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would lay the courtier of a constitutional sovereign in modern Europe under perpetual disgrace.

On one occasion, for instance, in the public discharge of his functions as corrector of manners, he had brought a specific charge against a certain knight for having squandered his patrimony. The accused proved that he had, on the contrary, augmented it. Well,' answered the emperor, somewhat annoyed by his error, but you are at all events living in celibacy, contrary to recent enactments.' The other was able to reply that he was married, and was the father of three legitimate children; and when the emperor signified that he had no further charge to bring, added aloud: Another time, Cæsar, when you give ear to informations against honest men, take care that your informants are honest themselves.' Augustus felt the justice of the rebuke thus publicly administered, and submitted to it in silence.

BISHOP THIRLWALL-MR GROTE-GEO. FINLAY
-COLONEL MURE-MR GLADSTONE, ETC.

impression totally different: it 'presents the appearance of a house built upon a plan comparatively narrow, and subsequently enlarged by successive additions.' He conceives that both poems are about the same age, and that age a very early one, anterior to the First Olympiad. Passing to authentic history, Mr Grote endeavours to realise the views and feelings of the Greeks, and not to judge of them by an English standard. Our idea of a limited monarchy, for example, was unknown even to the most learned of the Athenians.

Early Greek History not to be Fudged by Modern
Feeling.

The theory of a constitutional king, especially as it exists in England, would have appeared to Aristotle impracticable; to establish a king who will reign without governing—in whose name all government is carried on, yet whose personal will is in practice of little or no DR CONNOP THIRLWALL contributed to Lard-effect-exempt from all responsibility, without making ner's Cyclopædia a History of Greece, which extended to eight volumes, and has been enlarged and reprinted, 1845-52, and again reprinted in 1855 in eight volumes. It is a learned and philosophical work, evincing a thorough knowledge of Greek literature and of the German commentators. Dr Thirlwall was born in 1797, at Stepney, Middlesex, son of the rector of BowersGifford, Essex. The latter published, in 1809, Primitia, or Essays and Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral, and Entertaining, by Connop Thirlwall, eleven years of age. The future historian of Greece must then be considered the most precocious of English authors, eclipsing even Cowley and Pope. But the son, probably, did not thank the father for thrusting his childish crudities before the world. Connop Thirlwall studied at Cambridge, and carried off high academical honours at Trinity College. He intended following the profession of the law, and, after keeping his terms, was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1825. Three years' experience seems to have disgusted him with the legal profession; he entered the church, obtained a rectory in Yorkshire, then became dean of Brecon, and in 1840 was promoted to the see of St Davids. In 1874 he resigned his bishopric, in consequence of the increasing infirmities of age. He died in 1875. Mr Grote says that, had Dr Thirlwall's History of Greece appeared a few years earlier, he would probably never have conceived the design of writing his more elaborate work.

use of the exemption-receiving from every one unmeasured demonstrations of homage, which are never translated into act, except within the bounds of a known law-surrounded with all the paraphernalia of power, yet acting as a passive instrument in the hands of ministers marked out for his choice by indications which he is not at liberty to resist. This remarkable combination of the fiction of superhuman grandeur and license with the reality of an invisible strait-waistcoat, is what an Englishman has in his mind when he speaks of a constitutional king. When the Greeks thought of a man exempt from legal responsibility, they conceived him as really and truly such, in deed as well as in name, with a defenceless community exposed to his oppressions; and their fear and hatred of him was measured by their reverence for a government of equal law and free speech, with the ascendency of which their whole hopes of security were associated, in the democracy of Athens more, perhaps, than in any other portion of Greece. And this feeling, as it was one of the best in the Greek mind, so it was also one of the most widely spread, a point of unanimity highly valuable amidst so many points of dissension. We cannot construe or criticise it by reference to the feelings of modern Europe, still less to the very peculiar feelings of England respecting kingship; and it is the application, sometimes explicit, and sometimes tacit, of this unsuitable standard which renders Mr Mitford's appreciation of Greek politics so often incorrect and unfair.

