# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Roby, Henry John

​ROBY, HENRY JOHN (1830–1915), educational reformer and classical scholar, was born at Tamworth 12 August 1830, the only son of Henry Wood Roby, by his wife, Elizabeth Robins. His father, a solicitor at Tamworth, died in 1833, and Roby was educated at Bridgnorth School ​and St. John's College, Cambridge; he was senior classic in the tripos of February 1853, became a fellow of his college in 1854 and lecturer in 1855, and lived in Cambridge till 1861. Among his friends, afterwards distinguished, were J. B. Lightfoot and Henry Philpott, G. D. Liveing, Isaac Todhunter, Joseph Mayor, J. L. Hammond, and H. M. Butler; and he himself was a leading spirit among the young Cambridge tutors who were agitating for the proper use of college revenues and for other university reforms. He was one of the founders and the first secretary of the Cambridge local examinations; and during this time he examined for the classical tripos, the moral science tripos, and the degrees in law, as well as in a great many schools.
In 1861 Roby married Matilda (died 1889), daughter of Peter Albert Ermen, of Dawlish; she was an accomplished linguist and keenly interested in women's education. Because in those days marriage put an end to a fellowship, he had accepted the second mastership at Dulwich College shortly before. There, becoming soon dissatisfied with the Latin grammar of King Edward VI, then still in use, he wrote an Elementary Latin Grammar (1862), which had a large sale. With this however, he was so little content as to refuse to allow any second issue. Long-continued work led to the publication (1871–1874) of his Grammar of the Latin Language from Plautus to Suetonius, his greatest achievement as an author. He also continued his study of law. In 1864 he was appointed secretary to the Schools Inquiry commission, which was succeeded in 1869 by the Endowed Schools commission, an executive body. These dealt with all endowed schools in England and Wales other than the nine which had been the subject of the Public Schools commission of 1861. In 1865 he retired from Dulwich, and, although from 1866 to 1868 he also held the chair of jurisprudence at University College, London, he devoted himself almost wholly to school-reform for the next nine years—‘the most interesting portion of my life’ he called it afterwards.
Hand in hand with Dr. (afterwards Archbishop) Temple, Roby took a leading part in inquiries and legislation affecting over eight hundred schools for boys and girls. Most of them were in an indescribable state of inefficiency and maladministration, due partly to the inexpert control of the court of Chancery. For every one of these schools the Endowed Schools commission established, under the Committee of the Privy Council on Education, a scheme of management, which provided the necessary machinery for its own revision from time to time, but completely precluded any loose handling of the endowments. This reform was largely due to Roby's strenuous and brilliant pleading. Few public men can ever have enjoyed a greater reward than to have been the means, not merely of reforming the life and teaching of this multitude of schools, but also of enormously increasing the number of children to whom their doors were opened.
The Endowed Schools commission, of which Roby was first the secretary, and after 1872 a member, ended on 31 December 1874. He then accepted a business partnership with a relative of his wife, creating the firm of Ermen & Roby, of Manchester, sewing-cotton manufacturers; this he held for the next twenty years while his children (three sons and a daughter) grew up. The confidence with which he had come to be regarded in the commerce and society of Manchester led to his election as member of parliament for the Eccles division of Lancashire in October 1890, as a supporter of Mr. Gladstone. He lost his seat in the conservative reaction of 1895 and never re-entered parliament.
After his retirement from business in 1894 Roby settled, as became a lover of mountains and a devoted student of Wordsworth, in a beautiful corner of Easedale, below Helm Crag, near Grasmere; his garden was famous for the variety of roses which he established and improved. Here he delighted to entertain with genial hospitality a continual succession of friends, old and young; and the generous interest which he took in their concerns, and in everything that affected education or public questions, made the last twenty years of his life hardly less busy and hardly less fruitful than any that had gone before. He celebrated the completion of his eightieth year by the ascent of Scafell. He died at his home on 2 January 1915.
Roby's great Latin Grammar (seventh edition 1904) is distinguished from all its predecessors by the wealth of illustration drawn directly from his reading of all the authors from Plautus to Suetonius, and by its severe impartiality. Not that his statements lack precision; but they show a lawyer-like caution. Everywhere he preferred that the passages cited should speak for themselves; and that the limits of any general rule should be made plain by sharply contrasted examples. Thus in his treatment of the ​Subjunctive, the seventy right-hand pages are occupied with examples of the Indicative in uses nearly approaching those of the Subjunctive which are set forth in the examples on the seventy pages opposite. Hence arises what sometimes appears to beginners a defect—his refusal to make hard and fast rules, not always warranted by the facts. But no one who seeks counsel in ‘Roby’ on any difficult point will fail to find a representative collection of the evidence, worth many pages of dogma. He had a shrewd perception of degrees of probability, and an equally shrewd reluctance to accept tradition without testing it for himself. His profound knowledge of it, however, appeared everywhere; notably in his article on Priscian in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (ninth edition).
In one respect the Latin Grammar introduced among English-speaking scholars a reform so important as to amount to a revolution. Roby everywhere adopted the historical rather than the conventional point of view. He nowhere fails to make clear what older grammarians called the correct, that is, the Ciceronian usage, with abundant and striking examples; but he set it in its true perspective. He read deeply in the growing literature of comparative grammar; and chose continually that part of its teaching which made a strictly scientific use of evidence. His own carefully limited account of Latin phonology, which contributed much to the reform of Latin pronunciation, often anticipates the truth and clarity of the work of Karl Brugmann which was then just beginning; and his original investigations, especially in the preface to the second volume, still retain their full value.
Roman Law was a favourite study with Roby from his Cambridge days; but his first considerable publication was the Introduction to Justinian's Digest (1884), which provided students with a comprehensive account of the history, and method of compilation of the Digest, and of the jurists from whom it was drawn, such as did not exist, and does not exist, in any other language. It contained much original criticism, including a study—very valuable at the time—of ‘lawyer's Latin’, though later writers have shown that the Digest, in which he had suspected some degree of interpolation, is an even more complex product than he had supposed.
Roby's study of Roman Private Law (1902) was an admirable presentment of what is known as the ‘classical’ law, so far as it was then understood. These essays are probably the most original part of his legal work, though he had mastered what other men had written. ‘Here’, writes a competent critic, ‘is the real Roby; the work was better than anything that had been done before in England; he always drew from the sources and he always thought for himself.’ His latest contribution to the subject of any length was the chapter (vol. ii, c. 3) on Roman Law in the Cambridge Medieval History (1913).
Roby will no doubt be best remembered for his Latin Grammar—a monument of open-minded research from which other grammars will long continue to be compiled. But probably his greatest service to his generation lay in the educational reforms which he carried through with keen insight, indomitable zeal, and the most genial humour; and these qualities were fruitful also in other kinds of work, such as his long service on the governing bodies of the grammar school and university of Manchester, of Girton College, Cambridge, and of University College, London, which with other good causes were deeply indebted to his far-sighted, high-minded, and always generous guidance.
[Roby's published works, cited above; an autobiography (unpublished) written for his family; private information; personal knowledge.]
R. S. C.