ail the life and vigour of a singularly energetic nature, sharing in the activities of political life in England, and therefore better able to enter with animation, if not with impartiality, into those of the political life of Greece. So it is that we may trace in the apologist of Cleon one who found how easily a Conservative majority of country gentlemen, the kaloiKayaloì of the House of Commons, come to despise and denounce a Liberal leader sprung from the ranks of the people, and in the courage that led him to an elaborate vindication of the Sophists, as men before their time, the educators and reformers of their generation, a sympathy with the Benthamite school, of which he himself was one of the foremost representatives, and which had been decried as consisting all but exclusively of doctrinaires without principle and without heart.

Yet, in spite of the disadvantages under which Thirlwall worked, his History has distinctive merits of its own. We can scarcely expect the students of this generation to give much time or labour to works that are already fading into the dim obscurity of a past, almost of an obsolescent literature; but if we are to judge rightly of Bishop Thirlwall's labours in this region, they must be compared with those that had preceded, as well as with those that have followed him. Till the commencement of the present century, indeed, it may be said with truth that there was no History of Greece in the English language worthy even of the passing notice of the scholar. Goldsmith, with that facile pen of which it was true that 'nihil tetigit quod non ornavit,' had written a popular and entertaining schoolbook, and this, with such part of Rollin as dealt with Greece, and one or two forgotten works by Stanyan and others, were all that were to be found even in the catalogues of our libraries. Practically, most men learnt what they knew of the heroes and statesmen of Greece from Plutarch's Lives. The appearance of Mitford's History, in 1808, on a scale commensurate with the greatness of the subject, and with a scholarship as much in advance of his predecessors as it has been distanced by his followers, may accordingly be noted, in a favourite phrase of our Teutonic friends, as that of an epoch-making work. Mitford wrote, however, unmistakeably, if not avowedly, from the point of view of an English Tory. The absurd pseudo-classicalism of the leaders of the French Revolution, the revival of the phrases and forms of old republics in the rhetoric of Girondists and Jacobins; perhaps even the analogy between the massacres of Corcyra and those of the Reign of Terror, led him so to write his history as to point a moral as to the

evils of democracy. As Mr. Disraeli, in one of the earlier phases of his changing life, described Alison's History of Europe' as written to prove that Providence was on the side of the Tories,' so might Mitford's History of Greece' be described as an apologia for the Toryism of Sparta and an indictment against the Liberalism of Athens. Grote came afterwards, as we have seen, as counsel for the defendant, and pleaded for his client with all the fervour of sympathy. Between the two, balancing evidence with a judicial calmness, but with the principles of a constitutional Whig, keen to detect the mistakes and exaggerations of the writer who was then his only rival, but somewhat crippled and restrained by the conditions of which we have already spoken, came Thirlwall. His History has at once the merits and the defects which under those conditions might be expected. It moves on in a calm and equable style seldom rising into fervour, free from all inaccuracy in language or in statement, yet wanting in that pictorial vividness which we have learnt to expect at the hands of historians of the first order; vindicating, where necessary, the persons or the institutions that passed under his review from the censures or the sneers of ignorance, sometimes with a characteristic irony, sometimes with a grave dignity. It is in these last passages that he rises to his highest level, and we may be pardoned for recalling one or two of them to the memory of a generation to whom the work is becoming, we fear, less familiar than it ought to be. Here, for example, is an answer to the common charge (of which Mitford had made much) of ingratitude brought against democratic governments on the strength of the sentence passed by the Athenians on Miltiades:

'Darius might well think that the benefit he had received from Histiæus was so great that it could scarcely be effaced by any subsequent offence. But Miltiades was not in any such sense the benefactor of the Athenians if they conceived that nothing he had done for them ought to raise him above the laws, if they even thought that his services had been sufficiently rewarded by the station which enabled him to perform them, and by the glory he reaped from them, they were not ungrateful or unjust, and if Miltiades thought otherwise, he had not learnt to live in a free state.'

It was to be expected, perhaps, that the work of one who never hurried to a close, and who gathered energy as he went onward, should attain its highest excellence in its later portions; and it is here accordingly, in the history of Philip and Alexander and their successors, that we find not only the greatest fulness in detail but the greatest vigour in the appreciation

and delineation of character. While we read his account of Themistocles and Pericles, and even of Socrates, with something like disappointment at the passionless calmness with which the story of their life is told, the estimates of the characters of Phocion and Alexander, with which we close our extracts, may take their place (even if we do not altogether accept his verdict) among the highest models of this part of the historian's task.

Thus, of the former :

'Had he lived in an earlier period, he might have served his country, like Nicias, with unsullied honour. In a later age he might have passed his life in peaceful security. His lot fell on dark and troubled times, when it was difficult to act with dignity, and the best patriot might be inclined to despair. But he despaired and yet acted. He despaired, not merely of his country, which anyone may innocently do; but also for her, which no man has a right to do. He would have forced her to despair of herself. He resisted every attempt that was made by bolder and more sanguine patriots to restore her independence. He did not withdraw from public life; he acted as the tool of his country's enemies, as the servant of a foreign master; content to mitigate the pressure of the degrading yoke which he had helped to impose. Towards the close of his life he descended lower and lower, constant only in his opposition to whatever bore the aspect of freedom. The fellow who spat on him in his way to execution was perhaps a more estimable person than the man to whom he would have surrendered Athens as well as himself. He left a character politically worse than doubtful; one which his private worth alone redeems from the infamy that clings to the names of a Callimedon and a Demades; a warning to all who may be placed in like circumstances, to shun his example, whether they value their own peace, or the esteem of posterity.'

