The rise and fall of Porsoniasm

Abstract

In 1903, in the preface to the first volume of his edition of Manilius, Housman wrote:… we now witness in Germany pretty much what happened in England after 1825, when our own great age of scholarship, begun in 1691 by Bentley's Epistola ad Millium, was ended by the successive strokes of doom which consigned Dobree and Elmsley to the grave and Blomfield to the bishopric of Chester. England disappeared from the fellowship of nations for the next forty years.(Housman (1903) xlii)The name which lurks unspoken behind this paragraph is that of Richard Porson, and Dobree, Elmsley and Blomfield, whose namesarespoken, were all in different ways his disciples. Although Porson had no pupils and gave no lectures, in the generation just after his death he had a number of followers who cultivated his memory and emulated his style, at least before they were removed to higher spheres by death or preferment to bishoprics. If the cultivation of his scholarly style can be called Porsonianism, it was the cult of Porson himself after his death in 1808, centred on Trinity College, Cambridge, for which three years later the Oxford scholar Peter Elmsley coined the name ‘Porsoniasm’. As one might expect, the name-giver was an outsider. Yet as his inclusion in Housman's sketch indicates, Elmsley could be called a Porsonian, and indeed in 1911, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Latin at Cambridge, Housman remarked that ‘scholarship meant to Elmsley what it meant to Dobree’ (Housman (1969) 25). But though Elmsley was a Porsonian, he was not (if I may venture ahapaxof my own) a Porsoniast.