A GREAT SCHOLAR.
[To TOR EDITOR or TRH "SPECTATOR."' Sin., —I have read your brief notice of the late J. E. B. Mayor's sermons with interest.—By the way, you have, twice over, printed the second initial as "C.," and you begin your review by speaking of the Professor as J. B. Mayor ; but these latter are the initials of his distinguished brother, still happily with us.—I knew him slightly, and on two or three occasions spent a long evening with him in his rooms at Cambridge, and the memory of those hours will not readily be forgotten; the man was a prodigy of learning, and the readiness with which he lavished the treasures of his unique erudition on an unknown student was a thing to be remembered indeed. In Mayor we have lost the last of those brought up in the School of Casaubon, whom, in more than one way, he resembled.
A fine critic, perhaps one of the finest, as he is certainly one of the shyest and most fastidious scholars in Cambridge, once was talking with me about Mayor's English pamphlets, broad- sheets, and sermons. He insisted—and I am sure with justice—on the extraordinary quality of Mayor's English prose, so nimble, so apt, so full of sprightly and nervous energy. Not enough has been made of this, though the volume of sermons you reviewed last week will do something to give Mayor his rightful position among the writers of con- temporary prose. A fine example of his manner is to be found in the Introduction to the last edition of his Juvenal, issued in 1886.
No doubt his reputation will rest on his great commentary upon the Roman satirist. But it is one of the ironies of literary history that so many schemes launched by him with all the enthusiasm of youth (for, in one sense, Mayor never became an old man; his " senectus " was "crude atque viridis " indeed, and to the last) never came to anything. It is a curious case of infirmity of purpose in one who otherwise was far from infirm in any sense of the term. Forty years ago he planned and partly executed an edition of Quintilian ; but the piece published is a mere torso. He was for years sup- posed to be preparing an edition of Martial, an author strangely neglected by English scholars, though no author would repay attention in a fuller degree. But the book, though often advertised as "in the press," never appeared. No one in this country could have produced an edition on so ample a scale or with such a massive array of erudition as Mayor. He promised us, as the final work of his old age, an edition of Seneca, for which, he says, " I have made large collections."
The main object of this letter is an appeal to his executors to give us, if that be possible, these "collections " in something like permanent shape. It is understood that his commentary on the three satires of Juvenal which he did not include in his magnum opus has been completed; could not his annotations be published? Tho fact is, a new edition of his Juvenal, in something like finished and ordered shape, is a great desideratum. Since the last edition was published, a quarter of a century ago, Mayor printed (I think in the Journal of Philology) a number of "addenda " to his work. These, with his commentary on the omitted satires and a revise of the extant commentary, would form an invaluable work.—I am
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