3-082-376 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The drawing-room at Professor Blackie's residence, Edinburgh, 1895. Blackie was Emeritus Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh. 'An interest he maintained to almost the last hour of his consciousness was the continuity of the Greek language. For many years he ran full tilt at the orthodox schoolman who regarded Greek as a dead language, and some of his most valuable work was in the direction of papers read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh on that subject...He often said, "The original and proper sources of knowledge are not books but life, experience, personal thinking, feeling, and acting."...Song - national song - and the stage he recognised as powerful weapons in judicious hands; and speaking of the stage reminds us that no man in this country deserves better the gratitude of the theatrical profession than John Stuart Blackie. In season and out of it, he never tired of preaching the power of the stage, and he once remarked, "There is more to be got out of one of Henry Irving's plays than out of ten sermons."...Scholar, true poet, philosopher, and man, he stood out the most striking figure of modern Scottish history'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.