Hackett, Horatio B.

Horatio Balch Hackett (1808-1875), professor of Hebrew and classical literature, was born in Salisbury, Massachusetts, on December 27, 1808. He graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, and Amherst College, where he was a tutor in 1831-32. After graduation from Andover Theological Seminary, he taught at Mount Hope College in Baltimore in 1834-35. He was appointed adjunct professor of Latin and Greek at Brown in 1835, and was professor of Hebrew and classical literature from 1837 to 1839. Charles T. Congdon 1841 remembered Hackett:

"In Dr. Horatio B. Hackett we had a classical teacher of distinguished abilities and accomplishments.... I used to think him a man of the sixteenth century. He should have been employed in that kind of mastodonian annotation which swelled the spare remains of Velleius Paterculus into a chubby quarto of a thousand pages. Perhaps it was not altogether our fault if we could not relish the discussion of a disputed reading of Livy or of Tacitus as he relished it. He lived for learning, but he conscientiously gave all his great acquisitions to the cause of sound Christian knowledge. As he was accuracy itself, he occupied a high position among the American reviewers of the English Bible, and I suppose he went on toiling to the last."