Richard Porson - Early Published Work

Early Published Work

His first appearance in print was in a short notice of C. G. Schütz's Aeschylus in Paul Henry Maty's Review, written in 1783. This review contains several other essays by him, including those on Richard François Brunck's Aristophanes, Stephen Weston's Hermesianax, and Huntingford's Apology for the Monostrophics. He also began a correspondence with David Ruhnken, the veteran scholar of Leiden, requesting fragments of Aeschylus that Ruhnken had come across in his collection of unpublished lexicons and grammarians, and sending him his restoration of a corrupt passage in the Supplices (673–677) by the help of a nearly equally corrupt passage of Plutarch's Eroticus.

The Cambridge press was proposing a new edition of Thomas Stanley's Aeschylus, and the editorship was offered to Porson; but he declined to reprint Stanley's corrupt text and incorporate the variorum notes. He was especially anxious that the Medicean manuscript at Florence should be collated for the new edition, and offered to undertake the collation; but the syndics refused the offer, the vice-chancellor John Torkington, master of Clare Hall (the then name of Clare College), observing that Porson might collect his manuscripts at home.

In 1786, a new edition of Thomas Hutchinson's Anabasis of Xenophon was called for, and Porson was asked by the publisher to supply notes, which he did in conjunction with Walter Whiter. These are a good example of the terse style of Latin notes he practised. They also show his acquaintance with his two favourite authors, Plato and Athenaeus, and a familiarity with Eustathius of Thessalonica's commentary on Homer.

The following year Porson wrote his Notae breves ad Toupii emendationes in Suidam, though this treatise did not appear until 1790 in the new edition of Jonathan Toup's book published at Oxford. These first made Porson's name known as a scholar, and carried his fame beyond England. The letters he received from Christian Gottlob Heine and Johann Gottfried Jakob Hermann were preserved in the library of Trinity College.

During 1787 he wrote three letters on John Hawkins's Life of Johnson for the Gentleman's Magazine, which were reprinted by Thomas Kidd in his Tracts and Criticisms of Porson, and in a volume of Porson's Correspondence. They are specimens of dry humour, and allude to English dramatists and poets. In the same periodical, in the course of 1788 and 1789, appeared the Letters to Archdeacon Travis, against George Travis, on the debated Biblical verse called the Comma Johanneum (1 John 5:7); the Letters were collected in 1790 into a volume. Edward Gibbon's verdict on the book was that it was "the most acute and accurate piece of criticism since the days of Bentley." But it was then the unpopular side: the publisher is said to have lost money on the book; and one of his early friends, Mrs Turner of Norwich, cut down a legacy she had left Porson to £30 on being told that he had written a book against Christianity.

After 1787 Porson continued to contribute to the leading reviews, writing in the Monthly Review the articles on Joseph Robertson's Parian Chronicle, Thomas Edwards's Plutarch on Education, and Richard Payne Knight's Essay on the Greek Alphabet. He gave assistance to William Beloe in one or two articles in the British Critic, and probably wrote also in the Analytical Review and the Critical Review.