And of Alexander, after narrating the circumstances of his death:

'So passed from the earth one of the greatest of her sons; great above most, for what he was in himself, and not, as many who have borne the title, for what was given him to effect. Great, not merely in the vast compass, and the persevering ardour of his ambition, nor in the qualities by which he was enabled to gratify it and to crowd so many memorable actions within so short a period; but in the course which his ambition took, in the collateral aims which ennobled and purified it, so that it almost grew into one with the highest of which man is capable, the desire of knowledge and the love of good. In a word, great as one of the benefactors of his kind. . . It is not to

be supposed that in any of his undertakings he was animated by speculative curiosity, or by abstract philanthropy. If he sought to discover, as well as to conquer, it was because the limits of the known world were too narrow for his ambition. His main object, undoubtedly, was to found a solid and flourishing empire; but the means which he VOL. CXLIII. NO. CCXCII.

X

adopted for this end were such as the highest wisdom and benevolence might have suggested to him in his situation, without any selfish motive.'

6

From the work of the scholar we turn to that of the theologian. And here, as the first outward sign of a revived interest in the studies that had borne their first-fruits in the translation of Schleiermacher, we note the publication in 1834 of the memorable pamphlet on the Admission of Dissenters to 'Academical Degrees,' which led, in the first instance, as its direct consequence, to the loss of his tutorship at Trinity, and, afterwards, as placing him among the most conspicuous of the liberal thinkers of Cambridge, to his appointment by Lord Melbourne to the bishopric of St. David's. It would be a mistake to suppose, however, that it was the liberalism of the pamphlet wholly or chiefly that roused the indignation and anger of the authorities of Trinity and other colleges. The principles which it asserted were indeed clear and bold in their utterance. To him the compulsory attendance at chapel, then imposed on all students, seemed to make the daily service to 'the great majority of our congregations not a religious service at all, and to the remaining few the least impressive and edifying that can well be conceived.' If he was met, as he was by the present Bishop of Lincoln, with the plea that the alternative was between a compulsory religion and no re'ligion at all,' the answer was, that he could not draw such delicate distinctions,' and that the difference between a compulsory religion and no religion at all was too subtle for his grasp. But that which caused the waters of bitterness to overflow was the startling assertion that the institutions which were resisting the admission of Dissenters on the ground that they were pre-eminently places not only of sound learning' but of religious education' were so far from being dedicated exclusively or principally to the study of theology, that among all the branches of learning cultivated in them there was none that occupied a smaller share of their time and 'attention.'. Only in a very narrow, if not a forced sense,' could it be said that theology was cultivated in our colleges at all. One proof of this assertion lay in an induction from the programmes of Divinity Lectures and College Examinations, and in these he found that, while the papers set abounded in questions on points of chronology, of geography, of history, of antiquities, the occurrence of even a single question on any point of doctrine was a most rare exception to the general practice. On these grounds he maintained (1) that few Dissenters would object to their sons taking the whole

course of religious education as it was then actually given, and (2) that the few exceptions might be met on what we have now learnt to call a Conscience Clause. He believed that the substantial interests of the University, literature and 'science, morality and religion, would all gain by such an ac'cession to our numbers,' and he ended in a passage of singular power and eloquence, marked with a greater fervour than the judicial calmness which was afterwards his predominant characteristic:

'There is only one quarter from which I see a real danger lest this prospect which makes me tremble, not with fear, but with hopeshould be for a time overclouded. If the prophets of evil should become its preachers and ministers; if from our pulpits the spirit of strife and hatred and vindictive prejudice, some sparks of which exist even in the most generous bosoms, should be fanned into a flame; if our youths should be taught, by those to whom they look up with reverence, to consider themselves as martyrs, because their studies are shared by companions who have been brought up in a different creed; if they should be urged on sacred authority, in the name of the Prince of Peace, to fight even to the death for the passions and prejudices of their elders as for divine and infallible truth: if a voice from the sanctuary should cry to those who may soon be approaching us, with hearts perhaps as full of kindly feelings, of virtuous aims, and honourable ambition as any we have now among us: "Come-but come at your peril: come -but know that we hate and will persecute you, as we are sure that you must hate, and, when you can, will persecute us "-then I will not answer for the immediate consequences; but I cannot be deterred by them, both because the blame will rest with others, and because I feel assured that they will be only temporary and will cease with the shortlived effervescence that produces them.' (P. 44.)

We have thought it worth while to disinter these fragments of a forgotten controversy, not only because it is always well to note how principles that have since been generally received had at one time to be proclaimed, amid rebuke and reproach, by the great minds that were in advance of their time as the prophets of a better future, but because it was this almost contemptuous survey of the religious education given at Cambridge, though not without its parallel at the time in the comments on the theological teaching of Oxford in Dr. Pusey's pamphlet, 'Remarks on the Prospective and Past Benefits of Cathedral 'Institutions,' that involved Mr. Thirlwall in a painful controversy with the Master of his own, and the tutors of that and other Colleges, who thought themselves injured by what they looked on as misrepresentations. Moreover it explains, if we mistake not, the attitude of his mind towards the first great revival of the study of theology, with which he had to deal