All Scholars

Long enjoyed a brilliant career at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as sizar, was elected Craven Scholar, and was First Chancellor’s Classical Medalist at graduation. He was elected fellow of Trinity (over Henry Malden (1800-76) and the historian T.B. Macauley (1800-59)) but after one year was persuaded by Francis Walker Gilmer (1790-1826), Thomas Jefferson’s agent in England, to join three other bright young Englishmen (all were in their twenties) to constitute the first faculty at the new University of Virginia.  

        The move to America was consonant with motives Long espoused throughout his career: to disseminate knowledge to those who might not have a full education available to them. Charlottesville was at that time on the western frontier of the young country and Long proposed to introduce the principles of the latest specialty in classics, comparative grammar, as pioneered by Franz Bopp (1791-1863). With his colleague in modern languages, George Blaettermann (1782-1850), he composed the first American textbook on comparative grammar.  H.B. Adams wrote that at Virginia, Long had “fixed the standard of requirement of his classes at a higher point than was then known in this country.” Jefferson affectionately called him “the boy professor.” Following the death of his first wife, Arkansas-born Harriet Selden, the mother of his four sons, Long married the sister of Jefferson’s contractor. Long never lost his affection for the University and the South. During the Civil War he supported the South and in his popular translation of Marcus Aurelius, he saw a parallel with the Stoic in Robert E. Lee, whom he also compared to Julius Caesar. 

        Long’s classmate at Cambridge and colleague in mathematics (and classics), Thomas Hewitt Key (1799-1875), stayed in Charlottesville until 1827, when he returned to London to become first professor of Latin at the University of London. In the following year, at the invitation of the prominent liberal member of parliament and soon-to-be Lord High Chancellor, Henry Lord Brougham (1778-1868), a founder of the University of London, invited Long to become the University’s first Professor of Greek Language, Literature and Antiquities. He continued to explore comparative grammar in his 1830 lectures, and he made small corrections to Johann Schweighhauser’s authoritative edition of Herodotus, and a popular edition of Xenophon’s Anabasis (based on Dindorf’s edition) while holding the Greek chair, but his chief reputation was as an expert in Roman law (He wrote all the articles on Roman law in Smith’s Dictionary.). When the controversial Scottish anatomist Granville Sharp Pattison (1791-1851) was dismissed from the University’s medical faculty in 1831, Long resigned his professorship in protest. Long, along with Brougham helped found the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) and in the next decade he worked tirelessly on its behalf. Following his resignation, he edited the ten volumes of the Society’s progressive organ, The Quarterly Journal of Education, a review of teaching in schools and colleges. At the same time, he was a founder of the Royal Geographical Society, wrote numerous articles for William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography (London: Taylor, Walton & Maberly, 1852-7), ultimately editing geographies of America and the West Indies, Great Britain, and the ancient world.  At the same time (1833) he began the thirteen-year project editing the Society’s Penny Cyclopedia in 29 volumes. In 1842 he contributed the letter “A” to the Society’s Biographical Dictionary in 7 vols. (1842-4). In the same year he succeeded Key as Professor of Latin at what was now University College, London.

        In addition to all this activity, Long was becoming known as an expert in Roman Law. He gained a Readership in Jurisprudence and Civil Law at the Inner Temple. His reputation was quickly enhanced with the publication of Two Discourses on Roman Law (1848). Disillusioned by both lethargic students and indifferent administration, he resigned in 1849 to become a teacher at the progressive Brighton College. There he employed the texts and methods he had championed in his work for the Society. He found the students enthusiastic and admiring of him and in response he developed a series of texts primarily for the use of schools. He and the Reverend Arthur J. Macleane (d. 1858) edited the Bibliotheca Classica series for schools, to which he contributed editions of Cicero’s orations, and a much-reprinted translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Matthew Arnold spoke highly of his teaching in his Essays and Criticisms. He retired in 1871.

        Long never lost the enthusiasm for plain teaching and bringing the classics to life that he brought to Charlottesville. He trained many students in his methods, the first of which was Gessner Harrison. Long supported Harrison’s interest in comparative grammar. He sent Harrison a copy of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar. Harrison said of him, “A man of marked ability and attainments,…scrupulously demanding accuracy in the results of inquiry, and scouring mere pretension, he aimed at and was fitted to introduce something better than what passed current as classical learning.”  His translations of Marcus Aurelius and Eepictetus remain standard and have been reprinted through 2024-25.