CAREL

GABRIEL

See also:

• CAREL GABRIEL COBET (1813-1889)

COBET (1813-1889)  , Dutch classical scholar, was born at Paris on the 28th of November 1813, and educated at the Hague Gymnasium and the university of Leiden . In 1836 he won a gold medal for an essay entitled Prosopographia Xenophontea, a brilliant characterization of all the persons introduced into the Memorabilia, Symposium and Oeconomicus of Xenophon . His Observationes criticae in Platonis comici reliquias (184o) revealed his remarkable critical faculty . The university conferred on him an honorary degree, and recommended him to the government for a travelling pension . The ostensible purpose of his journey was to collate the texts of Simplicius, which, however, engaged but little of his time . He contrived, however, to make a careful study of almost every Greek manuscript in the Italian libraries, and returned after five years with an intimate knowledge of palaeography . In 1846 he married, and in the same year was appointed to an extraordinary professorship at Leiden . His inaugural address, De Arte interpretandi Grammatices et Critices Fundamentis innixa, has been called the most perfect piece of Latin prose written in the 19th century . The rest of his life was passed uneventfully at Leiden . In 1856 he became joint editor of Mnemosyne, a philological review, which he soon raised to a leading position among classical journals . He contributed to it many critical notes and emendations, which were afterwards collected in book form under the titles Novae Lectiones, Variae Lectiones and Miscellanea Critica . In 1875 he took a prominent part at the Leiden Tercentenary, and impressed all his hearers by his wonderful facility in Latin improvisation .

In 1884, when his

health was failing, he retired as emeritus professor . He died on the 26th of October 1889 . Cobet's special weapon as a critic was his consummate knowledge of palaeography, but he was no less distinguished for his rare acumen and wide knowledge of classical literature . He has been blamed for rashness in the emendation.of difficult passages, and for neglecting the comments of other scholars . He had little sympathy for the German critics, and maintained that the best combination was English good sense with French taste . He always expressed his obligation to the English, saying that his masters were three Richards—Bentley, Porson and Dawes . See an appreciative obituary notice by W . G . Rutherford in the Classical Review, Dec . 1889; Hartman in Bursian's Biographisches Jahrbuch, 189o; Sandys, Hist . Class . Schol .

(1908), iii . 282 .