1850.] Gaps in Grecian History. 293 pure, and in this respect they stand at a wonderful elevation above their ponderous German and vivacious Gallic neighbours. How different, for example, is the luminous style of Dr. Arnold from the knotty, endless, and unintelligible sentences of Niebuhr, both having written on the same subject, and with the same general views! And such, probably, will always be the characteristic of British historians, unless the execrable dialect, made up of coarse slang and second-hand Germanisms, which Carlyle has attempted to introduce, and servile American scribblers, catching the contagious folly at the third remove, have tried to imitate, should gain more favor than the good taste of either country has hitherto bestowed upon it. Until recently, however, the works of English writers on Greek history have not been founded on the solid basis of minute and comprehensive learning. Though the subject is brilliant and inspiring, the treatment of it is attended with critical and peculiar difficulties, partly owing to the imperfect state in which many of the authorities have come down to our times, and partly to the complex variety of forms under which the political genius of Greece was unfolded. The dawn of Grecian history stands like a fair picture, under the glorious light of the poetry of Homer; but a dark interval of centuries follows, filled with changes of vast moment, with here and there only a faint glimmer of historical illumination. The Persian and Peloponnesian wars are clearly delineated in the imperishable records of Herodotus and Thucydides; but the legislation of Lycurgus and Solon, by which the great Dorian and Ionian types of the Hellenic character were moulded through the historical ages, exists only in scattered and uncertain fragments, dispersed over the whole field of Grecian literature; and the great work of Aristotle, in which he described and compared one hundred and fifty political constitutions, is among the lost treasures of ancient wisdom. To fill up these lamentable chasms, so as to shape out a tolerably complete representation of the Hellenic world, requires the patient toil, minute research, careful comparisons, and comprehensive learning of the German philologist; to interpret the political phenomena, when they have once been exposed to the light by these exhaustive explorers, is a task for the deep experience and practised shrewdness of the Ameri can or English statesman. Literature and art entered so profoundly into the popular life of most of the Hellenic states, surrounding and penetrating it like the vital air, that any representation of Greece which should leave this element aside would be faint and ghastly, like a picture taken after death. But time has made such havoc with some departments of Grecian literature, and so nearly annihilated some departments of Grecian art, that here again the process of restoring what is lost by means of profound knowledge of what remains, guided by exquisitely cultivated taste, must needs be recommenced. Lyric poetry, which breathed a festive joy over the isles of Greece, is represented only in a few precious fragments of the Æolian and Ionian singers, and in a portion of the Dorian Odes of Pindar. The elder comedy, in which the public life of Athens was vividly embodied, we understand sufficiently from the remaining plays of Aristophanes; but how shall we replace those pictures of private life which have perished from our sight in the lost pages of Menander and his brother poets of the new? Without the resources and faculties indicated in the preceding remarks, no scholar can do justice to the history of Greece. There is one influence which has, to some extent, diminished the authority of English writers on Greece; and that is, party spirit. Standing at either extreme of political opinions, the Tory and the Radical have looked upon the events of ancient history through the colored medium of their own party associations. This is very observable, as we shall see, in some of the best known of their works. With all their respective excellences, has any one come up to the standard by which they all should be judged? Goldsmith wrote an agreeable book, with the slenderest possible stock of the neces sary learning. He compiled from the common materials which lay at hand, and adorned his page with the natural graces of his unstudied but inimitable style. His work carries with it no weight of authority, but, to adopt the language of Dr. Johnson, applied originally to the Natural History, he made it "as entertaining as a Persian tale." Gillies was an excellent scholar, and a writer of pure and classical taste. He was already favorably known to the literary world by his valuable translations of the Orations of Lysias and Isocrates, and of Aristotle's Ethics and 1850.] Gillies's and Mitford's Histories. $295 Politics, when his "History of Ancient Greece and its Colonies" appeared. It gained him at once a high reputation, and within a year was translated into German at Leipsic. He was familiar with the ancient writers, but, like Goldsmith, was deficient in the spirit of historical criticism, which searches into the truth, and measures the worth of documents, which sifts, compares, and contrasts authorities, and by which alone the knotty problems, so thickly strewn over Greek history, can be adequately resolved. Yet it was so well thought of in its day, that Gillies was appointed royal historiographer, after the death of Dr. Robertson, on the strength of the reputation it procured him. Although the recent labors of historical investigators have taken away its critical value, it must always hold a respectable place in English literature, as an elegant compend of the traditional views of Greek history held by the scholars of his time. Mitford was a writer of more pretension than either of his predecessors. He undertook to settle the complex questions of