444 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



" The Germans at Greek are sadly to seek." It must, indeed, have 

 been no ordinary enthusiasm that impelled a young man, under such 

 circumstances, to undertake what is perhaps the most thorough study 

 of the whole Greek literature — poets, historians, and philosophers — 

 ever accomplished by a self-educated man in modern times. It was 

 not, as has sometimes been thought, his parliamentary experience that 

 caused him to study the constitution of ancient Athens ; nine years 

 before he entered public life we find him preparing for his History 

 of Greece, the first volume of which, however, was not published 

 until 1846, twenty-three years later. The original research and the 

 profound learning which this work displayed, even in its earliest 

 volumes, testify to long years of hard and patient study. There is no 

 easy or short road to learning of this nature. In 1832, his literary 

 labors were interrupted by his election to the House of Commons as 

 member for the city of London. He remained in Parliament nine 

 years, and distinguished himself especially by what was called his " an- 

 nual motion " for the ballot. In his later years, when his favorite 

 scheme was brought into Parliament as a ministerial measure, he could 

 well afford to smile at the ridicule with which it was once greeted on 

 all sides. His public life delayed, perhaps fortunately, the publication 

 of his History. In the mean time, Thirlwall's " History of Greece " 

 appeared, which took an immense step in advance of the Tory views 

 of Mitford, but did not aim at such an overthrow of English opinions 

 and prejudices about Greek democracy as Grote contemplated. That 

 literary men, even out of England, were expecting Grote's History 

 with interest, appears from a letter of Niebuhr (who died in 1831), in 

 which he advised a friend to translate the coming work into German 

 as soon as it should be published. In the years 1846- 1856 were pub- 

 lished the twelve volumes of Grote's " History of Greece." Nine years 

 later was published his other important work, " Plato, and the other 

 Companions of Sokrates," in three volumes. If his History astonished 

 scholars by the intimate acquaintance of a self-educated man with the 

 Greek historians and poets, his Plato called forth new surprise, that a 

 man so pre-eminently practical as Mr. Grote, whose sober common-sense 

 was one of his great virtues as an historian, should prove equally fa- 

 miliar with the great idealist of antiquity, whose whole mode of thought 

 and reasoning was in constant conflict with his own. It often seems, 

 indeed, as if the pleasure of refuting the many absurd theories which 

 were current about Plato and his works made up to Mr. Grote for the 



