3-082-486 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

Professor Rhys, 1895. Engraving from a photograph. '...Oxford has now to be congratulated on the addition to the lay heads of houses by his election to the principal-ship of Jesus College...The new Principal...is a Welshman born and bred, one to whom in his youth English was a foreign tongue...After election to a Fellowship at Merton in 1869, Professor Rhys made a prolonged stay at the Sorbonne...This was followed by his appointment as School Inspector for Flint and Denbigh. Readers of Matthew Arnold's delightful "Lectures on Celtic Literature" will remember his strong pleading for the founding of a chair of Celtic at Oxford. When this came about Mr. Rhys was felt to be the only possible candidate, and amply has he justified his appointment, for he is so much more than a philologist, having that "saving grace" of comparative sense which enables him to apply the solutions suggested by Celtic studies to the larger problems of racial movements and to the intellectual and spiritual history of man. Numerous are his works on Welsh philology and mythology, and, to be specially noted, his "Hibbert Lectures on Celtic Heathendom."...this new appointment will attract his countrymen more than ever to a college whose associations are essentially Celtic'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.