R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

Oxford in the ' Seventies 225he reigned over Balliol for three and twenty years, beingthroughout the most conspicuous personality in Oxfordand one of the most important intermediaries betweenthe University and the outer world. Devoted as Jowettwas to the interests of his College, 'always thinking ofthe Undergraduates', and with a definite policy for theUniversity as a palaestra for the training of able youths,whether rich or poor, for service, or success, in practicaland public life, Jowett was also an eminent man of letters,with high ambition (' Can I ever write as well as Renan?')and immense industry; and his actual literary achievement,though falling far short of his plan and intention,was very considerable. He had suffered in various waysfor his anticipations of modernist theology; but, thoughhis opponents had managed to starve him awhile asProfessor of Greek, he was invulnerable as Master ofBalliol. The 'seventies witnessed the publication of hischief work: the complete translation, with elaborateintroductions, of the Dialogues of Plato, a work, aptlydescribed in the Inaugural Lecture of his illustrioussuccessor, Ingram Bywater, as 'an English Classic'; andthe 'seventies barely closed before his translation of theHistory of Thucydides was published. These two greattasks, the former of which appeared in a second editionwithin five years, far from exhausting his literary record,were preceded and succeeded by work of hardly lesssignificance in its day. Jowett's English style makes himone of the great authors of the Victorian Age; but it is astyle in which the right word and the felicitous sentencecount for more than the synthesis of the paragraph or thedialectic of the argument. In academic politics Jowettwas the chief exponent of the theory and practice whichtreat the University as a training station for practical liferather than as a laboratory of science; his heart was inthe College, imprimis his own College, not in the organisa-B 15