The great object of the historian is to penetrate the inner life of the Greeks, and to portray their social, moral, and religious condition. He traces with elaborate minuteness the rise and progress of The History of Greece by MR George GroTE the Athenian democracy, of which he is an ardent was hailed as a truly philosophical history. It admirer; and some of the Athenian institutions commences with the earliest or legendary his- previously condemned, he warmly defends. The tory of Greece, and closes with the generation institution of ostracism, or banishment without contemporary with Alexander the Great. This accusation or trial, he conceives to have been work extends to twelve volumes. The first necessary for the purpose of thwarting the efforts two were published in 1846; but it appears of ambitious leaders. With this view it was devised from a letter of Niebuhr, addressed to Pro- by Clisthenes, and it was guarded from abuse by fessor Lieber, that so early as 1827 Mr Grote various precautions, the most important of which was engaged on the work. The primitive period was, that the concurrence of one-fourth of all the of Grecian history-the expedition of the Ar- citizens was required, and that those citizens voted gonauts and the wars of Thebes and Troy-he by ballot. The two classes of demagogues and treats as merely poetical inventions. On the sophists he also vindicates, comparing the former subject of the Homeric poems, he holds that the Odyssey is an original unity, 'a premeditated structure and a concentration of interest upon one prime hero under well-defined circumstances.' The Iliad, he says, produces on his mind an

*One peculiarity of Mr Grote was spelling the Greek names after the German fashion: Clisthenes is Kleisthenes; Socrates is Sókratés; Alcibiades, Alkibiades; Aristides, Aristeides; &c. All this appears unnecessary, and is a sort of pedantic trifling unworthy of a great historian."

to our popular leaders of the Opposition in parliament, and the latter to our teachers and professors. Even Cleon, the greatest of the demagogues, he thinks has been unfairly traduced by Thucydides and Aristophanes, particularly the latter, who indulged in all the license of a comic satirist. 'No man,' says Mr Grote, 'thinks of judging Sir Robert Walpole, or Mr Fox, or Mirabeau from the numerous lampoons put in circulation against them; no man will take measure of a political Englishman from Punch or of a Frenchman from Charivari! The four stages of Athenian democracy represented by Solon, Clisthenes, Aristides, and Pericles are carefully described and discriminated by Mr Grote; he gives also an admirable account of the Greek colonies; and his narrative of the Peloponnesian War-which fills two volumes-contains novel and striking views of events, as well as of the characters of Pericles, Alcibiades, Lysander, &c. Even the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, which apparently had been exhausted by Xenophon, is told by Mr Grote with a spirit and freshness, and so much new illustration, as to render it a deeply interesting portion of his History. The following will give an idea of Mr Grote's style of narrative :

Xenophon's Address to the Army after the betrayed Grecian Generals had been Slain by the Persians. While their camp thus remained unmolested, every man within it was a prey to the most agonising apprehensions. Ruin appeared impending and inevitable, though no one could tell in what precise form it would come. The Greeks were in the midst of a hostile country, ten thousand stadia from home, surrounded by enemies, blocked up by impassable mountains and rivers, without guides, without provisions, without cavalry to aid their retreat, without generals to give orders. A stupor of sorrow and conscious helplessness seized upon all; few came to the evening muster; few lighted fires to cook their suppers; every man lay down to rest where he was; yet no man could sleep, for fear, anguish, and yearning after relatives whom he was never again to behold.

Amidst the many causes of despondency which weighed down this forlorn army, there was none more serious than the fact, that not a single man among them had now either authority to command, or obligation to take the initiative. Nor was any ambitious candidate likely to volunteer his pretensions, at a moment when the post promised nothing but the maximum of difficulty as well as of hazard. A new, self-kindled light, and self-originated stimulus, was required to vivify the embers of suspended hope and action in a mass paralysed for the moment, but every way capable of effort; and the inspiration now fell, happily for the army, upon one in whom a full measure of soldierly strength and courage was combined with the education of an Athenian, a democrat, and a philosopher.

taking up the accident, continued: 'Since, gentlemen, this omen from Zeus the Preserver has appeared at the instant when we were talking about preservation, let us here vow to offer the preserving sacrifice to that god, and at the same time to sacrifice to the remaining gods as well as we can, in the first friendly country which we may reach. Let every man who agrees with me hold up his hand.' All held up their hands: all then joined in the vow, and shouted the pan.

able to run away.

