than to Decius, Solon might have allowed the name of happy. His youth had caught the last rays of the romantic glory of earlier times; and his single combat with the giant Gaul, and the wonderful aid which the Gods had then vouchsafed him, was sung in the same strains as the valiant acts of the heroes of old, of Cincinnatus, or Camillus, or Cornelius Cossus. His manhood was no less rich in glory of another sort, which, if less brilliant, was more real."*

Not that we mean to depreciate the laboured and accurate explanations which Mr. Grote gives of the views and character of several of the leading Greeks who figure in his fourth volume; they are evidently the result of deep reflection, and are highly instructive to the student; but they are not the living pictures of Dr. Arnold, they lack his dramatic grouping, and the evident hearty appreciation of great men as men, and not as mere political engines.

The same vividness of conception and expression attends Dr. Arnold's treating of nations and parties as well as of men, and herein again he stands distinguished from Mr. Grote. The powers of the latter writer in sifting evidence, searching out truth, perceiving and realizing the political condition of a given age and country, and the aims of different parties and leading men, are beyond all question fully equal to those of Dr. Arnold; Mr. Grote is a philosopher and a historian, but Arnold is also a poet and a painter, neither of which Mr. Grote is, and consequently we lack that vivid and picturesque setting before our eyes of the strife of conflicting interests and principles which so distinguishes the great master of Rugby. Yet Mr. Grote's materials were the more favourable of the two; he has, as we shall hereafter see, done what Arnold can scarcely be said to have done, made actual discoveries in history of no small value; he has thrown a new light on some of the most important points in Grecian politics, he has shown the real bearings of events which had hitherto been misconceived, and brought into their proper prominence, others which had been unduly neglected. Arnold has given additional lustre to the great discoveries of Niebuhr; Mr. Grote wants an Arnold to discharge the same good office by his own scarcely inferior ones.

We have no hesitation whatever in classing Arnold among the very greatest masters of the English tongue. Brilliant, vivid, endued with unsurpassed power of riveting the attention, and winning over the heart, his language is at the same time utterly devoid of all art; the most eloquent passages are, like all real eloquence, completely simple and unstudied. Every word comes from the heart, and breathes the hearty and fervid enthusiasm of the author. A single word strikes upon some chord, awakes some favourite image, and is at once responded to in an energetic passage, which to a colder or more studied writer would never have occurred. We came

* Vol. ii. 273.

upon the following instance in turning over the pages of his second volume at random.

"This however was almost a solitary gleam of light amidst the prevailing darkness. In general there were neither soldiers, statesmen, nor orators now to be found in Athens. The great tragedians had long since become extinct; and Thucydides has neither in his own country, whether free or in subjection, nor in any other country or age of the world, found a successor to rival him. Plato's divine voice was silent, and the Master of the Wise" had left none to inherit his acute. ness, his boundless knowledge, and his manly judgment, at once so practical and so profound."

We feel sure that a technical rhetorician would reprehend the sudden change of tense, and the darting off to a matter not immediately involved in the subject which is conspicuous in the third clause of the above quotation. Yet who can fail to admire and sympathize with the thrill which the very name of Thucydides kindled in the heart of his affectionate editor? As to the proposition itself, we venture to say that he who enunciated it was the last man who could fitly do so; we hesitate not to express our own opinion that the age and country, for which the honour thus denied to all others was reserved, is no other than England in the nineteenth century, that then and there a successor has been found, and that that successor was Thomas Arnold.

