Richard Porson
He was sent first to the Bacton village school, kept by John Woodrow, and then to that of Happisburgh, kept by Mr Summers, where his extraordinary powers of memory and aptitude for arithmetic were discovered.
His literary skill was partly due to the efforts of Summers, who long afterwards stated that in fifty years of scholastic life he had never come across boys so clever as Porson and his two brothers.
Thomas Hewitt taught him with his own boys, taking him through Julius Caesar, Terence, Ovid and Virgil; he had already made great progress in mathematics.
In addition, Hewitt brought him to the notice of John Norris of Witton Park, who sent him to Cambridge to be examined by James Lambert, the two tutors of Trinity College, Cambridge (Thomas Postlethwaite and Collier), and the mathematician George Atwood, then assistant tutor; the result was so favourable that Norris decided in 1773 to provide for his education.
With his help Porson entered Trinity College, Cambridge, as a pensioner (i. e. a student who paid for his tuition and board, rather than a sizar or scholar) on 28 March 1778, matriculating in April.
His first appearance in print was in a short notice of Christian Gottfried Schütz's Aeschylus in Paul Henry Maty's Review, written in 1783.
This review contains several other essays by him, including those on Richard François Brunck's Aristophanes, Stephen Weston's Hermesianax, and George Isaac Huntingford's Apology for the Monostrophics.
In 1786, a new edition of Thomas Hutchinson's Anabasis of Xenophon was called for, and Porson was asked by the publisher to supply notes, which he did in conjunction with Walter Whiter.
The following year Porson wrote his Notae breves ad Toupii emendationes in Suidam, though this treatise did not appear until 1790 in the new edition of Jonathan Toup's book published at Oxford.
[5] Porson was without means of support, but a subscription was got up among his friends to provide an annuity; Cracherode, Cleaver Banks, Burney and Samuel Parr took the lead, and enough was collected to produce about £100 a year.
This last he twice transcribed (the first transcript was destroyed by a fire at James Perry's house) from the original among the Gale manuscripts in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.
He was pleased when he found how often in Aristophanes he had been anticipated by Bentley, and when Niels Iversen Schow's collation of the unique manuscripts of Hesychius appeared and proved him right in some instances.
It was at once recognised as Porson's work; he had superintended the printing of a small edition in two octavo volumes, but this was kept back by the printer and not issued till 1806, still without the editor's name.
Gottfried Hermann of Leipzig had also written a work on Greek metres and issued an edition of the Hecuba, in which Porson's theories were attacked.
Porson at first took no notice of either, but went on with his Euripides, publishing the Orestes in 1798, the Phoenissae in 1799 and the Medea in 1801, the last printed at the Cambridge press, and with the editor's name on the title page.
He found time, however, to execute his collation of the Harleian manuscript of the Odyssey, published in the Grenville Homer in 1801, and to present to the Society of Antiquaries his conjectural restoration of the Rosetta Stone.
For some months before his death he had appeared to be failing; his memory was not what it had been, and he had some symptoms of intermittent fever, but on 19 September 1808 he was seized in the street with a fit of apoplexy, and after partially recovering, died on the 25th.
His library was divided into two parts, one of which was sold by auction, while the other, containing the transcript of the Gale Photius, his books with his notes, and some letters from foreign scholars, was bought by Trinity College for 1000 guineas.
