Friday, November 02, 2018
The System of Shilleto
Percy Gardner (1846-1937),
Autobiographica (Oxford: Blackwell, 1933), p. 13, quoted by Christopher Stray, "Non-identical twins: classics at nineteenth-century Oxford
and Cambridge," in
Oxford Classics:
Teaching and Learning
1800-2000, ed. Christopher Stray (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), pp. 1-13 (at p. 12, n. 17):
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The system of Shillito [i.e. Richard Shilleto] and other noted teachers of classics was to lay all the stress on words, and to neglect the subject matter of the ancient writers. Exact scholarship was the one thing they aimed at. They liked to see a man, as they put it, translate through a brick wall, turn classical phrases into elegant English, and English prose into readable Greek and Latin, without troubling oneself what was the full bearing of the passage.
