DR. EDWIN ABBOTT has now published six volumes in his stately series of "Diatessarica," and his paragraphs, which he has numbered consecutively from the first, are no fewer than 2,799, while many of them are ample enough to furnish out such an article as is commonly contributed to a scholarly journal. He is putting his retirement to an honourable use and challenging younger men to a fuller employment of their time. It is true that, in spite of the industry it demands, his mode of work is akin to that of the leisurely ...
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DR. EDWIN ABBOTT has now published six volumes in his stately series of "Diatessarica," and his paragraphs, which he has numbered consecutively from the first, are no fewer than 2,799, while many of them are ample enough to furnish out such an article as is commonly contributed to a scholarly journal. He is putting his retirement to an honourable use and challenging younger men to a fuller employment of their time. It is true that, in spite of the industry it demands, his mode of work is akin to that of the leisurely observer of natural phenomena. There is no finality about it, nor any hope, or fear, of exhausting the subject. Dr. Abbott watches the modes of speech of evangelists as Mr. Selous observes the habits of birds, and his "Diatessarica," which we hope he will continue for many years, resemble in their way the successive volumes of transactions of some natural history society. But uniform as he is in his methods, in his last two volumes he has achieved a success which his. previous performances had not led us to expect. In them we had a superabundance of conjecture, and the guesses were often so crudely improbable that it seemed as though the author of "Flatland" had lost his sense of humour. Dr. Abbott was wandering then in the field of languages with which he was not, in spite of his industry, really familiar. Greek is as much his own subject as the language of Shakespeare, in which he first won his reputation. He moves freely and naturally in this domain, and his zeal and patience have been well rewarded. Dr. Abbott has done some of his best work by the more accurate employment of immemorial methods. Careful and minute collection and comparison of the use of words, and attention to the slight differences in the several narratives of the same events are always remunerative, and our author has brought out many points of interest. For instance, he is able to demonstrate the familiar thesis that S. John had before him as he wrote all the three preceding Gospels not only by general considerations of probability but by evidence, often very delicate, of the modification by the last Evangelist of the words of a predecessor.... -- The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art , Vol. 101
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