JOWETT, BENJAMIN (1817-1893), English scholar and theologian, master of Balliol College, Oxford, was born in Camberwell on the 15th of April 1817. His father was one of a Yorkshire family who, for three generations, had been supporters of the Evangelical movement in the Church of England. His mother was a Langhorne, in some way related to the poet and translator of Plutarch. At twelve the boy was placed on the foundation of St Paul's School (then in St Paul's Churchyard), and in his nineteenth year he obtained an open scholarship at Balliol. In 1838 he gained a fellowship, and graduated with first-class honours in 1839. Brought up amongst pious Evangelicals, he came to Oxford at the height of the Tractarian movement, and through the friendship of W. G. Ward was drawn for a time in the direction of High Anglicanism; but a stronger and more lasting influence was that of the Arnold school, represented by A. P. Stanley. Jowett was thus led to concentrate his attention on theology, and in the summers of 1845 and 1846, spent in Germany with Stanley, he became an eager student of German criticism and speculation. Amongst the writings of that period he was most impressed by those of F. C. Baur. But he never ceased to exercise an independent judgment, and his work on St Paul, which appeared in 1855, was the result of much original reflection and inquiry. He was appointed to the Greek professorship in the autumn of that year. He had been a tutor of Balliol and a clergyman since 1842, and had devoted himself to the work of tuition with unexampled zeal. His pupils became his friends for life. He discerned their capabilities, studied their characters, and sought to remedy their defects by frank and searching criticism. Like another Socrates, he taught them to know themselves, repressing vanity, encouraging the despondent, and attaching all alike by his unobtrusive sympathy. This work gradually made a strong impression, and those who cared for Oxford began to speak of him as "the great tutor." As early as 1839 Stanley had joined with Tait, the future archbishop, in advocating certain university reforms. From 1846 onwards Jowett threw himself into this movement, which in 1848 became general amongst the younger and more thoughtful fellows, until it took effect in the commission of 1850 and the act of 1854. Another educational reform, the opening of the Indian civil service to competition, took place at the same time, and Jowett was one of the commission. He had two brothers who served and died in India, and he never ceased to take a deep and practical interest in Indian affairs. A great disappointment, his repulse for the mastership of Balliol, also in 1854, appears to have roused him into the completion of his book on _The Epistles of St Paul_. This work, described by one of his friends as "a miracle of boldness," is full of originality and suggestiveness, but its publication awakened against him a storm of