what is called an "intellectualist": for he indeed believed in intellectual honesty as a religious ideal; he was also a great and gifted moral and religious teacher; he had the eyes that looked straight through you and the strong voice that could both charm and command. One of the rarest and most delightful experiences in life is hero-worship, and he was one of the few who could evoke it.
I am, &c.
_______________________________________________
Sir,
Those students of the New Testament who have been indebted to Dr. E. A. Abbott's publications were delighted with the sympathetic appreciation of them in your notice of him on October 13, but perhaps justice was scarcely done to the work on which he spent the greater part of the last half of his life, "The Fourfold Gospel." In it he examined carefully the exact relationship of each Gospel to the others, analyzed very fully the meaning of the great titles of Christ, in two volumes which are indispensable to any student of the Fourth Gospel; in another he treated exhaustively its grammar and vocabulary; in another he showed the extent of the dependence of the Odes of Solomon upon it; in another he made very probable the suggestion that, in I Cor. xi. 23, "the night in which He was betrayed" ought to be translated "the night in which He was offering himself as a sacrifice." Volume after volume appeared with a rapidity which was partly due to the efficiency of his daughter, who acted as his secretary. There were ten volumes, with additional sections and indices. It is perhaps just a criticism that he gave undue weight at times to linguistic points and treated the Evangelists as dealing with the materials at their disposal with the exactness of modern writers, but at all times his work was characterized by a combination of freedom with reverence of massive learning with that charm and lucidity of style which was to be found in his sermons and his illuminating romances, "Philochristus," "Onesimus," and "Silarius, the Christian," the latter a most excellent introduction to the philosophy of Epictetus. Yours. &c
SCHOLAR, CRITIC, AND TEACHER.
We announce with much regret that Dr. E. A. Abbott died yesterday at his residence at Hampstead, at the age of 87. He had been bedridden for more than seven years, and during the past week was attacked by a form of influenza, which brought on the end. Edwin Abbott Abbott was the son of Edwin Abbott, Headmaster of the Philological School, Marylebone, described by those who knew him as a man of strong personality. Born in London on December 20, 1838, Edwin Abbott the younger as sent to the City of London School in the early fifties, and left it as captain in 1867, with a scholarship at St. John's College, Cambridge. When, in 1861, he became Senior Classic and Senior Chancellor's Medallist, and W. 8. Aldis Senior Wrangler And First Smith's Prize man, to the City of London School fell quadruple honours such as had never come to any school in a single year. The Classical Tripos over, Abbott turned to Hebrew and New Testament. Greek, and soon after was ordained in the Church of England. He was elected Fellow of St. John's in 1862, and 50 years afterwards Honorary Fellow, a distinction followed in the next year by his election as a Fellow of the British Academy. Other marks of public recognition were offered him, but declined.
His marriage in 1803 with Mary Rangeloy, the daughter of a Derbyshire family, was the beginning of a long and happy wedded life, terminated only by Mrs. Abbott's death on February 5, 1919. A son and daughter maintained their father's high standard of scholarship; and that he was able to bring his great work to completion after 20 years of un-remitting toil was due in large measure to the help he received from his accomplished and devoted daughter. She nursed him with equal devotion in his last years of disabling illness. Abbott was a student and an author from the first. Incidentally he was a preacher, incidentally a schoolmaster, and in both characters eminent; but he gave up preaching to husband his strength, and schoolmastering to husband his time.
AN ORIGINAL HEADMASTER.
For a term or two he was at King Edward's School, Birmingham, but an invitation from Percival drew him to Clifton. Thence, at the call of his own old Headmaster, Dr. G. F. W. Mortimer, he went up to London and was appointed to succeed him at the City of London School. At that time he was a clean-shaven young clergyman of 20, so youthful in appearance that, he was at times mistaken for a junior member of his own Sixth. Twenty-four years of work placed him amongst the acknowledged heads of his profession and made his school famous at the Universities. It has been famous publicly stated that Benson was most anxious to have Abbott as his successor at Wellingtont Rugby also was pressed on him; and it is probable that he could have had any of the great public schools. But he preferred to rotire to Hampstead to devote himself to the work that had attracted his youth and that gave full scope to his remarkable powers of critical and constructive scholarship.
