The Business of a Scholar

To talk in publick, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar.  He wanders about the world without pomp or terror, and is neither known nor valued but by men like himself.

Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; 1759), p. 18.

Benefits Falling to the Lot of the Emigrant Scholar

It is one of the benefits falling to the lot of the emigrant scholar that, however much his outward activity may be curtailed in the new country in comparison with his former situation, his inner activity is bound to be immensely enhanced and intensified: instead of writing as he pleases,  after the usual fashion of the German scholar in particular (who is so well satisfied to live in the paradise of his ideas, whether this be accessible to his fellow men or not), he must, while trying to preserve his own idea of scholarship, continually count with his new audience, bearing in mind not only the conventional requirements but also those innermost strivings of the nation (inasmuch as it is given him to feel them) which, opposed to his nature as they may have seemed to him in the beginning, tend imperceptibly to become a second nature in him-indeed, to make shine by contrast his first nature in the clearest light. And, by so doing, he comes to feel enriched and to find that he has attained peace and happiness.

Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), p. v.

Old Type of Scholarship

Arthur Tilley (1851-1942), ‘The Development of Classical Learning’, The National Review, 4.20 (Oct. 1884), 163-76 (p. 163):

The old type of “scholarship,” the name by which we have been accustomed to honour “a minute acquaintance with the niceties of the dead languages,” is rapidly passing away from us. No longer is the skilful emendation of a Greek play the royal road to a bishopric; no longer do grave statesmen and men of learning beguile their leisure moments with doing Humpty Dumpty into Latin verse; a classical quotation in the House of Commons is almost an event; a false quantity falls there on unheeding ears. Yet, on the other hand, we have Greek plays, and museums of casts from ancient sculptures, and Hellenic societies, and projects of a Hellenic school at Athens; and Professor Jebb says that “probably the study of classical antiquity in the largest sense has never been more really vigorous than it is at the present day.