JOWETT, j0117.t. BENJAMIN (1817-93). A distinguished English scholar and educator. He was born in London and educated at Saint Paul's School and at Dallied College, Oxford. where he was elected to a fellowship before he took his degree in 1839 with a first class in greats. and to a tutorship in 1842. which he held until he became master in 1870. He was ordained deacon in 1842 and priest in 1845. His religious views, originally evangelical, were disturbed by the PX ei temen ts of the Oxford Movement, and especially by daily intercourse with W. (I. Ward, also a fel low of Balliol. He was carried in the direction -of Roman Catholicism for a time, but a reaction ,et in which took him far into liberal theology. The publication in 1855 of his edition of the Epis tles to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans, with the accompanying essays, raised a storm of protest; and when in the same year he was ap pointed to the regius professorship of Greek, his opponents made a strong manifestation against him and succeeded for ten years in preventing him from receiving the full income of the °dice. His essay on the "Interpretation of Scripture," published in Essays and Reviews+ (1860), com mitted him still more definitely to the Broad Church movement. His most important and formative work, however, was done as master of Balliol from 1870 until his death• and as vice chancellor of the university from 1SS2 to 1SSG; an extraordinary personal influence over his pu pils, many of whom occupied later the foremost places in English public life, and a broad con ception of the functions of the college and the university enabled him to do much toward shap ing the life and thought of his generation. He
never aspired to be the leader of a school either in religion or in philosophy, but, in many ways, as when he launched T. H. Green upon the study of Hegel, he affected the movements of others. Of great importance to scholars are his transla tions with notes of Plato's Dialogues (4 vols., 1371) and Republic (3 vols., 1894) ; of Aristotle's Politics (2 vols., 1585), and of Thucydides (2 vols., 1881). Two volumes of sermons also ap peared in 1899 and 1901. Consult Ins Life and Letters, by Abbott and Campbell (2 vols., London, 1S97) and more Letters (ib., 1899) ; Tollemache, Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol (ib., 1805) ; Ward, IV. G. Ward and the Oxford Movement lib., 1889) ; and essays in Swinburne, Studies in Prose and. Poetry (ib., 1894), and Stephen, .Studies of a Biographer (ib., 1S9S).