HARRY EDWIN BURTON

Death of Dartmouth's Grand Old Professor Emeritus

HARRY EDWIN BURTON, Daniel Webster Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, Emeritus, died suddenly at his home on Occom Ridge, March 20, 1945, in his 77th year. He had enjoyed abounding good health throughout his life and had recently remarked whimsically that he could entertain only one ambition now, to be the oldest living member of his class. He was born in Boston, May 29, 1868, and there he prepared for college. He received his A.B. from Harvard in 1890, with election to Phi Beta Kappa, and continued on for his A.M. and Ph.D. In 1895 he married May Grace Harvey, who died in 1938. Joining the Dartmouth staff in 1896, he lived in Hanover until his death. He is survived by an only son, Lieutenant Commander Harvey Burton of New York City, Dartmouth '21.

Professor Burton spent his school days in the same schools and under the same masters as did Santayana, some five years earlier: the Brimmer School, the historic Boston Latin School, and Harvard College. His objective and droll vignettes of these schools and masters formed an amusing contrast to Santayana's introspective musings on them in his autobiographical Persons and Places. He entered Harvard during the consulship of Eliot, and never quite forgave the Eliot curriculum, which permitted him in his enthusiasm for the classics to concentrate too intensively in his own field, regretting in after life that among other things his interest had not been early aroused in philosophy.

In 1895-1896, he was one of that small group of American scholars who were charter members of the American School of Classical Studies in Rome, and he returned to Italy in 1897-1898 for another year. He admitted a nostalgic affection for Italy and the Italians and a longing to revisit them after the war. Few American scholars have known in detail, as he did, the geography, topography, and monuments of the ancient Roman world. A day with him in the Forum was a day of great privilege. Recognition of this erudition came in his appointment, in 1927-1928, as Annual Professor of the American Academy in Rome.

He served a two years' apprenticeship in the Peekskill Academy." In 1903, Harvard invited him to teach in the Graduate School, which he did while on leave of absence. All the rest of his professional career was spent at Dartmouth, devoted to the class room, organization work, or research. Older alumni who sat under him will recall his stimulating teaching, suavity, and personal magnetism, and cherish recollections of the gracious hospitality of the Burtons' open house on Sunday afternoons. Since teaching was his finished product, he knew that he must not go stale. He attended faithfully the meetings of the learned societies, contributed articles, and wrote reviews. He was elected Presi dent of the Classical Association of New England in 1939.

His interest in classical geography found expression in the publication by the Harvard Press of The Discovery of the AncientWorld (1932), and he had also hoped for the inclusion of his translation of Pomponius Mela, the Roman geographer, in the well-known Loeb Library series. Disaliter visum. However, his translation of the Optics of Euclid is scheduled to ap- pear posthumously in the Journal of theOptical Society, which, undertaken On the suggestion of the Dartmouth Kye Insti- tute, will make accessible for the first time to American scientists the knowledge of the Greeks in this special field. It will serve as a fitting envoi to his scholarly career.

His textbooks were no mere hack work; a Livy, a Vergil, a Latin Grammar, and a Fourth Year Latin brought him recogni- tion and a host of acquaintances among school and college teachers. Based on meticulous scholarship, clear and precise, they aimed at a definite goal and attained it.

After Professor Burton had served on many committees, President Nichols suggested in the spring of 1915 that he investigate academic administration throughout the country. He visited some twentythree colleges and universities and published an admirable factual summary of his findings, Aspects of- College and University Administration (1916), which embraced a comprehensive range of topics from trustees to fraternities.

He was an active citizen as well, and none was better loved by the Town, which he served for eighteen years as Moderator. The office, however, which he surrendered with keenest regret on reaching seventy was that of Justice of the Municipal Court (1911-1938). Steeped in Roman law he brought the equitable and reasonable spirit of Roman jurisprudence to an obscure country court, and carried in his retentive memory vivid material for a book which might have been entitled CountryJudge. Indeed he was half persuaded to begin such a work, having made a resolution to that effect, last New Year's Day.

Professor Burton enjoyed his possessions. His Sabine Farm was his house, adorned with Piranesis and other trophies of his travels; his grounds, where he could putter Horace-like with his flowers and his vegetables; Hanover and its north country environs, of which he knew every gem of architecture, every stream and hill and autumnal view, and of which he could say: Ille terrarum mihi praeter omnis angulus ridet. But he enjoyed people more. He had a genius for friendship and he made countless friends. His was a typically Horatian spirit, lacking only the poet's melancholy and gift of song. His friends found in him what Mackail praises so highly in Horace, that typically Roman urbanitas, which differs from any characteristic of the Greeks, "the spirit at once of the grown man as distinguished from children, of the man of the world, and of the gentleman."

PROFESSOR BURTON, distinguished classical scholar and leader in Hanover civic life, who died March 20,

DANIEL WEBSTER PROFESSOR OF THE LATIN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE