although rendered obsolete in great measure by the progress of discovery has been declared by a competent authority to be the best book that he ever wrote [A. H. Sayce, Reminiscences, 1923, p. 126]. During the next few years he visited Greece twice, and the influence of his travels may be traced in his Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander (1874), as well as in Rambles and Studies in Greece (1876). His History of Classical Greek Literature (1880) was followed, after an interval of seven years, by The Story of Alexander's Empire (1887); then came in rapid succession Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest (1887), The Greek World under Roman Sway (1890), and Problems in Greek History (1892). The year 1890 marks the beginning of a new epoch in his literary activities. It was in this year that a quantity of mummy cartonnage was discovered by W. M. Flinders Petrie in the Fayûm, and handed over to Mahaffy for decipherment and publication. For the next ten years his interests were centred on the Egypt of the Ptolemies, and to this period belong the first two volumes of the Flinders Petrie Papyri (1891–1893), followed by a third volume produced in collaboration with J. G. Smyly, and The Empire of the Ptolemies (1895). For the rest of his life his interests were chiefly directed to the history of his university and of Ireland in general. An Epoch in Irish History, 1591–1660 (1904), The Particular Book of Trinity College (1904), and a monograph on the Plate in Trinity College (1918), were among the fruits of his researches in the field of Irish history. He was elected president of the Georgian Society, of which he was the founder, and from 1911 to 1916 he held the office of president of the Royal Irish Academy.
Mahaffy succeeded to a senior fellowship in 1899, and it was the general belief outside Trinity College itself that in view of his eminence in the world of letters and of his long service to his own college, he was certain of the succession to the provostship. When, however, the office became vacant by the death of Dr. George Salmon in 1904, he was passed over by the Crown in favour of Dr. Anthony Traill [q.v.]. Mahaffy had every right to anticipate that he would be appointed provost, although his was not the only name that might with propriety have been submitted to the King, and it is not too much to say that Traill's appointment came as a shock to the sentiment of the whole academic world. Mahaffy had to wait another ten years for the fulfilment of his hopes, and when, on Traill's death, he succeeded to the headship of his college (November 1914), he had reached the age of seventy-five. Two years later came the Irish rebellion of Easter week 1916, during which he directed the defence of Trinity College with coolness and resource. When the Irish Convention was summoned in 1917, it was at his invitation that it held its meetings in the Regent House of Trinity College. He was created G.B.E. in 1918. He died 30 April 1919, from the effects of a paralytic stroke.
It is by his contributions to the study of the literature, the life, and the history of the ancient Greeks that Mahaffy as a writer must be judged. Few authors, indeed, have been more versatile, and his range extended to subjects as remote from Hellenism as the Decay of Modern Preaching (1882), the Art of Conversation (1889), the architecture and furniture of the great houses of Ireland, and the introduction and diffusion of the domestic ass. On all these things he wrote well, and in his treatment of some of them he made valuable contributions to Irish history. His earliest effort, the Commentary on Kant, provoked a reply from Mill, then at the height of his influence; and his Sketch of the Life and Teaching of Descartes (1880) is an excellent piece of work so far as it goes. But it is not on these multifarious writings that his reputation rests. Indeed, it is probable that the estimate of him as a student of things Greek has suffered from the variety of his interests; he was supposed to be superficial, because people thought that knowledge so extended must be shallow. ‘The Provost's talents, though brilliant, were versatile rather than profound’, is the verdict in one of his obituary notices. Nothing could be more unjust. Honours such as he received from universities and learned societies (he was a corresponding member of the academies of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, and of the Lincei at Rome, an honorary D.C.L. of Oxford, and an honorary fellow of Queen's College—these were but a few of the distinctions conferred on him) are not commonly the rewards of the mere popularizer. Although, as he himself says in one of his prefaces, his object was to set down results rather than processes of investigation, an essay such as that on the Olympian Register in his Problems in Greek History affords a presumption that, had he chosen, he could have exhibited the processes of investigation equally well with the results. He had no claims to exact scholarship, but he had in him much of the stuff of which
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