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Edward Meredith Cope

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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EDWARD MEREDITH COPE (1818-1873), English classical scholar, was born in Birmingham on the 28th of July 1818. He was educated at Ludlow and Shrewsbury schools and Trinity College, Cambridge, of which society he was elected fellow in 1842, having taken his degree in 1841 as senior classic. He was for many years lecturer at Trinity, his favourite subjects being the Greek tragedians, Plato and Aristotle. When the professorship of Greek became vacant, the votes were equally divided between Cope and B. H. Kennedy, and the latter was appointed by the chancellor. It is said that the keenness of Cope's disappointment was partly responsible for the mental affliction by which he was attacked in 1869, and from which he never recovered. He died on the 5th of August 187 3. As his published works show, Cope was a thoroughly sound scholar, with perhaps a tendency to over-minuteness. He was the author of An Introduction to Aristotle's Rhetoric (1867), a standard work; The Rhetoric of Aristotle, with a commentary, revised and edited by J. E. Sandys (1877); translations of Plato's Gorgias (2nd ed., 1884) and Phaedo (revised by H. Jackson, 1875). Mention may also be made of his criticism of Grote's account of the Sophists, in the Cambridge Journal of Classical Philology, vols. i., (1854-1857).

The chief authority for the facts of Cope's life is the memoir prefixed to vol. i. of his edition of The Rhetoric of Aristotle.