DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1041#0235
History of the Society of Dilettanti xig
followed by a similar provision on a more ex-
tended scale at Oxford; the foundation of pro-
fessorships or readerships in the study at both
Universities; the formation and prosperity of the
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies;
and finally the establishment by private effort and
initiative of an English school at Athens;—all
these have been the signs and evidences of that
change of spirit to which we have referred. At
the opening of the Cambridge Museum of Classical
Archaeology in 1884, Sir Charles Newton, whose
career had been to some extent clouded by his sense
of isolation among the English scholars of his own race
and generation, uttered in welcome of such evidences
a touching Nunc Dimittis^ which those who heard it
are not likely to have forgotten. The consequence
is that the study of classical art and antiquity at this
moment stands in one sense in a more flourishing
position in this country than it has ever occupied
before. But the new phase upon which the study
has now entered is essentially different from that
through which it was passing in the days when the
Dilettanti took the chief part in promoting it.
Classical art and antiquities were then a matter of
more or less amateur interest to every leisured and
cultivated gentleman. Now they are so no longer,
but have become, on the other hand, a matter of
special study and research to a not inconsiderable
number of well-trained scholars, both men and
women. The new societies and institutions for
classical research, whether continental or English,
have each their separate journal or organ of
publication, in which the progress of work and
discovery is recorded in a constantly increasing
number of special essays and memoirs, and illustrated
followed by a similar provision on a more ex-
tended scale at Oxford; the foundation of pro-
fessorships or readerships in the study at both
Universities; the formation and prosperity of the
Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies;
and finally the establishment by private effort and
initiative of an English school at Athens;—all
these have been the signs and evidences of that
change of spirit to which we have referred. At
the opening of the Cambridge Museum of Classical
Archaeology in 1884, Sir Charles Newton, whose
career had been to some extent clouded by his sense
of isolation among the English scholars of his own race
and generation, uttered in welcome of such evidences
a touching Nunc Dimittis^ which those who heard it
are not likely to have forgotten. The consequence
is that the study of classical art and antiquity at this
moment stands in one sense in a more flourishing
position in this country than it has ever occupied
before. But the new phase upon which the study
has now entered is essentially different from that
through which it was passing in the days when the
Dilettanti took the chief part in promoting it.
Classical art and antiquities were then a matter of
more or less amateur interest to every leisured and
cultivated gentleman. Now they are so no longer,
but have become, on the other hand, a matter of
special study and research to a not inconsiderable
number of well-trained scholars, both men and
women. The new societies and institutions for
classical research, whether continental or English,
have each their separate journal or organ of
publication, in which the progress of work and
discovery is recorded in a constantly increasing
number of special essays and memoirs, and illustrated