Abbott was undoubtedly a great headmaster. Originality, freshness, and vigour were his in a degree far from common; but his pupils carried away most enduringly from his touching a deep impression of an overmastering intellectual honesty and of the ruthless application available means to the discovery of truth. Abbott was a student of Bacon to some purpose. His direct teaching was confined to the three highest classes, but his influence was felt in every part of the school. He had the gifts of enthusiasm, of penetration into character, of fertility of resource, of clear and incisive speech. It has been truly said of him, "He always made the best of us and got the best out of us"; fus"; but he was sternness incarnate to the "slacker." It was characteristic of Abbott to bring to the solution of every task every tool that he could find or fashion. When he determined to make the study of Shakespeare -- for which special inducements existed in the school -- a real thing, he tackled as a preliminary the apparent chaos of Elizabethan syntax. He published the first edition of his "Shakespearian Grammar in 1870. This work, which involved heavy labour and untiring accuracy, placed him at once among the chief authorities in the matters treated. It was followed by "English Lessons for English People," in which he was assisted by his old friend and schoolfellow, J. R. Seeley. Then came an incomparable guide to teachers of the Bible called "Bible Lessons," and other small but solid and enduring school-room classics. In 1876 Abbott produced the fullest and best edition of Bacon's "Essays" yet published. Some of his views on Bacon's work and character by Spedding, and a battle wore resented by ensued in which the veteran but over-partial Beconian met a discriminating and and well-equipped antagonist. A further book on "Bacon and Essex" was the immediate result, to be followed 10 years later by "An Account of the Life and Works of Francis Bacon".
LIBERAL THEOLOGY.
In 1877 the publication of "Through Nature to Christ, or Through the Illusion to the Truth," brought down a storm of hostile criticism it defined for the first time that liberal attitude to theology which marked all his subsequent work. The year following he published anonymously a book of singular beauty, "Philochristus, or the Memoirs of a Disciple of the Lord," written in Elizabethan English, a style proper to "the highth of this great argument." Two other works of historical imagination followed, one intended to illustrate the spread of the Gospel in the time of St. Paul, and the other to depict the conflict of Christianity with Stoicism: "Onesimus" in 1882, and "Silanus the Christian" in 1906. A long article on "The Gospels," packed with facts, in the ninth edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica" was from his pen. To him also was due the plan of the elaborate "Synopticon," which old pupil and life-long friend, W. G. Rushbrooke, afterwards headmaster of St. Olave's, carried out in detail in 1881. With Rushbrooke, also, he produced in 1884 the "Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels." In 1886 a realization of the difficulties presented to the would-be believer by the miraculous elements in the Bible story led to the series of letters to a young friend called "The Kernel and the Husk," dedicated "To the Doubters of this Generation and the Believers of the Next." And even this list does not exhaust the astonishing series of books written during the 24 years of headmastership in which nothing required by the day's business was left undone, nothing done except in the freshest way and after the ripest consideration.
The notable series of erudite books which came from his hand when he left the City of London School was preceded by a long and arduous study of Syriac and of the Rabbinical literature. Yet he found time to deal also with the interesting problems presented by the character and career of John Henry Newman and the varying accounts of the Death and Miracles of Thomas à Becket. The latter subject was an excursion into medieval history made to illustrate, the development of miraculous story; the former was the result of a controversy in which he had become entangled and in which his terse passion for truth led him into what some regarded as unduly polemical iconoclasm.
The "Spirit on the Waters," published in 1897, but written long before, was an aphoristic summary, intended only for students, of the course of the Divine Revelation; it might be called a Manual of Theology for Thinkers. Not till 11 years after his retirement did he put out the first volume of the great work he had taken in hand, and he was then 62 years of age but as there had been no haste, so there had been no rest. This book is called "Clue, a Guide through Greek and Hebrew Scripture," and was followed in rapid sequence by a series of volumes, solid and learned, amply justifying the promise of the first. To these he gave the general title of "Diatessarica."
To find a parallel to such single-hearted devotion to a scholar's task task one must go back to the great scholars of a bygone age. Arnd though little or no official recognition was ever given to Dr. Abbott's work by the authorities of his own Church, from the fit audience of the greatly learned he had ample recognition. On his 80th birthday he received a remarkable tribute in the form of an address signed by the two Archbishops and many Bishops and dignitaries of the Church England as well as the leaders of the nonconforming Churches, the headmasters of most of the great schools of the country, and most of the chief theological professors, besides men and women of eminence in various other pursuits.
