1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Bennett, Charles Edwin

BENNETT, CHARLES EDWIN (1858–  ), American classical scholar, was born on the 6th of April 1858, in Providence, Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1878 and also studied at Harvard (1881–1882) and in Germany (1882–1884). He taught in secondary schools in Florida (1878–1879), New York (1879–1881), and Nebraska (1885–1889), and became professor of Latin in the University of Wisconsin in 1889, of classical philology at Brown University in 1891, and of Latin at Cornell University in 1892. His syntactical studies, notably various papers on the subjunctive, are based on a statistical examination of Latin texts and are marked by a fresh system of nomenclature; he ranks as one of the leaders of the “New American School” of syntacticians, who insist on a preliminary re-examination of all available data. Of great importance are his advocacy of “quantitative” reading of Latin verse and his Critique of Some Recent Subjunctive Theories in vol. ix. (1898) of Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, of which he was an editor. Bennett’s Latin Grammar (1895) is the first successful attempt in America to adopt the method of the brief, scholarly Schulgrammatik. Besides the Latin classics commonly read in secondary courses and other text-books in “Bennett’s Latin Series,” he edited Tacitus’s Dialogus de Oratoribus (1894), and Cicero’s De Senectute (1897) and De Amicitia (1897). He wrote, with George P. Bristol, The Teaching of Greek and Latin in Secondary Schools (1900), and The Latin Language, (1907), and with William Alexander Hammond translated The Characters of Theophrastus (1902).