The Debates on which we have been engaged have had, for the most part, not only a special, but a perennial interest; and though they have been few, they have been treated from points of view widely different, and in methods of much variety. To the contributors of those papers which give this serial its unique character, and impart to this volume so much of its worth and importance, the conductors, fully alive to their merits, owe "the recompence of thanks" for their aid in maintaining the culture of critical thought as a valuable element in the republic of letters. Old names they recognise with new feelings of delight in their associated work, and new ones with the fresh joy of seeing "the torch of thought" taken up by others, to be shaken and passed on. Our Topics have called out terse and telling suggestions, which will be perused with profit as examples of condensed thinking and concise expression. The Essayist has been varied and attractive; and the Inquirer has been, if less multifarious, much more informing than of late. Our Collegiate Course holds on much in its old way, being at once interpreting and informing. Our Societies' Section has somewhat improved in interest; and our Reviewer has been concise and varied, if he has not found occasion to be full and subtle. The Literary Notes have been extended and increased, as we hope, both to the pleasure and profit of the reader; and the Leading Papers are due to the laborious thinker who has, with few exceptions, furnished them for upwards of nineteen years.

Nineteen years! Yes, even so; our serial has stood the test of timemay we not say well? Among the multitudes of magazines projected and produced in the first year of the half-century, how few survive unto this day! How many perished in their early days! how few, like us, have survived their teens! We made no vast professions, and offered no attraction except honest thought impartially presented; we have been able to make no startling announcements of striking novelties calculated to catch the popular taste of the times; but have been contented to pursue our course of earnest endeavour to promote reflective self-culture. Ours has not been a course of seeking for pecuniary profit. In this regard we have had to sacrifice much. But our efforts have been of profit to many in a far higher sense than money can represent. Are we wrong in believing that after such testing, such labours, and such patient pursuit of human good, we should find our readers more willing to farther our ends by increasing our circulation and aiding our efforts by sympathy and active co-operation in our work, our progress and prosperity? Old friends must pass away; but a little effort on the part of those who love our aim and appreciate our endeavours might bring to rally round us, new men and true men, who love truth, goodness, and reflective thought, who seek improvement and cultivate the faculties of investigation. We begin our twentieth year in hope and faith. Let our readers second our efforts, and we shall soon attain a valued majority.

Made wiser by our years, and by the experience we have gained, aided by the wider circle of friends which has gathered around us, quickened by the interest felt in our efforts, and growing more anxious as time passes to perform our duty efficaciously, we hope with increased acceptancy to provide for our readers a supply of thoughtfully impartial controversy, of well-chosen and original information, of carefully selected inducements to and advice regarding self-culture, a life devoted to high purposes and thought, likely to lead to nobler aims and efforts.

THE

BRITISH CONTROVERSIALIST.

Modern Historians.

GEORGE GROTE, F.R.S., D.C.L. Oxon., and L.L.D. Camb. author of The History of Greece; Plato and the other

Companions of Socrates, &c.

"A decided liberal, perhaps even a republican, in politics, Mr. Grote has laboured to counteract the influence of Mitford in Grecian history, and to construct a history of Greece from authentic materials, which should illustrate the animating influence of democratic freedom upon the exertions of the human mind. In the prosecution of this attempt he has displayed an extent of learning, a variety of research, a power of combiration, which are worthy of the very highest praise, and have secured for him a lasting place among the historians of modern Europe."-Sir Archibald Alison.

