Born, at Clay Hill, Kent, 17 Nov. 1794. At school at Sevenoakes, June 1800 to 1804. At Charterhouse, 1804–10. Lived at home, 1810–20. Clerk in his father’s bank, 1810–16; partner, 1816–43. Married Harriet Lewin, 5 March 1820. Active part in promotion of London University, opened 1828; Mem. of Council, 1828–71. Contrib. to “Westminster Rev.,” 1826, 1843 and 1866; to “Spectator,” 1839 and 1847; to “Classical Museum,” 1844; to “Edinburgh Rev.,” 1856. Travelled on Continent, 1830. M.P. for City of London, Dec. 1831, Jan. 1835, and July 1837. Travelled in Italy, Oct. 1841 to spring of 1842. Retired from banking, 1843. F.G.S., 1843. Resided partly in London, partly at Burnham Beeches. Visit to Paris, 1844; to Switzerland, 1847. Mem. of Council of University Coll., 1850; Treasurer, 1860; President, 1868–71. Elected on Governing body of new University of London, 1850; Vice-Chancellor, 1862. Trustee of British Museum, 1859. D.C.L., Oxford, 1853. F.R.S., 1857. Correspondent of French Acad. of Moral and Political Sciences, 1857; Foreign Associate, 1864. Prof. of Ancient History to Royal Academy, 1859. Foreign Mem. of Institute of France, Feb. 1864. Refused Peerage, Nov. 1869. Died, in London, 18 June 1871; buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform,” 1821; “Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion” (under pseud. of Philip Beauchamp), 1822; “Essentials of Parliamentary Reform,” 1831; “History of Greece,” vols. i., ii., 1846; vols. iii., iv., 1847; vols. v., vi., 1848; vols. vii., viii., 1850; vols. ix., x., 1852; vol. xi., 1853; vol. xii., 1856; “Seven Letters on the Recent Politics of Switzerland” (from “Spectator”), 1847; “Plato’s Doctrine respecting the Rotation of the Earth,” 1860; “Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates,” 1865; Review of J. S. Mill’s “Examination of Hamilton” (from “Westminster Rev.”), 1868 [1867]. Posthumous: “Aristotle,” ed. by A. Bain and G. C. Robertson (2 vols.), 1872; “Poems” (priv. ptd.), 1872; “Minor Works,” ed. by A. Bain, 1873; “Posthumous Papers” (priv. ptd.), 1874; “Fragments on Ethical Subjects,” ed. by A. Bain, 1876. He edited: G. Waddington’s “History of the Reformation,” 1841; J. Mill’s “Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind,” 1869. Life: by Mrs. Grote, 1873.

Personal

  You are right as to Mrs. Grote; she is, and will be for ever, jealous of everybody who puts Grote into the shade. She ought, in truth, to be jealous of Grote, for he himself causes his own eclipse. If he would do anything, his reward in praise and esteem would be boundless.

  Mr. and Mrs. Grote have been staying here some days. She is very clever and very odd. Grote is a reasonable and reasoning Radical, with manners a little formal but very polished.

  He is very kind-hearted, and with most genuine, childlike simplicity of manner, not always found in company with such exuberant and accurate erudition as he possesses. Mrs. Grote is a character, very firm, decided, clever, accomplished, strong-minded, tall, and robust, whom Sydney Smith called the most gentleman-like of women. She is very droll in her dress, despising crinoline and flounces, and attiring herself, when going out for a walk, in a shawl thrown over her shoulders and tied round her waist, with a poplin gown reaching to the tops of her boots, a tall, brown, man’s hat, with a feather in it, and a stout walking-stick. She is the best company in the world, full of originality and humour, has seen and known every remarkable person in England and France, and is full of anecdotes about everybody and everything.

  Similarity of literary taste, study, and knowledge gained for Sir George Lewis the intimate friendship of George Grote. He valued Mr. Grote’s opinion and judgment so highly, that few, if any, of his pleasures exceeded that which he took in discussing with the learned historian of Greece, not only subjects connected with early history and philosophy, but likewise topics connected with politics and passing events. He had also great enjoyment in the society of Mrs. Grote, with whose varied and brilliant conversation he was always entertained.