Hellenic life in a more authoritative manner, and with a closer application to the circumstances of the modern world. Though educated in the usual style of an English gentleman, his youthful studies had been greatly interrupted by illness. Greek is said to have been his favorite study; but the state of his health, and preparation for the bar, to which he was destined, prevented him from acquiring that nice and critical knowledge of the constructions of the language, on which alone any original inquiries into the history of the Hellenes can safely rest. His love of Greek never made up for his early loss of Greek, though it led him to abandon the profession of the law, and to adopt the wiser, as well as pleasanter course, of retiring to his paternal estate in Hampshire, marrying at the age of twenty-two, and diversifying his classical studies by having a large family of children. It happened, singularly enough, that during this retirement he held the commission of captain in the South Hampshire militia, in which Mr. Gibbon, the historian, was major. Captain Mitford and Major Gibbon amused the hours of leisure which their military duties permitted them, by conversations on ancient history, and by illustrations of the movements of the Grecian phalanx and the Roman legion, drawn from the manœuvres of the Hampshire militia. The Major advised the Captain to undertake the History of Greece. Such was the origin of Mitford's work; but, unfortunately for its permanent value, his defective Greek and excessive Toryism involved him in numerous misconstructions of words and misstatements of facts. Relying too much on Latin versions and perversions of Greek authors, he does wrong to their language, he treats with systematic injustice every man of the popular or patriotic party in the Greek republics, and lavishes all his sympathies upon those whom the consenting voices of the world have stigmatized as usurpers and tyrants. He paints in forbidding colors the greatest of popular orators, and his illustrious labors to save his sinking country from subjection to a foreign yoke; but Philip, the crafty autocrat of Macedon, and Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, are to him models of princely clemency and disinterested virtue. He wrote under the panic then created in Tory breasts by the French Revolution, which added fervor to his hatred of popular principles, and persuaded him to consider the Greek republics as awful beacons in the past, and the consequences of the principles which lay at the basis of their governments as affording terrific warnings against the revolutionary tendencies, which, starting from Paris, were shaking the nations of the earth to their centre. In this spirit, and aided by the comic genius of Aristophanes, he drew his picture of the Athenian Demos, as "changeful, angry, unjust, inconstant, yielding, clement, merciful, proud, boastful, humble, ferocious, and cowardly," *-as the many-headed monster painted by the satyrical pencil of Parrhasius. It must, however, be confessed, that, notwithstanding its grave and numerous faults, Mitford's work possesses some striking merits. Many of his political speculations are interesting and instructive; and there is something very animating in the rugged energy of his style, despite what Byron calls his "bad spelling." Another class of writers, exactly the opposite of Mitford, palliate the worst excesses of the Athenian democracy, as if Demos, like the king, could do no wrong. Sir Bulwer Lytton's unfinished History of Athens, with much scholarship, but a somewhat tawdry taste, and no very delicate appreciation of 1850.] Thirlwall's History. 297 Attic genius, is a specimen of this manner of treatment. His argument in defence of ostracism is an amusing illustration of the extremes to which finical theorists and dandy democrats can go. Notwithstanding the various merits of these several works, it is apparent that the history of Greece yet remained to be written in English literature. The Rev. Connop Thirlwall, already known as a classical scholar of high merits, who had studied history in the school of Niebuhr, but had subjected the skeptical tendency of that school to the control of English common sense, took up the task of supplying the deficiency. His work was published in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, the first volume appearing in 1835. The successive volumes were regularly published until the seventh, which came out in 1840, when two events threatened to interrupt its completion. The reverend editor of the Cabinet Cyclopædia, like Paris of old, "The hospitable board disgraced, and Mr. Thirlwall, according to a modern English custom, was made Bishop of St. David's, for his knowledge of Greek. The Doctor, having illustrated an old heroic myth, of course could do no more for history after he had "fled to Simoïs' leafy shore"; and it was feared that the scholar, translated to the bench of bishops, would scarcely find time, amidst the duties of his new position, to continue the literary employments which had gained him so deserved an honor. But the last volume happily appeared in 1844. As a writer, Thirlwall's merits are distinct and great. He has not the classical finish of Gillies, nor the graceful flow of Goldsmith; but he is a more accomplished master of style than Mitford, and is free from the overwrought intensity of Lytton. He writes like a man dealing honestly and earnestly with his subject, and intent on giving clear and unequivocal impressions of his meaning to the reader, who finds himself occupied with the interest of the subject, and not with the colors of the medium through which the image of it is conveyed. An honorable impartiality breathes in the spirit of the work; and at the same time we feel that the author sympathizes with every aspiration of man for liberty; that he believes in popular freedom, and is equally averse to the license |