Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 classical scholar and critic

Critic

A critic is anyone who expresses a value judgement. Informally, criticism is a common aspect of all human expression and need not necessarily imply skilled or accurate expressions of judgement. Critical judgements, good or bad, may be positive , negative , or balanced...

, descended from a family of French refugees named Perlechamp, was born at Groningen.

He was professor of ancient literature and universal history at Leiden from 1822 to 1849, when he resigned his post and retired to Hilversum

Hilversum

is a municipality and a town in the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. Located in the region called "'t Gooi", it is the largest town in that area. It is surrounded by heathland, woods, meadows, lakes, and smaller villages...

, where he died on 27 March 1865.

He was the founder of the subjective method of textual criticism

Textual criticism

Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts...

, which consisted in rejecting in a classical author whatever failed to come up to the standard of what that author, in the critics opinion, ought to have written. His ingenuity in this direction, in which he went much further than Bentley

Richard Bentley

Richard Bentley was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge....

, was chiefly exercised on the Odes of Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

 (the greater part of which he declared spurious), and the Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is composed of roughly 10,000 lines in dactylic hexameter...

of Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...

.

He also edited the Ars poetica and Satires of Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

, the Agricola of Tacitus

Tacitus

Publius Cornelius Tacitus was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors...

, the romance of Xenophon of Ephesus

Xenophon of Ephesus

Xenophon of Ephesus was a Greek writer. His surviving work is the Ephesian Tale of Anthia and Habrocomes, one of the earliest novels as well as one of the sources for Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet....

, and was the author of a history of the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

 poets of the Netherlands (De vita, doctrina, et facultate Nederlandorum qui carmina latina composuerunt, 1838).

See L Müller

Lucian Müller

Lucian Müller was a German classical scholar.-Biography:Müller was born in Merseburg in the Province of Saxony. After graduating from Humboldt University, Berlin and the University of Halle, he lived for five years in the Netherlands, working on his Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den...

, Gesch. der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlandes (1869), and JE Sandys

John Edwin Sandys

Sir John Edwin Sandys FBA , was a classical scholar.He was born at Leicester on 19 May 1844, a son of the Reverend Timothy Sandys of the Church Missionary Society and Rebecca . Living at first in India, he returned to England at the age of eleven, and was educated at the Church Missionary Society...

, Hist. of Class. Schol. (1908), ii. 276.

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