  Unlike most persons who have the prospect of being rich by inheritance, he had, though actively engaged in the business of banking, devoted a great portion of time to philosophic studies; and his intimacy with my father did much to decide the character of the next stage in his mental progress. Him I often visited, and my conversations with him on political, moral, and philosophical subjects gave me, in addition to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure and benefit of sympathetic communion with a man of the high intellectual and moral eminence which his life and writings have since manifested to the world.

  The historian of Greece, one of the few serious English men of letters who has made his mark all the world over, within the past half century, was for many years indulgently kind to me. A more noble-hearted and accomplished gentleman than he who has departed full of years, and rich in honours, I have never seen. When the word “gentleman” is used, it is with express reference to that courtesy and consideration of manner which appears to me dying out of the world. Four men that I have known, the late Duc de Grâmont, the Duke of Ossuna, the late Duke of Beaufort, and Mr. Grote, in their high breeding and deference to women, in their instinctive avoidance of any topic or expression which could possibly give pain, recur to me as unparagoned.

  In the depths of his character there was a fund of sympathy, generosity, and self-denial, rarely equalled among men; on the exterior, his courtesy, affability, and delicate consideration of the feelings of others were indelibly impressed upon every beholder; yet this amiability of demeanour was never used to mislead, and in no case relaxed his determination for what he thought right. Punctual and exact in his engagements, he inspired a degree of confidence and respect which acted most beneficially on all the institutions and trusts that he took a share in administering, and his loss to them was a positive calamity.

  It was on the 7th of December, 1843, that I first met with George Grote, who, shaking off for the first time in thirty years the trammels of a banking house, had come to pass the winter in Italy. He was not yet known as a great historian, but as a strenuous advocate of parliamentary reform on the floor of St. Stephen’s, and a student who might one day tread boldly in the footprints of Niebuhr. He came well provided with letters, and among them were two to me…. I held at that time the office of United States consul, and the day on which Grote presented his letters was my reception day, or rather my reception evening, and I sent him a card. Evening came; the rooms were filling fast; the broken ice of the first half-hour was well-nigh melted; acquaintances were gathering in groups, and strangers casting about them for a face that they might have seen before, when Grote was announced. I can see him now,—a man somewhat above the common height, with the air and bearing of one accustomed to act and be acted upon by his fellow-men, and mind written all over his spacious brow. You felt at once that you were in the presence of a remarkable man…. I have often regretted that, though I passed a month in daily intercourse with Grote, I kept no record of his conversation; and I have regretted it all the more from the impression it made upon me at the time. He was not like Johnson, an over-whelming talker, nor like Macaulay, an eloquent talker, much less like Sydney Smith, a scintillating and brilliant talker; but he was an earnest and truth-loving talker, who made social intercourse a means of testing and elucidating his subject…. His manner corresponded with his matter,—calm, firm, and earnest; and though a frequent speaker in the House of Commons, he never put on the tone of a declaimer at the dinner table or an evening circle. His words were well chosen, neither elaborately Saxon, nor fastidiously Latin, but coming freely at his bidding from either source. The structure of his sentences was simple and direct, rising at times to eloquence under the inspiration of his deep convictions, but leaving something, perhaps, to desire in harmony and variety. He would seem, indeed, to have contented himself with a secondary place among pictorial historians, if he could but make for himself a sure place among the philosophers who have written history.

  After waiting two years in vain for his father’s consent, Harriet Lewin met George Grote one March morning, 1820, at a neighboring church, where they were married early enough for her to take her usual place at the breakfast-table…. Mr. Grote shared his wife’s tastes for poetry, painting and music, and even played the violoncello himself. They differed as to society, for he was both reserved and shy—she, as we have observed, neither, though awfully “stately,” while little known. But her character in this respect overbore his; for society, especially of clever men, gravitated towards both of them as by a natural law. The way in which the young couple affected each other was very remarkable. Each gave and took an education. He endowed her mind with a more solid basis, she fashioned, mounted, framed and glazed him. People would not have missed the profounder instruction he imparted to her; she would always have been deep enough, and more than brilliant enough for society, but without her he would have remained, socially, and in a publicly literary sense, almost unknown.