This accident, so dexterously turned to profit by the rhetorical skill of Xenophon, was eminently beneficial in raising the army out of the depression which weighed them down, and in disposing them to listen to his animating appeal. Repeating his assurances that the gods were on their side, and hostile to their perjured enemy, he recalled to their memory the great invasions of Greece by Darius and Xerxes-how the vast hosts of shewn themselves on the field of Kunaxa worthy of Persia had been disgracefully repelled. The army had such forefathers; and they would, for the future, be yet bolder, knowing by that battle of what stuff the Persians were made. As for Aricus and his troops, alike traitors and cowards, their desertion was rather a gain than a loss. The enemy were superior in horsemen : but men on horseback were, after all, only men, half occupied in the fear of losing their seats, incapable of prevailing against infantry firm on the ground, and only better Now that the satrap refused to furnish them with provisions to buy, they on their side were released from their covenant, and would take provisions without buying. Then as to the rivers; those were indeed difficult to be crossed, in the middle of their course; but the army would march up to their sources, and could then pass them without wetting the knee. Or, indeed, the Greeks might renounce the idea of retreat, and establish themselves permanently in the king's own country, defying all his force, like the Mysians and Pisidians. If,' said Xenophon, 'we plant ourselves here at our ease in a rich country, with these tall, stately, and beautiful Median and Persian women for our companions, we shall be only too ready, like the Lotophagi, to forget our way home. We ought first to go back to Greece, and tell our countrymen that if they remain poor, it is their own fault, when there are rich settlements in this country awaiting all who choose to come, and who have courage to seize them. Let us burn our baggage-wagons and tents, and carry with us nothing but what is of the strictest necessity. Above all things, let us maintain order, discipline, and obedience to the commanders, upon which our entire hope of safety depends. Let every man promise to lend his hand to the commanders in punishing any disobedient individuals; and let us thus shew the enemy that we have ten thousand persons like Klearchus, instead of that one whom they have so perfidiously seized. Now is the time for action. If any man, however obscure, has any thing better to suggest, let him come forward and state it; for we have all but one object-the common safety.'

It appears that no one else desired to say a word, and that the speech of Xenophon gave unqualified satisfaction; for when Cheirisophus put the question, that the meeting should sanction his recommendations, and finally elect the new generals proposed-every man held up his hand. Xenophon then moved that the army should break up immediately, and march to some wellstored villages, rather more than two miles distant; that the march should be in a hollow oblong, with the baggage in the centre; that Cheirisophus, as a Lacedæmonian, should lead the van; while Kleanor and the other senior officers would command on each flank; and himself with Timasion, as the two youngest of the generals, would lead the rear-guard.

Xenophon had equipped himself in his finest military costume at this his first official appearance before the army, when the scales seemed to tremble between life and death. Taking up the protest of Kleanor against the treachery of the Persians, he insisted that any attempt to enter into convention or trust with such liars would be utter ruin; but that, if energetic resolution were taken to deal with them only at the point of the sword, and punish their misdeeds, there was good hope of the favour of the gods and of ultimate preservation. As he pronounced this last word, one of the soldiers near him happened to sneeze; immediately the In the later volumes we have an equally interwhole army around shouted with one accord the accus- esting and copious account of the career of tomed invocation to Zeus the Preserver; and Xenophon, | Epaminondas-the Washington of Greece; the

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Gone glittering through the dream of things that were, render the whole the most noble and affecting record in the history of humanity. From the epoch of Alexander the Great, Mr Grote dates 'not only the extinction of Grecian political freedom and self-action, but also the decay of productive genius, and the debasement of that consummate literary and rhetorical excellence which the fourth century before Christ had seen exhibited in Plato and Demosthenes.' There was, however, one branch of intellectual energy which continued to flourish 'comparatively little impaired under the preponderance of the Macedonian sword' the spirit of speculation and philosophy, and to this subject Mr Grote proposed to devote a separate work. His History was completed in 1856, the author being then in his sixty-second year. In 1866 appeared Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates, three volumes, a work which fully sustained the author's fame.

