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Of course, a certain outline should be obtained of Greek history, in which the important moments and persons can be rightly set down; but the shortest is the best, and, if one lacks stomach for Mr. Grote's voluminous annals, the old slight and popular summary of Goldsmith or Gillies will serve. The valuable part is the age of Pericles, and the next generation.
Golden summers, when he spent whole days out on the cliff or moor with the Parson, their specimen cases at their backs; ruddy autumns when the peewits cried in the dappled sky and the blackberries were thick on the marsh; grey winters when the rain and mist blotted the world out, and he and the Parson sat by a glowing fire of wreckage, the Parson reading aloud from Jorrocks or Pickwick, or the entrancing tales of Captain Marryat, and later, for more solid matter, Grote's "History of Greece," its democratic inferences counterbalanced by "Sartor Resartus," whose thunderous sentences enthralled Ishmael, if their purport was yet beyond him; wonderful pale springs when the sunshine and the blood in his veins were both like golden wine.
Some of us who can remember John Stuart Mill addressing that same assembly at a later day, can probably form an idea of the influence exercised on the House by the man who seemed to be thinking his thoughts aloud rather than trying to win over votes or to catch encouraging applause. Grote's speech on Ward's motion brought up one view of the Irish Church which especially deserved consideration.
Grote's opinion, the remaining books injure the symmetry of this plot by unnecessarily prolonging the duration of the Wrath, while the embassy to Achilleus, in the ninth book, unduly anticipates the conduct of Agamemnon in the nineteenth, and is therefore, as a piece of bungling work, to be referred to the hands of an inferior interpolator. Mr.
If we would understand some of the reasons which induced Plato and Aristotle to write of the state as they did, we can turn to chapter xiv of Grote's Aristotle. With certain later classical moralists most of us are more or less familiar. Seneca, in his work On Benefits, gives a good picture of the moral emotions and judgments of an enlightened man of his time.
Altho several histories of Greece have been written since Grote's, his work "still remains in some respects the greatest," says A. D. Lindsay, his latest editor. Grote, in a sense, stands to Greece as Gibbon to the Roman Empire. He depended mainly on the literary sources, archæology in his day having done little to widen knowledge.
From Grote's History of Greece. New York. Stanford & Delisser. 18mo. pp. 2l9. 50 cts. Readings for Young Men, Merchants, and Men of Business. Reprinted from the London Edition. Boston and Cambridge. J. Munroe & Co. 12mo. pp. 172. 60 cts. Abridgments of the Debates of Congress. By Thomas H. Benton. Vol. 10. New York. D. Appleton & Co. 8vo. pp. 756. $2.50. Morality and the State. By Simeon Nash.
After dinner Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting lecture on silence. Carlyle sneered at almost every one: one day in my house he called Grote's 'History' "a fetid quagmire, with nothing spiritual about it." I always thought, until his 'Reminiscences' appeared, that his sneers were partly jokes, but this now seems rather doubtful.
The annals of the ancient world are elaborately and ably set forth in Grote's History of Greece, Merivale's Rome, and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Another class of books closely allied to biography and history, is the correspondence of public men, and men of letters, with friends and contemporaries.
The student of history will note with some interest that, at a day much nearer to our own, the Lord Stanley whose name we shall presently have to bring up in connection with this debate on Mr. Ward's motion made use, in the House of Lords, of an appeal which suggested the idea that he had not heard or had forgotten George Grote's speech on which we have just been making comment.
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