historians are made; industry and imagination, a memory that was superb, and a curiosity that was insatiable. His greatest gift was his power of seeing things in the concrete; of so visualizing the past as to make it as real to us as the life we live and see around us. Hence it is that the books which bear the most distinctive impress of his individuality are the three volumes which treat of the social life and civilization of the Greeks from the age of Homer to the age of Hadrian. The first of these, Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander, marks an epoch in the treatment of the subject. The books which had hitherto been written were little more than works of reference. Since Mahaffy published his original and brilliant sketch no writer on these subjects, in this country at least, has ventured to make dullness his professed aim. His History of Greek literature is a solid and useful book, and many of his literary judgements are acute and fresh, but in originality both of conception and treatment it cannot be put on the same level as the three volumes referred to. As an historian, he had limitations and defects. He was interested in persons, rather than in the play of forces or the operation of laws; his strength certainly did not lie in the grasp of historical principles. It was perhaps inevitable that one to whom the past became as real as the present should sometimes allow the present to intrude into the past. Some of his parallels, it must be admitted, are fanciful or far-fetched. In justice to his memory, it should never be forgotten that he was above all things a pioneer. His judgements, both literary and political, anticipated in many instances the verdict of the next generation. To exalt Euripides above Sophocles is one of the commonplaces of latter day criticism; it was not a commonplace when Mahaffy wrote his Social Life. It needs, at the present moment, neither courage nor insight to pronounce that the democratic principle is fraught with peril to the higher interests of civilization; it needed both the one and the other when Mahaffy first pointed this moral. He, too, was one of the very few scholars in this or any other country who appreciated at the outset the revolutionary character of the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, and he was one of the first to grasp the importance of papyrology.
When it is remembered that Mahaffy came to the study of papyri with no previous palæographical training, we may well be surprised at the measure of success which he achieved. He was at his best in the guessing of the sense of obscure passages, the suggestion of supplements, and the lucid summarizing of results; for the task of accurate decipherment he lacked the patience and the attention to detail which are indispensable. To form a just estimate of his powers in this field we must look to the third volume of the Petrie Papyri, where he had the assistance of Smyly, or to the Introduction which he contributed to Dr. B. P. Grenfell's edition of the Revenue papyrus (1896). His Empire of the Ptolemies, an indirect result of his papyrological interests, still remains far the best account in English of that period.
Mahaffy's reputation was not merely that of a man of letters or university professor. For nearly half a century he was one of the best-known figures in the social life of his generation. He was an inveterate diner-out, and a constant attendant at congresses and other gatherings of the learned. His versatility extended far beyond the range of his literary interests. He was a firstrate shot and angler, and a learned and accomplished musician. He was an excellent man of business, and although his provostship was brief and in troublous times, he succeeded in carrying out some useful reforms in the government of Trinity College. Thanks in part to a boyhood spent on the Continent, he could speak German like a native and French fluently. But it was as a wit and raconteur, as one of the most brilliant talkers of his time, with a fund of apposite anecdote, that he was so widely known and so generally welcome in society. ‘Ireland is a place where the inevitable never happens and the unexpected always occurs’, is a fair specimen of his epigrammatic power. Like Dr. Johnson, he had the gift of stripping a subject of unessentials and arriving at once at the heart of things. His caustic wit made him unpopular, especially in his own university, and it is probable that this unpopularity stood in the way of his promotion. His wit was never really ill-natured, but he loved creating a sensation, even though he excited resentment, and he had a curious incapacity for anticipating the effect of what he said. Those who were present at the Historical Congress at Berlin in 1908 are not likely to forget the scene that was occasioned by his remark that the reason why English scholars, in dealing with questions of authorship, attached far more importance than the Germans to the argument from style, was that English scholars had been drilled in writing Latin and Greek prose,
365
