Henry Drisler

Henry Drisler (27 December 1818 – 30 November 1897) was an American classical scholar, born on Staten Island, New York, USA.

Drisler graduated at Columbia College in 1839, taught classics in the Columbia grammar school for four years, and was then appointed tutor in classics in the college. In 1845 he became adjunct professor of Latin and Greek there, in 1857 was appointed to the new separate chair of Latin language and literature, and ten years later succeeded Dr. Charles Anthon as Jay Professor of Greek Language and Literature. He was acting president in 1867 and in 1888–1889, and from 1890 to his retirement as professor emeritus in 1894 was dean of the School of Arts, as the undergraduate division of Columbia was known at the time. (For this reason, some Columbia scholars consider him, and not John Howard Van Amringe, to have been the first dean of Columbia College.) He died in New York City in 1897.

Dr. Drisler completed and supplemented Dr. Anthon's labors as an editor of classical texts. His criticisms and corrections of Liddell and Scotts Greek-English Lexicon, of which he brought out a revised American edition in 1846, won his name a place on the title-page of the British edition in 1879, and in 1870 he published a revised and enlarged edition of Yonge's English Greek Lexicon. This version has evolved into the work that is currently available as "A Latin Dictionary".

Dr. Drisler ardently opposed slavery, and brilliantly refuted "The Bible View of Slavery", written by Bishop John Henry Hopkins of Vermont, in a Reply (1863), which meets the bishop on purely Biblical ground and displays the wide range of Dr. Drisler's scholarship.

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