  Bishop Thirlwall was buried in Grote’s grave 3 Aug., 1875.

  Direct successors of the Grotes were still doing business in 1885 on the site of the original banking-house, on Threadneedle Street, corner of Bartholomew Lane.

  To courage and tenacity of intellectual purpose, with single-minded devotion to public ends, Grote joined an unfailing courtesy of nature and great dignity of demeanour. A certain shyness of manner was the outward token of an unaffected modesty that was beautiful to see in one whose work of its kind, for quantity and quality taken together, has never been surpassed. Consideration for others, on a full equality with self, was his guiding principle of action. It made him, as he was in private the most conscientious and methodical of workers, a man who could be absolutely relied upon in association, punctual and regular to a proverb in everything that he undertook with others, and scrupulously fair-minded in all his judgments. At the same time, under the calm exterior there lay, as those who knew him best were aware, enthusiasms and fires of passion which took all his strength of reason and will to control.

  The historian Grote and his wife also made our acquaintance. I especially remember her appearance because it was, and was allowed to be, somewhat grotesque. She was very tall and stout in proportion, and was dressed on this occasion [1843] in a dark-green or blue silk, with a necklace of pearls about her throat. I gathered from what I heard that hers was one of the marked personalities of that time in London society.

History of Greece, 1846–56

  Endeavour to become acquainted with Mr. Grote, who is engaged on a Greek History; he, too, will receive you well if you take him my regards. If you become better acquainted with him, it is worth your while to obtain the proof-sheets of his work, in order to translate it. I expect a great deal from this production, and I will get you a publisher here.

  You have, no doubt, been enjoying, as I have, Grote’s “History.” High as my expectations were of it, it has very much surpassed them all, and affords an earnest of something which has never been done for the subject either in our own or any other literature. It has afforded me some gratification to find that in the flood of new light which he has poured upon it his views do not appear greatly to diverge from mine on more than a few important points, and those of a special nature not involving any general principles. For though I am not yet satisfied with the limits he prescribes in his first volume to the investigations which occupy a part of mine, I think it would be found on a further analysis that the difference between us is not very material.

  I am reading Grote’s “History.” Wonderful it seems to me that a writer so fresh from the Attic, and particularly so conversant with Thucydides, should stand up to his chin among the greengrocery of Covent-garden! It would however be ungrateful to collect blemishes of language from an author to whom we are indebted for so much diligence and information, so much learning and wisdom.

  A decided liberal, perhaps even a republican, in politics, Mr. Grote has laboured to counteract the influence of Mitford in Grecian history, and 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 combination, which are worthy of the very highest praise, and have secured for him a lasting place among the historians of modern Europe.

  Has penetrated more deeply than any writer of any country, into all the depths of the ancient philosophy. Others may have equalled him in descriptions of the heroism with which the Greeks, under Leonidas and Themistocles, repelled the invasion of the Persian monarch at Thermopylæ and Salamis, and retaliated it by the overthrow of his descendent at Issus and Arbela; or of the more painful contest when Athenians and Spartans turned their fratricidal arms against each other, and when the intestine strife of rival factions laid the greater nation prostrate at the mercy of its rival, and a way was thus prepared for the supremacy over both of a northern people who in the days of Xerxes were hardly acknowledged to be Greeks. But the teachings of philosophy are of wider and more enduring influence than the triumphs of the warrior; and in a judicious appreciation, in a clear and eloquent explanation, of the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle, of their diversity, and of their value, not only to the Athenians of their own day, but to the people of all other countries and of all subsequent generations, no one has approached Mr. Grote.

  Mr. Grote possessed that essential quality of a historian—the historical or narrative interest. In school days he devoured novels; in later life the place of these was taken by histories and biographies relating to every nation and time. He felt and avowed the still more peculiar interest in the process of growth or evolution, whether in political institutions, in literature, or in philosophy and science. The historical taste was thus with him a very wide and mixed susceptibility, and his narrative compositions became correspondingly varied in their interest. His earnest devotion to mental science, in all departments—psychology, ethics, metaphysics, and logic—had no small share in the characteristic excellencies of his historical compositions.