Nothing has been said of his vivid and inspiring utterances in the pulpit, which those who heard him cannot forget. Bishop Percival said on one occasion, "Had Edwin Abbott been able to cơntinue preaching, he would have been the greatest preacher in the English Church" and a distinguished contemporary headmaster on another occasion declared, "I never met a mah with so strong a passion for truth as Edwin Abbott." Abbott's greatness as teacher, preacher, and scholar was based on deep and lively human sympathies and an unquerichable passion for truth.
The funeral service will be at Christ Church, Hampstead, on Friday, at 2 o'clock o'clock, and the interment at Hanmp-stead Cemetery, Fortune Green, at 2.30.
SOME REMINISCENCES.
We have received the following reminiscences by an old friend:-
One of Abbott's carllest publications wak a little work entitled "Bible Lessons" (1872), which had the honour of being commended by Bishop Thirlwall as showing "How this difficult duty of imparting a sound religious education may be effected." The book was A characteristic indication of his desire to bring int into their right connexion the two things -- education and divinity -- to which his life was with such rare consistency of purpose devoted. The lines which he chose for the motto of his last book may be deemed to express a fundamental principle of his theology:-
Since God made man so good --His books on Bacon won the approval of the omniscient and religious Lord Acton, who styled him "our premier Baconian" in a letter to Lady Blennerhassett.
here stands my creed --
"God's good indeed."
His fixed habit of concentrating his attention and his prodigious powers of work on a few big things gave rise to the reshark that he knew only three books well (if books is the right word): the New Testament, Shakespeare, and Bacon, and that with regard to many matters, both in literature and in life, which are well known to ordinary people, he was almost as ignorant as a clown. In the "Life and Remains of R. H. Quick," edited by F. Storr (1890), the following evidently refers to Albott: "One of the ablest men and best workers I know gets to have a splendid curiosity of knowledge in the subject on which he has worked, but shows astonishing ignorance when you go a step beyond." Elsewhere, Quick compares Abbott with F. W. Walker, the famous High Master of St. Paul's, and proclaims the latter to be the stronger of the two in the arena of controversy, though Abbott might beat him by agility like a lightweight pugilist. Abbott, it appears, expected his sixth-form boys to do at least three hours of work in the evening, after the regular school day. At the same time, his boys have great liberty of study, for they are treated like so many private pupils. Abbott, who relished Walker's half-cynical frankness of opinion, used to relate how the Iatter showed him over his grand new school buildings at Hammersmith, and how, when Abbott expressed his admiration of everything, and especially of the magnificent chemical laboratories, Walker replied: "Yes, they are all very well in their way; but, as we two are alone here, I may venture to say (lowering his voice to a confidential whisper) that you and I know that this sort of thing is not education."
Among those who in certain ways influenced Abott -- for the most part he was singularly independent, while generous in acknowledging obligations -- was the Rev. J. Llewelyn Davies, an intimate and lifelong friend. Abbott's father was Davies's church warden at Christ Church. E. A. Abbott was for many years a member of the congregation and sometimes preached. He had a natural gift of extemporaneous utterance, and his sermons were always listened to with keen interest. He showed in them the power of persistent exposition and popular appeal, of which he afterwards gave clear proof in his "Philochristus" and other works, and which is often found in combination with minute and profound learning. He was debarred from making full use of his faculty of eloquent speech in the pulpit or elsewhere by a chronic deliency of the throat, which rendered it imprudent for him to add to the strain which his school work necessarily imposed upon his volition. In earlier days, when Abbott lived in St. John's Wood, his garden was the scene of little Saturday afternoon tennis parties, of which some of his younger friends had pleasant recollections. This was the only form of bodily exercise or recreation, it is believed, in which Abbott could ever be induced to indulge.
People who took him out of school sometimes wondered whether the shy little man, as he seemed to be, could possess that power of keeping order and commanding respect without which other talents are almost useless to a schoolmaster. In point of fact, he was a strict and highly efficient disciplinarian; it was a case of the triumph of mind the vivida vis animi -- over matter. One could hardly imagine how a noisy little mob of boys around the class room would suddenly hushed into awe-struck stillness at the sound of the voice of the proaching headmaster:
He calledThat he was able to inspire in his pupils not only a wholesome fear, but also indispensable gratitude and the warmest admiration that has been made known to the world by testimonies and tributes of the most striking kind.
Across the tumult, and the tumult fell!
______________________________________________
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir,
Is a very old memory of Abbott worth preserving? I was one year senior to him at St. John's, Cambridge.
My friend, W. E. Mullins, afterwards of Marlborough, and I agreed that we would both call on the two freshmen whom we picked out at the first chapel as the most reverent and attractive. We found that we had both chosen Abbott. We ascertained his name and rooms, and so began a long, intimate friendship at Cambridge, and continued while we were both engaged in school work. His work as a pioneer and scholastic in theology was of great value to students of 30, 40, and 50 years ago, and he lived to see some of the fruits of his work. May I, in the name of his few surviving contemporaries, thank the writer of the excellent obituary notice in your columns of today?
JAMES M. WILSON. Steep, Petersfield, Oct. 13.
_________________________________________
A FORMER PUPIL'S TRIBUTE
Sir,
As one who had the high privilege of being trained at the City of London School from 1866 to 1874 under Edwin Abbott, I would like to pay to his memory the tribute of a few grateful words; for when a great man passes, the few who know how great he was should speak out.
Your excellent obituary account conveys a sufficient impression of his extraordinary achievement in varied lines of work—literary, scholarly, theological, and educational. One may say that he was not only the greatest headmaster of his day, but also that no headmaster ever produced so much for the world of letters. His greatness as an educator was partly that of the organizer and originator of new methods and systems. He was the pioneer of many new departures in school curriculum. Having a reverence for physical science not often found among the classical scholars of his day, he made an elementary acquaintance with chemistry compulsory throughout the upper school. Caught by the enthusiasm then prevalent at Cambridge for the study of comparative philology, at that time in its interesting and easy-going youth, he provided better teaching in it for the scholars of his sixth form than they could find for many years afterwards in the lecture rooms of Oxford; for this purpose, he even introduced his advanced classical pupils to the study of Sanskrit, and thus started on his life's career the distinguished Sanskritist Professor Bendall, a contemporary of mine.
Perhaps his greatest special achievement as an educator was that in his devotion to the masterworks of English literature he made these an integral part of the form of teaching from the Lower School upwards; and his sixth terminally studied a play by Shakespeare as they studied a Greek play; and thus the language and the soul of one great world helped to interpret those of the other. It was Abbott's enthusiasm for English studies, his masterful exposition of the secrets and principles of style that opened to many of us a treasure house that has enriched our lives and inspired pupils such as Bullen and others who have won fame as English scholars and men of letters.
But apart from any of his special interests and reforming ideas, it was his whole personality that inspired and controlled us. The strong soul-power within him meant he could impart to others; and this is the mark of the spiritual leader. He was awed with intellectual energy, and he kindled those who were under him. He never drove us or overtasked us; but he made intellectual effort a kind of religion for us, and his deep and serious reprobation of intellectual slackness and unveracity was such a spur to us that his sixth form became a most stimulating palaestra for the eager and receptive spirits, while for some, perhaps, the tonic was an overstrain. But he was by no means what is called an "intellectualist": for he indeed believed in intellectual honesty as a religious ideal; he was also a great and gifted moral and religious teacher; he had the eyes that looked straight through you and the strong voice that could both charm and command. One of the rarest and most delightful experiences in life is hero-worship, and he was one of the few who could evoke it.
I am, &c.
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Sir,
Those students of the New Testament who have been indebted to Dr. E. A. Abbott's publications were delighted with the sympathetic appreciation of them in your notice of him on October 13, but perhaps justice was scarcely done to the work on which he spent the greater part of the last half of his life, "The Fourfold Gospel." In it he examined carefully the exact relationship of each Gospel to the others, analyzed very fully the meaning of the great titles of Christ, in two volumes which are indispensable to any student of the Fourth Gospel; in another he treated exhaustively its grammar and vocabulary; in another he showed the extent of the dependence of the Odes of Solomon upon it; in another he made very probable the suggestion that, in I Cor. xi. 23, "the night in which He was betrayed" ought to be translated "the night in which He was offering himself as a sacrifice." Volume after volume appeared with a rapidity which was partly due to the efficiency of his daughter, who acted as his secretary. There were ten volumes, with additional sections and indices. It is perhaps just a criticism that he gave undue weight at times to linguistic points and treated the Evangelists as dealing with the materials at their disposal with the exactness of modern writers, but at all times his work was characterized by a combination of freedom with reverence of massive learning with that charm and lucidity of style which was to be found in his sermons and his illuminating romances, "Philochristus," "Onesimus," and "Silarius, the Christian," the latter a most excellent introduction to the philosophy of Epictetus. Yours. &c
