I - MORITZ HAUPT

Summary

There have been scholars whose works are monumental, and will be read so long as the historical sciences continue to be seriously studied. There have been others (and their number is far larger), the influence of whose labour has to a great extent been confined to the sphere of their own generation, whose reputation rests rather on their personal power than on the fame of any one work, and who, though strong as writers, were stronger as instructors. Moritz Haupt was one of these last; and it is because he was so, and because I am personally much indebted to his teaching, that I am anxious that his name should not be forgotten in Oxford.

Wishing to make acquaintance with the German University system, and more especially to learn something of the German method of teaching classical philology, I spent four months from April to August, 1865, at Berlin, matriculating and attending lectures as an ordinary student. On asking advice of a competent informant as to the lectures which then stood highest in general repute for ability and usefulness, I was at once recommended to attend Professor Haupt's course on the Epistles of Horace.

I may say without exaggeration that these lectures introduced me to a method of teaching which was wholly unknown at the time in Oxford, and perhaps in England.