Mr Grote was of German ancestry. His grandfather, the first of the family that settled in England, established the banking-house that still bears the name of Grote as one of the founders, and the historian was for some time employed in the bank. He sat in parliament as one of the representatives of the city of London from 1832 till 1841, and was known as a Radical Reformer and supporter of vote by ballot. His annual motion in favour of the ballot was always prefaced by a good argumentative speech, and he wrote one or two political pamphlets and essays in the Reviews. Sydney Smith sarcastically said: 'Mr Grote is a very worthy, honest, and able man; and if the world were a chess-board, would be an important politician.' Mr Grote died June 18, 1871, aged seventy-seven. A memoir of the historian has been published by his widow.

Character of Dion.

Apart from wealth and high position, the personal character of Dion was in itself marked and prominent. He was of an energetic temper, great bravery, and very considerable mental capacities. Though his nature was haughty and disdainful towards individuals, yet as to political communion, his ambition was by no means purely self-seeking and egotistic, like that of the elder Dionysius. Animated with vehement love of power, he was at the same time penetrated with that sense of regulated polity and submission of individual will to fixed laws, which floated in the atmosphere of Grecian talk and literature, and stood so high in Grecian morality. He was, moreover, capable of acting with enthusiasm, and braving every hazard in prosecution of his own convictions.

Born about the year 408 B.C., Dion was twenty-one years of age in 387 B.C., when the elder Dionysius, having dismantled Rhegium and subdued Kroton, attained the maximum of his dominion, as master of the Sicilian and Italian Greeks. Standing high in the favour of his brother-in-law Dionysius, Dion doubtless took part in the wars whereby this large dominion had been acquired; as well as in the life of indulgence and luxury which prevailed generally among wealthy Greeks in Sicily and Italy, and which to the Athenian Plato

appeared alike surprising and repulsive. That great philosopher visited Italy and Sicily about 387 B.C. He was in acquaintance and fellowship with the school of philosophers called Pythagoreans; the remnant of the Pythagorean brotherhood, who had once exercised so powerful a political influence over the cities of those regions, and who still enjoyed considerable reputation, even after complete political downfall, through individual ability and rank of the members, combined with habits of recluse study, mysticism, and attachment among themselves.

With these Pythagoreans Dion also, a young man of open mind and ardent aspirations, was naturally thrown into communication by the proceedings of the elder Dionysius in Italy. Through them he came into intercourse with Plato, whose conversation made an epoch in his life.

The mystic turn of imagination, the sententious brevity, and the mathematical researches of the Pythagoreans, produced doubtless an imposing effect upon Dion; just as Lysis, a member of that brotherhood, had acquired the attachment and influenced the sentiments of Epaminondas at Thebes. But Plato's power of working upon the minds of young men was far more impressive and irresistible. He possessed a large range of practical experience, a mastery of political and social topics, and a charm of eloquence, to which the PythaThe stirring effects of the goreans were strangers. Socratic talk, as well as of the democratical atmosphere the communicative aptitude of his mind; and great as in which Plato had been brought up, had developed all that aptitude appears in his remaining dialogues, there is ground for believing that it was far greater in his conversation. Brought up as Dion had been at the court of Dionysius-accustomed to see around him only slavish deference and luxurious enjoyment-unused to open speech or large philosophical discussion-he found in Plato a new man exhibited, and a new world opened before him.

As the stimulus from the teacher was here put forth with consummate efficacy, so the predisposition of the learner enabled it to take full effect. Dion became an altered man both in public sentiment and in individual behaviour. He recollected that, twenty years before, his country, Syracuse, had been as free as Athens. He learned to abhor the iniquity of the despotism by which her liberty had been overthrown, and by which subsequently the liberties of so many other Greeks in Italy and Sicily had been trodden down also. He was made to remark that Sicily had been half barbarised through the foreign mercenaries imported as the despots' instruments. He conceived the sublime idea or dream of rectifying all this accumulation of wrong and suffering. It was his first wish to cleanse Syracuse from the blot of slavery, and to clothe her anew in the brightness and dignity of freedom, yet not with the view of restoring the popular government as it had stood prior to the usurpation, but of establishing an improved constitutional polity, originated by himself, with laws which should not only secure individual rights, but also educate and moralise the citizens. The function which he imagined to himself, and which the conversation of Plato suggested, was not that of a despot like Dionysius, but that of a despotic legislator like Lycurgus, taking advantage of a momentary omnipotence, conferred upon him by grateful citizens in a state of public confusion, to originate a good system, which, when once put in motion, would keep itself alive by fashioning the minds of the citizens to its own intrinsic excellence. After having thus both liberated and reformed Syracuse, Dion promised to himself that he would employ Syracusan force, not in annihilating, but in recreating, other free Hellenic communities throughout the island, expelling from thence all the barbarians-both the imported mercenaries and the Carthaginians.