The style of Dr. Thirlwall is one widely differing from that of Arnold; and has this great point of dissimilarity, that, as far as internal evidence can show, it is not the same spontaneous effusion, but is formed upon some deliberate conviction as to the propriety of a particular mode of writing. It is easy and unaffected, but still exhibits marks of design, perhaps rather negative than positive. It preserves throughout an equable dignity, every word is well chosen, occupies its proper place, and has its proper share in expressing the meaning of the sentence. Lucid, terse, and vigorous, it is an admirable example of a quiet, intellectual, refined style of writing, which, if it never rises to the thrilling grandeur of Arnold's eloquence, never for a moment sinks to the undignified colloquialism which often disfigures the pages of Mr. Grote. Yet we cannot but think that it was choice rather than nature which debarred Dr. Thirlwall from an eloquence, not indeed identical with Arnold's, but of nearly equal merit in its own kind. There are scattered throughout his work passages of immense concentrated vigour, where a single word tells in a wonderful manner; take for instance the following:

Pissuthnes, the satrap of Sardis, who is even said to have furnished them with gold, when hopes were entertained of bribing Pericles."+

"He brought with him the Athenian galleys surrendered in Piræus— the last fragments of that maritime power which he had broken."*

These are the sort of energetic sentences which we may say without scruple, that Thucydides would have written if he could. But Dr. Thirlwall occasionally rises still higher into graphic passages, which are almost worthy of Arnold himself. The following is a picture of a scene, of a spot, on which we might defy even an archæologian to stifle all human feelings.

"When Xenophon rode up to ascertain the cause, the first shouts that struck his ear were, The Sea, the Sea.' The glad sound ran quickly till it reached the hindmost, and all pressed forward to enjoy the cheering spectacle. The Euxine spread its waters before their eyes; waters which rolled on to the shores of Greece, and which washed the walls of many Greek cities on the nearest coast of Asia. Officers and men embraced one another with tears of joy. A pile of stones was reared on the summit of the Sacred Mountain, and crowned with captive arms, and other offerings."+

We know nothing in the whole compass of language more powerful than the clause which we have given in italics: it gives at once in the simplest and briefest, and therefore most vigorous, manner, the spirit and life of the whole scene; and sets before us most vividly the true character of that mighty element on which the Greek "gazed with delight and child-like wonder," not the "dissociabilis Oceanus," but in truth the bond connecting the remotest corners of the earth, in whose presence the wearied host might almost feel themselves again on their native shores; and, more than this, the true home of the Athenian, whose navy was city and country enough, though the fires of the barbarian might consume his hearths and his temples.

When we turn from either of these writers to Mr. Grote, we shall find the change, in point of style, deplorable indeed. The descent from the grandeur of Arnold, and the quiet dignity of Thirlwall, to the periods of his history, at once studied and homely, ambitious and undignified, is like turning from the majesty of Eschylus, or the equable faultlessness of Sophocles, to the domestic muse of the cabbage-woman's son, asking

πῶς τοῦτ ̓ ἔχει ;

ποῦ μοι τοδί; τίς τοῦτ' ἔλαβε; Ι

But it is not of course mere colloquialisms, the employment of which, under some circumstances, adds much point and brilliancy to a sentence, which form the great objection to Mr. Grote's style;

it is the general cumbrous, heavy, and artificial character of his composition, and the lack of vigour and animation which it almost everywhere displays. And this is the more to be lamented, when we consider the profound research and accurate reasoning which we fear will be often quite lost on account of the uninviting and almost unreadable style in which they appear. Arnold and Thirlwall, are, or ought to be, English Classics, to be read over and over again for their own sakes; Grote will live as the Historian of Greece, but his work will be a mere magazine of facts and reasonings, to be read once and afterwards sink into a book of reference. Where he has new matter to bring forward or old matter to put in a new light, every word is of sterling value, and the matter itself keeps up the interest; where he has merely to repeat what others have said before him, which is, however, no very common case, his powers of composition are not sufficient to rescue his subject from actual dulness.

To set the two writers of Grecian history side by side we cannot do better than give their respective renderings of a famous passage of Herodotus. A respected weekly contemporary has noticed the cumbrous inadequacy of Mr. Grote's; it comes out the more strongly when we remember that Dr. Thirlwall's rendering, combining Herodotean simplicity with his own vigour, was or might have been before him; and we only wonder that he could venture upon a second translation at all.

