George Meason Whicher

Though resident of Amherst, George Meason Whicher was a frequent visitor at the Century, where his gentle face and quiet conversation gave a pleasant touch to Club-house exchange of views. Before his retirement in 1924, Whicher had for many years taught Greek and Latin at Packer and Hunter colleges. He believed, along with most people who have read such literature intelligently, that study of the ancient classics was indispensable, not only for the imparting of culture to the undergraduate, but for teaching prospective writers how the proper order of words and phrases could save their English from a succession of subordinate clauses dangled at the end of sentences—the practice by which our written language is so constantly disfigured. It was the testimony of Dr. Whicher’s pupils that his teaching never made Greek or Latin a collection of dry rules of grammar, but, as one of them described it, “an adventure” in which they felt, with Keats,

“Like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken.”

Dr. Whicher’s poetry, of which he wrote much, was perhaps not notable. But it was pleasing and graceful; it was like himself.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1938 Century Association Yearbook