MR GEORGE FINLAY, an English merchant at

Athens, wrote several works-concise, but philosophical in spirit, and containing original views and information-relative to the history of Greece. His first was Greece under the Romans (1845); History of the Byzantine Empire, from 716 to 1057 (1853), and continued to 1453 A.D. (1854); Medieval Greece and Trebizond to 1461; and the History of Greece under the Othoman and Venetian Domination, from 1453 to 1821 (1856). Mr Finlay died in 1875, the last survivor of the small band of enthusiasts who went out to Greece to join Lord Byron and the Philhellenes. He acted for some years as correspondent of the Times in Athens.

Vicissitudes of Nations.

Iliad and Odyssey occupies a considerable portion of his History, and the general conclusion at which he arrives is, that each poem was originally composed, in its substantial integrity, as we now possess it. We give one short specimen of Colonel Mure's analysis.

The Unity of the Homeric Poems.

It is probable that, like most other great painters of human nature, Homer was indebted to previous tradi tion for the original sketches of his principal heroes. These sketches, however, could have been little more than outlines, which, as worked up into the finished portraits of the Iliad and Odyssey, must rank as his own genuine productions. In every branch of imitative art, this faculty of representing to the life the moral The vicissitudes which the great masses of the nations phenomena of our nature, in their varied phases of of the earth have undergone in past ages have hitherto virtue, vice, weakness, or eccentricity, is the highest and rarest attribute of genius, and rarest of all as exercised received very little attention from historians, who have adorned their pages with the records of kings, and the by Homer through the medium of dramatic action, personal exploits of princes and great men, or attached where the characters are never formally described, but their narrative to the fortunes of the dominant classes, conduct. It is this, among his many great qualities, made to develop themselves by their own language and without noticing the fate of the people. History, how- which chiefly raises Homer above all other poets of his ever, continually repeats the lesson that power, numbers, own class; nor, with the single exception, perhaps, of and the highest civilisation of an aristocracy, are, even when united, insufficient to insure national prosperity, the great English dramatist, has any poet ever produced and establish the power of the rulers on so firm and of different ages, ranks, and sexes. so numerous and spirited a variety of original characters, Still more peculiar permanent a basis as shall guarantee the dominant class to himself than their variety, is the unity of thought, from annihilation. On the other hand, it teaches us that conquered tribes, destitute of all these advantages, with which they are individually sustained, and yet withfeeling, and expression, often of minute phraseology, may continue to perpetuate their existence in misery out an appearance of effort on the part of their author. and contempt. It is that portion only of mankind Each describes himself spontaneously when brought on which eats bread raised from the soil by the sweat of the scene, just as the automata of Vulcan in the Odyssey, its brow, that can form the basis of a permanent national existence. The history of the Romans and of the Jews though indebted to the divine artist for the mechanism illustrates these facts. Yet even the cultivation of the on which they move, appear to perform their functions soil cannot always insure a race from destruction, for by their own unaided powers. That any two or more mutability is nature's bane.' The Thracian race has poets should simultaneously have conceived such a disappeared. The great Celtic race has dwindled away, credible is it, that the different parts of the Iliad, character as Achilles, is next to impossible. Still less and seems hastening to complete absorption in the Anglo-Saxon. The Hellenic race, whose colonies exwhere the hero successively appears as the same sublime tended from Marseille to Bactria, and from the Cim-ideal being, under the influence of the same combination merian Bosphorus to the coast of Cyrenaica, has become extinct in many countries where it once formed the bulk of the population, as in Magna Græcia and Sicily. On the other hand, mixed races have arisen, and, like the Albanians and Vallachians, have intruded themselves into the ancient seats of the Hellenes. But these revolutions and changes in the population of the globe imply no degradation of mankind, as some writers appear to think, for the Romans and the English afford examples that mixed races may attain as high a degree of physical power and mental superiority as has ever been reached by races of the purest blood in ancient or modern times.