GREECE was once almost a synonym for glory. It was the birthland of reflective thought. To it we owe the polite and liberal arts; and, to it, our minds instantly recur when we think of what is grand in intellect, perfect in beauty, or exalted in heroism. It is a region of ennobling associations, because it has been the scene of noble deeds and the native country of exquisite thoughts. The special office or mission of the Hellenic people seems to have been the complete realization of manly excellence (kalokayalia). Greece is to literature what Palestine is to religion: the former sought to embody the admirable as the latter aimed at developing the adorable. A generous magnificence of life animated the Greeks in every effort of their activity and enterprise. Everything they touched they intellectualized, inspirited with thought, and endued with artistic form. Marble took personality by their chisel, and thought took outwardness to their minds in a splendid concourse of divinities. Poetry, sculpture, painting, and architecture passed with them from being mere formal arts and became essential elements of human life, while philosophy, science, history, and statesmanship, though but the inner forces of individual or national vitality, received the charm of formal beauty from the intensely cosmic 1869.

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spirituality, which they imparted to every conception which arose in their intelligence. Greece was the land of formative individual life. Hence, as John Stuart Mill says, "The interest of Grecian history is unexhausted and inexhaustible," though it were taken but as a part of the history of mind. The Greeks have made good an inalienable claim to a mastery over the admiration of thoughtful men. No poetry will rob their Homer of our love; no philosophy (silent of Christian teachings) can ever breathe with serener truth than that of Socrates [from the spirit of Plato]. Heathen history owes its best pages to Thucydides; heathen justice still takes the life of Aristides for its best example. Eloquence, so far as it depends on language, cannot rise higher than Demosthenes ; and art, so far as it consists in form and execution, has never even equalled the long-lived creations of Phidias and the nameless sculptor of the Apollo. It would be vain to enumerate these names were they not sufficiently familiar to represent the ideality and the effort of a people in love with beauty. There are others suggesting different associations, yet readily associated with these. The love of beauty is not alone the love of things material or even intellectual, but of things moral, the most beautiful of all. Imperfectly as these could be known in Greece, they were not neglected in the abundance of other objects of cultivation and exertion. The dangers and the sacrifices of Aristomenes for the sake of Messenia, the death of Leonidas and his three hundred faithful to iron-hearted Sparta, the devotion and the triumph of Thrasybulus over his evil-minded countrymen at Athens, are all illustrations of the love of home and law and liberty, which are more truly parts of the one great principle of beauty than poetry, or policy, or art-they are the human ground-work of a divine morality.*

If we look with a diligent eye over the surface of the ancient world we shall find no country that appears to be comparable with Greece, and the islands which lie between it and the western coast of Asia Minor, in the conditions of site, climate, and the articulation of contrasts within a limited compass in such a manner as to be favourable for variety of existence, effort, and progress. It was a land of ever changing, yet continual, loveliness-one in which every power benign

"Conspired to blow the flower of human kind." Those who diligently study the careful sketch of the "Geography and Limits of Greece" in Grote's History (vol. II., pp. 281-314) will find that its fruitful valleys were interspersed with mountain peaks towering skywards, that a vast extent of its coast was fondled by the sea, that its scattered islands had splendid interspaces of ocean lying round them, and that these conditions of life excited to the varied industries of husbandry and pasturage, mercantile traffic and the sea-faring adventurousness to which commerce induces. The grateful alternations of sea-air and mountain

* The Liberty of Rome: a History. By Samuel Eliot; vol. I.,

p. 105.

