Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/68

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48o Scholars cient classics or in their stead, it was challenged to furnish an equivalent discipline. For this process March's method was admirably fitted. It is fully set forth in his Method oj Philo- logical Study of the English Language (1865), which is modelled upon the Method of Classical Study (1861) by Samuel Harvey Taylor, principal of Phillips Andover Academy. These books gave a minimum of text and a maximtim of questions and notes on grammar, syntax, and etymology. As a classical scholar himself, March undertook the general editorship (1874-77) of the Douglass Series of Christian Greek and Latin writers, in which the two principal volumes were March's Latin Hymns and Gildersleeve's Justin Martyr. March's chief work, however, lay in EngHsh philology. His Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language (1870) was the first attempt anywhere to concentrate upon Old English the results of general Indo-European linguistic study. It f ocusses upon the illustration of Old English forms a collection of the forms of "Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Saxon, Old Friesic, Old Norse, and Old High German." According to a competent critic "the Grammar 'marked an epoch, ' " and "revealed the author's full stature as a commanding figure in the world of philological scholarship . " ' March was ' ' controlled by the noblest philosophic conception of the science of gram- mar" — the conception that the "facts and laws of language are seen to be facts and laws of mind and of the history of man." He was profoundly interested in spelling reform, which he ac- tively urged upon both the learned and the unlearned. His work in lexicography is also notable. For several years he co- operated with the Oxford Dictionary by selecting and direct- ing its American readers (1879-82). As consulting editor he planned the Standard Dictionary (1890-95). The Thesaurus Dictionary of the English Language (1902), said to have been "prepared under the supervision of Francis Andrew March," is really a recension of Roget, for which March "did little more than read printers' proofs and contribute a 'Foreword. ' " American editions of Shakespeare,^ from 1795, when the first one, edited anonymously, was pubUshed in Philadelphia, "J. W. Bright. Mod. Lang. Ass. Pub., xxix, cxxix. ' For a full account, see Jane Sherzer's valuable article, Mod. Lang. Ass. Pub., XXII, 633-96.