The Creed of the Old South, 1865-1915

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924) was an American classical scholar. From 1856 to 1876 he was professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, holding the chair of Latin also from 1861 to 1866. He published a Latin Grammar (1867) and a Latin Series for use in secondary schools (1875), both marked by lucidity of order and mastery of grammatical theory and methods. He edited in 1885 The Olympian and Pythian Odes of Pindar, with a brilliant and valuable introduction. His views on the function of grammar were summarized in a paper on The Spiritual Rights of Minute Research delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1895. His collected contributions to literary periodicals appeared in 1890 under the title Essays and Studies Educational and Literary. He was elected president of the American Philological Association in 1877 and again in 1908 and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He received the degree of LL. D. from William and Mary (1869), Harvard (1896), Yale (1901), Chicago (1901), and Pennsylvania (1911); D. C.L. from the University of the South (1884); L. H.D. from Yale (1891) and Princeton (1899); Litt. D. from Oxford and Cambridge (1905).