breezes, and the pleasing changes of landscape and ocean communicated no less delight than they exited to strenuous activity and varied exertion-so that the Greeks were neither oppressed by toil nor enervated to languor. The singular disunion of its component parts introduced emulation and rivalry; while their pride of race prevented their ardent zeal for home from degenerating into localism, and their national feasts and international games kept up the fervency of patriotism and the interests of public life. Different ideals of existence thus became possible, and yet were brought so closely into competition with others that experiments were varied as the need and the hour changed. Despotism, which had been the bane of the mighty civilizations of the ancient world, could effect but little in a land which was itself so strangely dissociated in space, yet associated in race, and whose inhabitants consequently could be so little subdued to any one scheme or form of life. The old empires had afforded no scope for history; governmental changes and dynastic revolutions constitute almost the only record of the long periods during which they existed-we dare scarcely say flourished. The individual formed but a part of the mighty enginry of State in them; but in Greece social existence demanded the proper exercise of individuality, for civilization depended on each man's doing his best in the situation wherein his lot was cast, by adapting himself to the circumstances in which he was placed, and doing the duty which lay nearest to his hand with all possible energy. This is the secret of the manly excellence that made Greece a land of men, heroes, and thinkers. That the history of such a nation should be full of interest to those who dwell in a land where personality is regarded as precious is scarcely to be wondered at, and hence we find that the incidents of Greek history have always been favourite illustrations with those who desired to inculcate and encourage individual energy or national independence. At every era in modern history in which the freedom of man has been felt to require extension and security, Greek literature has been a peculiarly popular study, and Hellenic records have been appealed to in behalf of the movements made for the furtherance of human independence. We know how great a stir and ferment of spirit seized the western nations when Greek letters, in the fifteenth century, carried the treasures of thought from Constantinople to the universities of Germany, France, and England. At the reformation Greek literature had again sprung into favour and was studied with loving diligence. A classical revival preceded the French revolution, and, in fact, the echo of Greek imperialism, alternating with the republican impulses of Hellenic history are not inactive in Germany and France to this day. After the stormiest period of the revolution had passed, men began to seek a more complete and trustworthy knowledge of Hellenistic life, letters and philosophy, and this revival of interest in the history of Greece has affected our own land to such a degree that we have now in our literature one of the noblest and best histories of Greece which has yet been produced

in any land. Of this history and its author we now proceed to give some account.

George Grote, eldest son of Geo. Grote, Esq., of Badgmoor, Oxon, was born in 1794, at Clayhill, near Beckingham, in the county of Kent. His grandfather, a gentleman of German descent, was, along with Geo. Prescott, one of the founders of the private barking establishment, still extant. under the designation of Prescott, Grote, Cave & Co., at 62, Threadneedle Street, London. His father was an assiduous and thoughtful man of business, and he determined to bring up his eldest son, as he had himself been trained, from his youth up, to a business career. After acquiring, under home and private tuition, the earlier rudiments of education, George Grote, in his tenth year, became a pupil in Charter House School, as a boarder with the head master. As a Carthusian he was a contemporary with and schoolfellow of Connop C. Thirlwall (subsequently Historian of Greece, and now Bishop of St. David's), with whom he has ever since maintained relations of intimate friendship. The old Chartreuse had the reputation of being one of the best schools in the metropolis; and here, during six years, George Grote received the elements of a first-rate education, within precincts intended at one time to be sacred to monkery as the Priory of the Salutation of the Mother of God. In the sixteenth year of his age he began his business life, being then indentured as a junior clerk in the banking-house of which his father was one of the principals, and of which he is himself now one of the heads. Through all the grades of clerkly service in the bank he regularly progressed, taking his promotion and pay on the same terms as others, and being as thoroughly held bound to the proper performance of his departmental duties as any other sub-official in the service of the firm. He combined with business talent and zeal a scholar's tastes, aptitudes, and ambitions, and though debarred from that University career which was opened to his brother John Grote (afterwards B.D., Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge, author of "Exploratio Philosophica," &c.), he determined to pursue a course of intellectual culture such as would place him on a level, as to results at least, with those who had spent their years amid the scholastic advantages to be found on the banks of the Isis or the Cam. Accordingly, he employed all his leisure in study, and with the resolute enthusiasm for erudition which characterizes the Teutonic race, to which his ancestors belonged, he rose early in the morning and sat iate at night poring over the pages of the ancient writers, and making himself familiar with the best productions of the greatest thinkers of modern times in his own land and on the Continent, He succeeded in mastering the literatures of Greece and of Rome, and having attained a practical knowledge of the languages of France, Italy, and Germany, he was able to avail himself of all the aids to his favourite studies furnished by the research and scholarship of the best writers and thinkers of these nations.

In 1820, Mr. Grote married Harriet Lewin (daughter of Thomas