A different view of the Homeric question from that entertained by Mr Grote, and also of some portions of Athenian history, has been taken by WILLIAM MURE, Esq., of Caldwell (1799-1860), in his able work, A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Ancient Greece, four volumes, 1850-53. Colonel Mure had travelled in Greece; and in the Journal of his tour-published in 1842-had entered into the Homeric controversy, especially with regard to the supposed localities of the Odyssey, and had adduced several illustrations of the poems from his observation and studies. A sound scholar, and chiefly occupied on Greek literature and history for a period of twenty years, he brought to his Critical History a degree of knowledge perhaps not excelled by that of Mr Grote, but tinctured by political opinions directly opposite to those of his brother Hellenist. His examination of the

of virtues, failings, and passions-thinking, speaking, acting, and suffering, according to the same single type of heroic grandeur-can be the production of more than in the case of the less prominent actors, in so far as it a single mind. Such evidence is, perhaps, even stronger is less possible that different artists should simulincidental personages, than of heroes whose renown may taneously agree in their portraits of mere subordinate have rendered their characters a species of public without any concert, have harmonised to a great extent property. Two poets of the Elizabethan age might, in their portrait of Henry V.; but that the correspondence should have extended to the imaginary companions of his youth-the Falstaffs, Pistols, Bardolphs, Quickleys -were incredible. But the nicest shades of peculiarity ceived and maintained in the same spirit of distinction in the inferior actors of the Iliad and Odyssey, are conas in Achilles or Hector.

Colonel Mure's work was left incomplete. His fourth volume enters on the Attic period of Greek literature the great era of the drama and the perfection of Greek prose-from the usurpation of Pisistratus at Athens, 560 B.C., to the death of Alexander the Great, 323 B.C. He gives an account of the origin and early history of Greek prose composition, and an elaborate biographical and critical study of Herodotus, reserving for future volumes the later Greek prose authors and Attic poets. A fifth volume was published, and at the time of his death he was engaged on a sixth, devoted to the Attic drama. Colonel Mure derived his title from being commander of the Renfrewshire Militia.

His family had long been settled in the counties of Ayr and Renfrew, and he himself was born at the patrimonial property of Caldwell in Ayrshire. He was an excellent country gentleman as well as accomplished scholar and antiquary.

Another and more distinguished votary of Greek literature is the RIGHT HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P., who, in 1858, published Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, three volumes. Mr Gladstone does not enter into any detailed criticism of the Iliad or Odyssey; he deals with the geography, history, and chronology of the poems, maintaining the credibility of Homer as the delineator of an age, and finding also fragments of revealed religion in his system of mythology. He traces the notion of a Logos in Minerva, the Deliverer in Apollo, the Virgin in Latona, and even the rainbow of the Old Testament in Iris; while the principle of Evil, acting by deceit, he conceives to be represented in the Homeric Atè. This certainly appears to be fanciful, though supported by Mr Gladstone's remarkable subtlety of intellect and variety of illustration. One volume of the work is devoted to Olympus, and another to establish Homer's right to be considered the father of political science. In supporting his different hypotheses, we need not say that Mr Gladstone evinces great ingenuity and a refined critical taste. His work is indeed a cyclopædia of Homeric illustration and classic

lore.

The World of Homer a World of His Own.

The Greek mind, which became one of the main factors of the civilised life of Christendom, cannot be fully comprehended without the study of Homer, and is nowhere so vividly or so sincerely exhibited as in his works. He has a world of his own, into which, upon his strong wing, he carries us. There we find ourselves amidst a system of ideas, feelings, and actions different from what are to be found anywhere else, and forming a new and distinct standard of humanity. Many among them seem as if they were then shortly about to be buried under a mass of ruins, in order that they might subsequently reappear, bright and fresh for application, among later generations of men. Others of them almost carry us back to the early morning of our race, the hours of its greater simplicity and purity, and more free intercourse with God. In much that this Homeric world exhibits, we see the taint of sin at work, but far, as yet, from its perfect work and its ripeness; it stands between Paradise and the vices of later heathenism, far from both, from the latter as well as the former, and if among all earthly knowledge the knowledge of man be that which we should chiefly court, and if to be genuine it should be founded upon experience, how is it possible to overvalue this primitive representative of the human race in a form complete, distinct, and separate, with its own religion, ethics, policy, history, arts, manners, fresh and true to the standard of its nature, like the form of an infant from the hand of the Creator, yet mature, full and finished, in its own sense, after its own laws, like some master-piece of the sculptor's art.

We may notice here a work now completed, A History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, by K. O. MÜLLER, continued after the author's death by J. W. DONALDSON, D.D., three volumes, 1858. Dr Donaldson's portion of the work embraces the period from the foundation of the Socratic schools to the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. The work is altogether a valuable one-concise without being dry or meagre. A History of Greece, mainly

based upon that of Dr Thirlwall, by DR L. SCHMITZ, principal of the International College, London (1851), is well adapted for educational purposes: it comes down to the destruction of Corinth, 146 B.C. Dr Schmitz is author of a popular History of Rome (1847), and a Manual of Ancient History to the overthrow of the Western Empire, 476 A.D. He has also translated Niebuhr's Lectures. Few foreigners have acquired such a mastery of the English language as Dr Schmitz.

EARL STANHOPE.

PHILIP HENRY, EARL STANHOPE, when Lord Mahon, commenced a History of England from the Peace of Utrecht to the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1713-1783). The first volume appeared in 1836, and the work ultimately extended to seven volumes, of which a second edition has since been published. The period of seventy years thus copiously treated had been included in Smollett's hasty, voluminous History, but the ground was certainly not preoccupied. Great additional information had also been accumulated in Coxe's Lives of Marlborough and Walpole, Lord Hervey's Memoirs of the Court of George II., the Stuart Papers, the Suffolk and Hardwicke Correspondence, and numerous other sources. In the early portion of his workthe Queen Anne period there is a strong and abiding interest derived from the great names engaged in the political struggles of the day, and the nearly equal strength of the parties. Lord Mahon thus sketches the contending factions :

ness.

Whig and Tory in the Reign of Queen Anne. distinguished, as at present, by the nicknames of Whig At that period the two great contending parties were and Tory. But it is very remarkable that in Queen not only different but opposite to that which they bore Anne's reign the relative meaning of these terms was at the accession of William IV. In theory, indeed, the The leading main principle of each continues the same. principle of the Tories is the dread of popular licentiousThe leading principle of the Whigs is the dread of royal encroachment. It may thence, perhaps, be deduced that good and wise men would attach themselves either to the Whig or to the Tory party, according ular period from despotism or from democracy. The as there seemed to be the greater danger at that particsame person who would have been a Whig in 1712 would have been a Tory in 1830. For, on examination, it will be found that, in nearly all particulars, a modern Tory resembles a Whig of Queen Anne's reign, and a Tory of Queen Anne's reign a modern Whig.

First, as to the Tories. The Tories of Queen Anne's glorious war against France. They treated the great reign pursued a most unceasing opposition to a just and general of the age as their peculiar adversary. To our recent enemies, the French, their policy was supple and aversion, to our old allies the Dutch; they had a politicrouching. They had an indifference, or even an cal leaning towards the Roman Catholics at home; they were supported by the Roman Catholics in their elections; they had a love of triennial parliaments, in preference to septennial; they attempted to abolish the protecting duties and restrictions of commerce; they of our trade with Portugal; they were supported by a faction whose war-cry was 'Repeal of the Union,' in a sister-kingdom. To serve a temporary purpose in the House of Lords, they had recourse-for the first time in our annals-to a large and overwhelming creation of peers. Like the Whigs in May 1831, they chose the

wished to favour our trade with France at the expense

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