Teaching Latin and Greek at Trinity, and also at Girton, was the main work of his life; and he is best known to classical scholars for what A. E. Housman praised as his 'unpretending school edition' of Juvenal.
He was over forty years old when he taught himself Russian, in order to read in the original the novels of Tolstoy and especially Turgenev, which he had greatly admired in French translations. He never visited Russia, but had Russian friends, with whom he corresponded in their own language: notably Alexandra Grigorievna Pashkova, the wife of a Russian landowner, whose two sons were Trinity undergraduates.〔Duff, P. W., "Note on the translator."〕