Excerpt from Francis Philip Nash

He had a sound working knowledge of Arabic, Hebrew and Russian, to which within a few years he had annexed Hungarian. From this he had lately translated some clever dramatic Sketches and idylls, for which he had received the hearty acknowledgments and compliments of the authoress.

He was never a niggard of the treasures of his Scholarship, but dispensed them without price and with a noble Platonic liberality. It was quite characteristic that, only a month before his death, he spent some labor on translating from the Russian a monograph on the apple-tree moth, which was much needed in connection with the researches of one of the staff of the Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva. For translating this brochure a prohibitive price had been asked 'by a Russian Professor in New York City.

This little service to a brother in science was characteristic, as I have said; for, time and again, he had spent freely his leisure and learning inrevising or recasting manuscript which some author had too cheerfully flung upon his hands, or, it might be, the formless incubus thrust upon his brain by some ingenuous foreign lady with the polite request, Please put this in Shape for your American readers, and find me a publisher. For such innocents all that could be done by painful drudgery he undertook with chivalrous and unselfish devotion.

If this list of acquirements sounds exaggerated, let me refer to an impartial authority. Some ten years ago the President of one of our most solid Universities in the West, a gentleman of world wide experience, who had just lost by a fatal accident the head of his department of Romance Languages, consulted me as to whether Mr. Nash would accept the vacant position. I know all the available men in the country - and there is no one so fit as he - no one to be compared with his peculiar fitness. I agreed with him; but we also agreed that the exacting duties of the chair, at his time of life, would be too much for a somewhat delicate constitution.

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