Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Hardie, William Ross
HARDIE, WILLIAM ROSS (1862–1916), classical scholar, the elder son of William Purves Hardie, tailor, of Edinburgh, by his wife, Agnes Ross, was born at Edinburgh 6 January 1862. He entered Edinburgh University at fourteen and learned high ideals of scholarship from William Young Sellar [q.v.]. Graduating M.A. he went in 1880 to Oxford as scholar of Balliol. He was the most brilliant undergraduate classic of his generation and won an unusual number of university distinctions. Elected to a fellowship at Balliol in 1884, he spent a year abroad, mostly in Greece and Italy, and returned to his college as tutor, remaining there until his appointment as professor of humanity at Edinburgh in 1895. At Balliol he established a new tradition in the teaching of classical scholarship. He had the whole field of classical literature at his command, and in lectures and private classes discussed general literary questions in a strikingly simple manner with a wealth of illustration: some specimens of his method were published later in his Lectures on Classical Subjects (1903). He was a most brilliant composer with an unrivalled memory and a remarkable sense of idiom: several of his most felicitous versions are included in Anthologia Oxoniensis (1899). The stimulus of his teaching was perhaps accentuated by his peculiarly shy manner.
The tradition of the chair of humanity at Edinburgh concentrated Hardie's work on Latin, though at Balliol he was regarded as an even greater Greek scholar. On large classes of pass students his fine scholarship and conscientious methods were to some extent lost; but to the honour students who could appreciate these qualities he gave himself with a rare devotion; with the help of his assistants he developed a system of individual teaching on Oxford lines. He published two characteristic volumes, Latin Prose Composition (1908), the introduction to which expounds the art—for such it was to Hardie—in its more advanced form, and Silvulae Academicae (1911), a collection of experiments in Latin and Greek verse, including the Panegyricus composed for the five-hundredth anniversary of the university of St. Andrews. Res Metrica (1920), published after his death, is a penetrating analysis of some problems of Latin verse-rhythms, written with his usual sanity and caution.
That Hardie's literary production was not large was due to his complete absorption in his teaching: indeed, his devotion to the work of his professorship was the chief cause of his early death on 3 May 1916. His lasting memorial, apart from his few books, is the large number of his pupils who attained distinction in academic life, in the civil service, and in other professions. Naturally taciturn, he would often sit silent even among intimate friends—but amused and sympathetic. He had a fine eye for colour and was a naturally gifted painter in water-colours; he was also an ardent and skilled fisherman and an enthusiastic golfer.
Hardie married in 1901 Isabella Watt, third daughter of the Rev. William Stevenson, of the Madras Christian College, and had three sons and one daughter.
[Balliol College Register; notice in Edinburgh University Magazine, 1916; personal knowledge.]