Sellar

Sellar, WILLIAM YOUNG, was born at Morvich near Golspie in Sutherland, February 22, 1825, and educated at Edinburgh Academy, of which at fourteen he was head-boy. He next went to Glasgow University, from which he passed at seventeen, a Snell Exhibitioner, to Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated with a classical first-class, in 1850 was elected to a fellowship at Oriel, next acted as assistant-professor at Durham, Glasgow (1851-53), and St Andrews (1853-59), filled for four years the Greek chair at St Andrews, and was elected in 1863 to the Latin chair at Edinburgh, which he retained till his death near Dalry in Galloway, 12th October 1890. He made his name widely known by his learned and brilliant book, The Roman Poets of the Republic (1863; revised and enlarged, 1881), which was followed by The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age—Virgil (1877), and Horace and the Elegiac Poets (1892), the latter edited from his papers by his nephew, Mr Andrew Lang, with a brief memoir prefixed. Of the last volume—the completion of his task—the part treating of Ovid alone is unfinished. The whole forms a noble corpus of criticism on the greatest poets of Rome, marked by full knowledge, insight at once keen and sympathetic, and a fine dignity of style—a quality in modern days too rare.