Herodotus v. 78. ̓Αθηναῖοι μέν νυν ηὔξηντο· δηλοῖ δὲ οὐ κατ ̓ ἓν μοῦνον ἀλλὰ πανταχῆ ἡ ἰσηγορίη ὡς ἔστι χρῆμα σπουδαῖον, εἰ καὶ ̓Αθηναῖοι τυραννευόμενοι μὲν οὐδαμῶν τῶν σφέας περιοικεόντων ἦσαν τὰ πολέμια ἀμείνους, ἀπαλλαχθέντες δὲ τυράννων μακρῷ πρῶτοι ἐγένοντο. δηλοῖ ὦν ταῦτα ὅτι κατεχόμενοι μὲν ἐθελοκάκεον ὡς δεσπότῃ ἐργαζόμενοι, ἐλευθερωθέντων δὲ αὐτὸς ἕκαστος ἑαυτῷ προεθυμεέτο κατεργάζεσθαι.

Grote, iv. 235. Thus did the Athenians grow in strength. And we may find proof not merely in this instance, but everywhere else, how valuable a thing freedom is: since even the Athenians, while under a despot, were not superior in war to any of their surrounding neighbours, but so soon as they had got rid of their despots, became by far the first of all. These things show that while kept down by one man, they were slack and timid, like men working for a master; but when they were liberated, every single man became eager in exertions for his own benefit.

Thirlwall, ii. 78. The Athenians then grew mighty. And it is plain, not in one matter only, but in every way, that liberty is a brave thing: seeing that the Athenians, so long as they were lorded over, were no whit better men at feats of arms than any of their neighbours; but as soon as they were rid of their lords, they got far ahead. This, therefore, shows that while they were kept under, they cared not to conquer, as men toiling for a master; but

when they were set free, none grudged his labour for his own good."

The review of Mr. Grote's work in the Guardian, alluded to just above, has taxed him very truly and severely with taking republican liberties with the Queen's English, and helping us not unfrequently to a xóμμa xaivóv of his own brain. The great question on this head, as it appears to us, is the very difficult one of the technical terms of Greek Archæology, in which Mr. Grote, after the example of some preceding writers, as Mr. Keightley, and to some extent the translators of Niebuhr, deals very largely in Greek words furnished with English terminations. Thus he does not say, but he might have said that, "the Thebans applied for aid to Ægina, whose eponymous heroine was sister to their own. That island was then, in accordance with Pan-Hellenic sentiments, autonomous, but on the establishment of the Athenian thalassocracy it became subject to their hegemony. States in this condition had even the private causes of their citizens decided by the Athenian dikasteries, and in case of revolt, they were often expelled, and their lands divided among cleruchs." But seriously, how to express these ideas, for which we have no exact English equivalent, is a very real difficulty; we may however take for granted that it is not expedient to coin words in this wholesale way, sometimes without any necessity. Dême and phratry may perhaps have something said for them, but why on earth are we to talk of autonomy or dikastery? It is really wonderful that in the passage above quoted from Herodotus, Mr. Grote did not tell us of the blessings of isegory, and we should not be at all surprised to hear that the Grecian apakies often converted their neighbours into douls, or that the Athenian stratiotes andrapodized the women and children of Melos. In many cases we cannot but think that an English term, well chosen and adhered to consistently, would be preferable to the foreign one. No one misunderstands the "tribes" of Athens; why then may not an equivalent be found for duos as well as for puan? Sometimes an English derivative already exists in another sense, which may be employed in a fixed meaning; thus, "Century" does very well to express a certain division of the Roman people, and "Tyrant" is a similar example. We cannot see what Mr. Grote gains by always substituting "Despot" for the last word. We should think every student of Grecian history sufficiently advanced to be engaged upon his book must be perfectly familiar with the Greek notion of a tyrant, and would have no difficulty in giving the word its right signification and that only. The change is therefore unnecessary; and we further cannot admit Mr. Grote's term to be more accurate than that which it supplants. We are not aware that the Greek deσóns is ever used as a formal equivalent to rúgavvos; in the passage quoted above from Herodotus, rúgavvos is the formal term, donors the accidental equivalent, exactly as Lord Byron uses the English terms: