main ground of its success, though it is incidentally connected with both. Since Mitford's time the study of Greek history had made rapid advances. The labors of C. O. Müller and other eminent Germans had thrown new light upon it. A Greek history was required which should at least embody the results of their researches, even if it added nothing to them. The spirit of the times demanded not merely a more genial political thinker, but a deeper and more finished scholar, than Mr. Mitford.

Thirlwall's history, then, is conceived in a liberal spirit, and displays an erudition which renders it a most valuable book for students. Still it is not in all respects satisfactory, nor is it exactly the kind of book to become universally popular. The author speaks in his preface of two classes of readers,* for the former of whom, undoubtedly by far the larger, the work is principally designed; but the execution of the work is such as to render it far more acceptable to the smaller class. As a book of reference, and what is technically called cram, it is unsurpassed. But the style, though clear and argumentative, is the very reverse of brilliant or graphic; and the general tone of the book is to a mere reader, what we cannot give a better idea of than by calling it Hallam's MiddleAges-ish. Moreover, the reverend historian has, with an amiable but sometimes embarrassing modesty, been more solicitous to collate and condense the opinions of others than to arrive at decisions of his own, so that in many places the book is chiefly valuable as a synopsis of different views, and in some its very copiousness of information is bewildering. While, therefore, Thirlwall's Greece found an immediate place in the library of every student, it was felt that there was still room for another History of Greece, which should be attractive as well as critical, and give results as well as materials; and the announcement that Mr. George Grote was about to endeavor to supply this want excited a lively interest.

"One consisting of persons who wish to acquire something more than a superficial acquaintance with Greek history, but who have neither leisure nor means to study it for themselves in its original sources; the other of such as have access to the ancient authors, but often feel the need of a guide and an interpreter."

Mr. Grote is well known to the commercial world as a partner in one of the great London banking houses, and not unknown in the political. His principles are what is generally called philosophical radical, that is to say, encouraging the freest range of speculation and discussion, but not countenancing haste or violence in action.* When in Parliament, where he twice represented the city of London, he was chiefly distinguished for proposing and advocating Vote by Ballot. But this method of exercising the franchise, natural and proper as it appears to us, is highly repugnant to English usages and prejudices. Mr. Grote found little support from his own party, and the great clerical wit, usually foremost in the ranks of the reformers, signally contributed to laugh down the proposed reform. More recently Mr. Grote has studied and personally inspected the affairs of Switzerland, and has very lately published in the Spectator a series of letters containing a triumphant vindication of President Ochsenbein and the Diet. Amid all his various pursuits he never lost sight of his great literary work, projected at a very early period of his life, (some say before he left the university.) With every allowance for frequent interruptions, it is probably rather an under-statement of the case to say, that the eight intended volumes (we have a suspicion that they will run over by one or two) will represent twenty years' hard work. And should any one be disposed to think this an over-estimate, we would request him, before pronouncing a positive opinion, to make himself master of one book of Herodotus or Thucydides, first making sure that he understands the author's meaning, and then collating and digesting the authorities on all historical and archæological points involved or alluded to. The time thus occupied will give him some measure of that which must have been expended on Mr. Grote's History, into which (supposing the remaining

volumes to equal the promise of the four already published) it is not too much to say that the reading of a life will have been worked, so various are the sources from which Mr. Grote draws his authorities and illustrations. And all this learning is introduced most naturally and appropriately; for the author is one of those rare specimens, a scholar without any of the disagreeable peculiarities of scholars, without pedantry or dogmatism or "shop" of any kind.* Unconnected with academical honors or any sort of academical business as his name was, his appearance as a classical historian subjected him to a most rigorous scrutiny from all those firstclass men and medallists who thought they had taken out a patent for all classical learning in the "Schools" and the "Tripos;" and the paucity and triviality of the inaccuracies they have been able to discover bear witness to the accuracy and depth of his work.

His opening is bold and novel. Instead of beginning with the geography of the country, and then passing to the early inhabitants, as Thirlwall and his predecessors generally have done, he commences with the stories about the gods-the Greek Mythology, in fact. With this he immediately connects the legends of the heroic age, all the personages of which he considers equally mythical and fabulous with the gods and goddesses. Hector and Agamemnon are put into the same category with Zeus and Apollo, and authentic history begins only with the first Olympiad. În anticiIn anticipation of surprise and censure, he thus speaks in his preface:

"The times which I thus set apart from the regions of history are discernible only through a different atmosphere-that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment, entirely unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks, and known only through their

There is but one thing in the book which savors in the least of pedantry-an affectation of purism in spelling the Greek names with Greek instead of Roman letters. This is very harsh in some cases to the ear as well as the eye, the change of spelling involving a change of pronunciation in such names as Alkæus and Phokylides. Nor is Mr Grote always consistent with himself: why should Perikles be spelt with k and Calypso not? Even the same word varies in different volumes: we have Crete in the first and Krete in the fourth.

legends-without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this- f he disclose the picture-1 reply in the words of ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him, on exhibiting his masterpiece of imitative art: The curtain is the picture.' What we now read as poetry and legend, was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot by could conceive or relish of the past time: the any possibility be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands-not to efface, still less to repaint it."-Preface, pp. xii., xiii.

in

The

These legends occupy about 450 pages, or two-thirds of the first volume. Mr. Grote's narrative style in relating them, seems to us remarkably happy-simple without being prosaic, and carrying the reader straight forward through very volved and contradictory stories. difficulty of telling these old tales in a form acceptable and suitable to modern readers, is confessedly very great, as the singular expedient to which Arnold had recourse testifies. To us, Mr. G. seems to have hit the very thing; but "doctors differ:" a writer in the Classical Museum thinks that "his style is too homely, and that he might have risen more with his theme."* We should like to extract a legend or two, that our readers might judge for themselves, but it is more important to examine our author's way of dealing with the na ture and historical value of these mythes. We cannot take a better specimen than the tale of Troy divine," contrasting Grote's broad conclusion upon it with Thirlwall's Euemerizing doubts. latter, after sketching or rather hinting at the story of Troy, in just eleven lines, proceeds thus:

The

"Such is the brief outline [brief indeed!] of a story which the poems of Homer have made familiar to most readers, long before they are tempted to inquire into its historical basis; and it is consequently difficult to enter upon the inquiry without some prepossessions unfavorable to an impartial judgment. Here, however, we must not be deterred from stating our view of the subject, by the certainty that it will appear

*W. M. Gunn, Classical Museum, vol. V., p. 132.

In this and the following extracts we have occasionally taken the liberty of italicizing a passage.

*

contradictory, as to exclude the possibility of weaving them into one connected narrative. We are compelled to select one out of the number generally, without any solid ground of preference, and then to note the variations of the rest. No one who has not studied the original documents, can imagine the extent to which this discrepancy proceeds: it covers almost every portion and fragment of the tale. But though much may have been thus omitted, of what the reader might expect to find in an account of the Trojan war, its genuine character has been studiously preserved without either exaggeration or abatement. The real Trojan war is that which was recounted by Homer and the old epic poets, and continued by all the lyric and tragical composers; for the latter, though they took great liberties with the particular incidents, yet worked more or less faithfully on the Homeric scale. ** * * And the incidents comprised in the Trojan cycle were familiarized, not only to the public mind, but also to the public eye, by innumerable representations both of the sculptor and the painter-those which were romantic and chivalrous, being better adapted for this purpose, and therefore more constantly employed, than any other. Of such events the genuine Trojan war of the old epic was for the most part composed. Though literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern inquiry essentially a legend, and nothing more. If we are asked whether it be not a legend imbodying portions of historical matter, and raised upon a basis of truth-whether there may not really have occurred at the foot of the hill of Ilium a war purely human and political, without gods, without heroes, without Helen, without Amazons, without Ethiopians under the beautiful son of Eôs, without the wooden horse, without the characteristic and expressive features of the old epical war-like the mutilated trunk of Deiphobus in the under-world --if we are asked whether there was not really some such historical Trojan war as this, our answer must be, that as the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed. We possess nothing but the ancient epic itself, without any independent evidence: had it been an age of records indeed, the Homeric epic, in its exquisite and unsuspecting simplicity, would probably never have come into existence. Whoever, therefore, ventures to dissect Homer, Arctinus and Leschês, and to pick out certain portions as matters of fact, while he sets aside the rest as fiction, must do so in full reliance on his own powers of historical divination, without any means either of proving or verifying his conclusions."—Vol. I., pp. 432-5.

Is Mr. Grote then a mere destructive, who applies the besom of skepticism to the heroic age, and sweeps it remorselessly

"These mythes or current stories, the spontaneous and earliest growth of the Grecian mind, constituted at the same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to which they belonged. They are the common root of all those different ramifications into which the mental activity of the Greeks subsequently diverged; they contain, as it were, the preface and germ of the positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology and the professed romance, which we shall hereafter trace, each in its separate development. They furnished aliment to the curiosity and solution to the vague doubts and aspirations of the age; they explained the origin of those customs and standing peculiarities with which men were familiar; they impressed moral lessons, awakened patriotic sympathies, and exhibited in detail the shadowy, but anxious, presentiments of the vulgar as to the agency of the gods; moreover, they satisfied that craving for adventure and appetite for the marvellous, which has, in modern times, become the province of fiction proper.

"It is difficult, we may say impossible, for a man of matured age to carry back his mind to his conceptions, such as they stood when he was a child, growing naturally out of his imagination and feelings, working upon a scanty stock of materials, and borrowing from authorities whom he blindly followed, but imperfectly apprehended. A similar difficulty occurs when we attempt to place ourselves in the historical and quasi-philosophical point of view which the ancient mythes present to us. We can follow perfectly the imagination and feeling which dictated these tales; and we can admire and sympathize with them as animated, sublime and affecting poetry: but we are too much accustomed to matter of fact and philosophy of a positive kind, to be able to conceive a time when these beautiful fancies were construed literally, and accepted as serious reality. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Grecian mythes cannot be understood or appreciated, except with reference to the system of conceptions and belief of the ages in which they arose. We must suppose a public not reading and

writing, but seeing, hearing and telling, destitute of all records, and careless, as well as ignorant of positive history with its indispensable tests, yet, at the same time, curious and full of eagerness for new or impressive incidents; strangers even to the rudiments of positive philosophy, and to the idea of invariable sequences of nature, either in the physical or moral world, yet requiring some connecting theory to interpret and regularize the phenomena before them. Such a theory was supplied by the spontaneous inspirations of an early fancy, which supposed the habitual agency of beings intelligent and voluntary like themselves, but superior in extent of power, and different in peculiarity of attributes." Pp.

460-462.

In those days, then, imagination and sympathy supplied the place of geography and physical science. But many causes, and first of all, "the expansive force of Grecian intellect itself," caused different constructions to be put upon these products of early fancy. Mr. Grote goes through the treatment of the mythes by the earlier philosophers and the dramatic poets, and the attempts of the historians to make history of them; Herodotus' adoption of the more plausible Egyptian version of the story of Helen; Thucydides' exposition of the Trojan war as a great political enterprise, an exposition which "would, doubtless, have been historical truth, if any independent evidence could have been found to sustain it," but which, in the absence of such evidence, must be viewed as "a mere extract and distillation from the incredibilities of the poets;" and so on down to Euemerus, that disenchanter of the ancient romance, whose name has passed into a familiar word with scholars; and Palæphatus, whose results "exhibit the maximum which the semi-historical theory can ever present: by aid of conjecture, we get out of the impossible and arrive at matters intrinsically plausible but totally uncertified." He then sketches the allegorical theory, and thus decides on the respective merits of the two:

cluded in the original purport of the story. No one can doubt that the tale of Atê and the Litæ, in the ninth book of the Iliad, carries with it an intentional moral; and others might be named conveying a similar certainty. But the semi-historical interpretation, while it frequently produces absurd transformations of the original tale, is never, even in its most successful applications, accompanied with any certainty that we have reached the positive truth. After leaving out from the mythical narrative all that is miraculous or high-colored or extravagant, we arrive at a series of credible incidents-incidents which may, perhaps, have really occurred, and against which no intrinsic presumption can be raised. This is exactly the character of a wellwritten modern novel, the whole story of which is such as may well have occurred in real life; it is plausible fiction, and nothing beyond. To nity of truth, some positive testimony or posiraise plausible fiction up to the superior digtive ground of inference must be shown; even the highest measure of intrinsic probability is not alone sufficient. A man who tells us that on the day of the battle of Platæa rain fell on the spot of ground where the city of New-York now stands, will neither deserve nor obtain credit, because he can have had no means of positive knowledge; though the statement is not in the slightest degree improbable. On the other hand, statements in themselves very improbable may well deserve belief, provided they be supported by sufficient positive evidence: thus the canal dug by the order of Xerxês across the promontory of Athos, and the sailing of the Persian fleet through it, is a fact which I believe, because it is well attested, notwithstanding its remarkable improbability, which so far misled Juvenal as to induce him to single out the narrative as a glaring example of Grecian mendacity. Again, many critics have observed that the general tale of the Trojan war (apart from the superhuman agencies) is not more improbable than that of the Crusades, which every one admits to be a historical fact. But (even if we grant this position, which is only true to a small extent) it is not sufficient to show an analogy between the two cases in respect to negative presumptions alone; the analogy ought to be shown to hold between them in respect to positive certificate also. The Crusades are a curious phenomenon in history, but we accept them nevertheless as an unquestionable fact, because the antecedent im probability is surmounted by adequate contemporary testimony. ** In applying the semihistorical theory to Grecian mythical narrative, it has been often forgotten that a certain strength of testimony or positive grounds of belief must first be tendered before we can be called upon to discuss the antecedent probability or improbability of the incidents alleged. The belief of the Greeks themselves, without the smallest aid of special or contemporary wit