  I have understood that it was at the suggestion of Mr. James Mill, that Mr. Grote first thought of writing his History; and there seems to be no doubt that it was partly through the influence of Mr. James Mill, and of the other followers of Bentham (who is said to have called poetry “misrepresentation in verse”), that Mr. Grote laboured to repress his naturally strong imaginative faculty, and wrote in a style clear and forcible, but studiously unadorned. It was, perhaps, partly owing to this circumstance that he, as I have said, preferred the simple but rather unformed and diffuse style of Buckle to the style of Macaulay.

  So much research and sound thinking had resulted in an achievement which set the author at once in the front rank of modern historians.

  As a scholar, Thirlwall was Grote’s superior. He equalled Grote in knowledge and probably surpassed him in judgment. The Bishop further possessed a greater command of style than his rival, who though a forcible is always an awkward and occasionally an incorrect writer. Grote, nevertheless, as the Bishop had the singular generosity both to see and admit, produced a work which has permanently thrown Dr. Thirlwall’s meritorious labors into the shade. The cause of this is that Grote, with some defects, shows a force or grasp and above all an originality of mind and boldness of conception quite foreign to the somewhat episcopal caution of the Bishop’s intellect. But this boldness in speculation is due, if in part to nature, in great measure also to the philosophy of James Mill, which taught his pupils not to be overawed by received opinions…. Grote’s success at least is due above all things to the intellectual boldness which, while it did not lead him to waste his strength on the maintenance of unprofitable paradoxes, enabled him to look at the waste of the past with his own eyes unblinded by traditional phrases or prejudices sanctioned by a weight of high authority.

  Grote was a man of extraordinary attainments, and an earnest lover of truth. His style is excellent, and his work on Greece ranks with Gibbon’s classical work on Rome.

  Grote’s learning, sagacity, candour, and perfect mastery over his materials give his work a place among the very few great histories which England has produced. But its literary execution is by no means first-rate; he never seems to have realised that prose composition is an art.

  No one of the great historical works produced in the course of this century has received more general or more hearty commendation than has the work of Grote. It possesses nearly every quality of an historical work of the very highest order of merit. In extent of learning, in variety of research, in power of combination, in familiarity with the byways as well as the highways of Grecian literature, it leaves nothing whatever to be desired. Almost the only regret one feels in making use of this noble work is that the author never acquired a mastery of an easy, correct, and graceful English style. His sentences are often involved and awkward, and sometimes obscure and ungrammatical. This, to be sure, is a small drawback, when placed in comparison with the great merits of the work; but it is sufficient to drive many readers from its pages.

  Grote’s “History of Greece” is undoubtedly a work of considerable value, though lacking the literary merit which we find in that of Thirlwall. It is an extraordinarily elaborate work, which contains perhaps all that can be said—or could be said then—on its subject, and enters at great length upon many matters, apparently of detail, which less careful historians are apt to slur over. Though we cannot say that it contains nothing but information, there can certainly be little complaint as to anything being left out, and to the student, whose interest in history is limited to facts, there is much to be learned from Grote. It may be said that he occasionally is too exact in following the ancient historians; his account of the Athenian expedition against Syracuse and the earlier years of the Peloponnesian war generally, being little more than a translation from Thucydides, including even the imaginary speeches put by that great historian into the mouths of the various statesmen and embassadors of his period. As a literary work, the prolix and tedious history can hardly be said to have any merit.

  Grote’s history displays immense painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a “party pamphlet” as Macaulay’s own, the advocate’s client being in this case not merely the Athenian democracy, but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student’s eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.

  Though wanting alike in the style and the scholarship of Thirlwall’s history, and too often declining in its political disquisitions to the level of a mere Radical pamphlet, yet by the animation and graphic power of its narrative deserved at least some measure of the popularity which it obtained.

