It is this interest which the works of a man like the late Dr. Verrall serve to stimulate.  He was eminently fitted for the task.  On the principle which Dr. Johnson mocked by saying that “who drives fat oxen should himself be fat,” it may be said that an advocate of humanistic learning should himself be human in the true and Terentian meaning of that somewhat ambiguous word.  This is what Verrall was.  All who knew him speak of his lovable character, and others who were in this respect less favoured can judge of the genuineness of his human sympathies by applying two well-nigh infallible tests.  He loved children, and he was imbued with what Professor Mackail very appropriately calls in his commemorative address “a delightful love of nonsense.”  His kindly and genial humour sparkles, indeed, in every line he wrote.  Moreover, whether he was right or wrong in the highly unconventional views which he at times expressed, his scorn for literary orthodoxy was in itself very attractive.  Whenever he found what he called a “boggle”—­that is to say an incident or a phrase in respect to which, he was dissatisfied with the conventional explanation—­“he could not rest until he had made an effort to get to the bottom of it.”  He treated old subjects with an originality which rejuvenated them, and decked them again with the charm of novelty.  He bade us, with a copy of Martial in our hands, accompany him to the Coliseum and be, in imagination, one of the sixty thousand spectators who thronged to behold the strange Africans, Sarmatians, and others who are gathered together from the four quarters of the Roman world to take part in the Saturnalia.  He asked us to watch with Propertius whilst the slumbers of his Cynthia were disturbed by dreams that she was flying from one of her all too numerous lovers.  Under his treatment, Mr. Cornford says, the most commonplace passages in classical literature “began to glow with passion and to flash with wit.”  His main literary achievement is thus recorded on the tablet erected to his memory at Trinity College:  “Euripidis famam vindicavit.”  He threw himself with ardour into the discussion on the merits and demerits of the Greek tragedian which has been going on ever since it was originally started by Aristophanes, and he may at least be said to have shown that what French Boileau said of his own poetry applies with equal force to the Greek—­“Mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque chose.”  In the process of rehabilitating Euripides, Verrall threw out brilliantly original ideas in every direction.  Take, for instance, his treatment of the Ion.  Every one who has dabbled in Greek literature knows that Euripides was a free-thinker, albeit in his old age he did lip-service to the current theology of the day, and told the Athenians that they should not “apply sophistry,” or, in other words rationalise, about the gods.[93] Every one also has rather marvelled at the somewhat lame and impotent conclusion of the play when Athene—­herself in reality one