Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Cope, Edward Meredith
COPE, EDWARD MEREDITH (1818–1873), classical scholar, was born on 28 July 1818 at Birmingham, was educated at the schools of Ludlow and Shrewsbury, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1837. After taking his degree in the mathematical tripos of 1841, and appearing as senior in the classical tripos, he was elected fellow of Trinity College in 1842, and took the degree of M.A. in 1844. In 1845 he was appointed assistant tutor of Trinity College, and here, excepting the portions of the year he spent in foreign travel, the greater part of his life was spent. He was ordained deacon in 1848 and priest in 1850, but he found the work of the educational clergy more congenial than that of the parochial. In 1867 he was a candidate for the Greek professorship at Cambridge; the votes of the electors were divided, and as the vice-chancellor and the master of Trinity College, on whom the election then devolved, differed, the appointment lapsed to the chancellor, who gave it to Dr. Kennedy. There is no doubt that his disappointment on this occasion preyed on Cope's mind, and was one of the causes of his seizure in 1869. His mind then gave way, and after lingering for four years, he died on 4 Aug. 1873, and was buried at Birmingham.
Eminent as a Greek and Latin scholar, he knew the chief modern languages of Europe. His first published work of any importance was his criticism of Mr. Grote's dissertation on the sophists in the ‘Cambridge Journal of Classical Philology,’ 1854–6. He published a translation of the Gorgias in 1864, and an introduction to Aristotle's ‘Rhetorick’ in 1867. After his death his translation of the ‘Phædo’ was edited by Mr. H. Jackson, and his edition of the ‘Rhetorick of Aristotle,’ with an elaborate commentary, by Mr. J. E. Sandys in 1877. Notes and corrections of his are in a later volume of Grote's ‘History of Greece.’
[Munro's Memoir, prefixed to Sandys's edition of the Rhetorick, Camb. 1877.]