Quaker Scholarship SIR,—Like Sir Ernest Barker, I, too, in the
days of my youth knew Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker banker-scholar who was the neighbour and friend of my parents. Coming down from Cambridge in 1890, where I had been one of the early pupils of R. H. Kennet, later the famous Professor of Hebrew and the Semitic languages, I found myself invited to join a Hebrew reading circle, of which he, Dr. Hodgkin, was by no means the least erudite member, and I well remember his reading a paper on the two languages used in the book of Daniel and his championship of views, in those days regarded with alarm and suspicion by most "traditionalists," as to the nature of the book as a whole and its probable
date. The " Chaldee," as it was then (mistakenly) styled, in which so much of the book is written, interested him greatly and led him to a study of Syriac. I still possess a Syriac Grammar and Reader which 1 had the honour of lending him to help him in his researches. He did not, perhaps, get far along those lines, but that he should have been able to find time in his very full life for such by-paths of scholarship is still today, after sixty years, a wonder and a stimulating memory to me.—
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