Porson, Richard

Porson, Richard, 1759–1808, English classical scholar, b. Norfolk. A poor boy, he showed such astonishing powers of memory that patrons sent him through Eton and Cambridge. He was appointed regius professor of Greek at Cambridge in 1792, and lived in London, where he edited several plays of Euripides. A scrupulous scholar, Porson was a textual critic of the highest order and changed existing ideas of Greek meter. His treatises and criticism were edited by Thomas Kidd (1815) and his correspondence by H. R. Luard (1851).

See biography by M. L. Clarke (1937).

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