  Grote’s history is a book of high educational value. In it we have all that is best in Herodotus, Thucydides, and the other ancient historians, added to the sound and weighty judgment of a clear-sighted modern critic, exceptionally free from the erroneous impressions which had so long prevailed as to the real character of the Athenian democracy, and we cannot find elsewhere a truer or juster picture of Athens at the height of her power.

  Grote’s style is heavy and ungainly. He plods along, correct as a rule, but uninspiring and unattractive. He is similarly clumsy in the use of materials. Skillful selection might have appreciably shortened his history; but Grote rarely prunes with sufficient severity, and often he does not prune at all. His habit of pouring out the whole mass of his material in the shape of notes lightens the labour of his successors, but injures his own work as an artistic history. Nevertheless, though Grote had no genius, and nothing that deserves to be called a style, his “History of Greece” holds the field. It does so because of its solidity and conscientious thoroughness, because of its patient investigation of the origin and meaning of institutions, and because its very faults were, after all, faults which sprang from sympathy. Grote was the first who did full justice to the Athenian people; and he may be pardoned if he sometimes did them more than justice.

  The language is unequal; passages of great beauty are closely followed by others that are dull and wearisome.

Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates, 1865

  The most entertaining of all that he has written. And the subject is worthy of him. The history of no mere man that the world has seen is equal to that of the little stonemason figure-cutter of Athens who used to ask questions. The noble galaxy of great spirits who surrounded him—Plato, Xenophon, Critias, Crito, each a king of men—was only fitted to be crowned by the philosophical monarch, who died as he would have slept, the chief actor in a tragedy without the strut of the tragedian, the victim in a martyrdom without the song and crown of the martyr. We need not recommend Mr. Grote’s work, but we will urge our readers to get it. If they want to get rid of contemporary nonsense, and to clear their minds of cant, while they fill them with great and sublime images, they should read of Plato and Socrates in the pages of Grote.

  Grote’s work is rich in suggestion and instruction; the author of the “History of Greece” maintains here his masterly superiority in historical presentation, but his acceptance as genuine of all the dialogues accredited by Thrasyllus has caused him to lose sight of the essential unity present in Plato’s thought and works, and to admit in its stead a multifariousness abounding in change and contradiction.

  It is, necessarily, a less popular and less widely-known work than its predecessor; but has an equal if not a superior value, as a permanent addition to literature; for, while history teaches affairs by examples, the results of all profound philosophical thought must, more or less, aid in the solution of the deepest and gravest problems which affect humanity. The felicities of Grote’s style have done much to lighten the abstract tenor of the instruction conveyed by the “Plato;” he seems equally at home in the soberly-lighted porch of the Stoics, and among the revels of Olympus, and the shows at Corinth; and comprehends equally the value to all mankind of a Platonic aphorism, and the significance of Mercury’s or Vulcan’s godlike attributes. The intellectual activity and results of the Socratic age, the previous preparation in the Greek commonwealth for the advent of this remarkable school, and its influence upon that country at periods remotely subsequent, are clearly comprehended by Grote, who gives to his exposition a profoundly critical discrimination and analysis, which are of especial value to the reader who is not already familiar with the subject.

General

  The first of living historians.

  The accomplished historian of Greece, and the one-sided interpreter of Plato.

  Mr. Grote’s history of Greece is indeed a monumental piece of work. It has all that patience and exhaustive care which principally mark the German historians, and it has an earnestness which is not to be found generally in the representatives of what Carlyle has called the Dryasdust school. Grote threw himself completely into the life and the politics of Athens. It was said of him with some truth that he entered so thoroughly into all the political life of Greece as to become now and then the partisan of this or that public man. His own practical acquaintance with politics was undoubtedly of great service to him. We have all grown somewhat tired of hearing the words of Gibbon quoted in which he tells us that “the discipline and evolutions of a modern battalion gave me a clearer notion of the phalanx and the legion; and the captain of the Hampshire Grenadiers (the reader may smile) has not been useless to the historian of the Roman Empire.” Assuredly the practical knowledge of politics which Grote acquired during the nine or ten years of his Parliamentary career was of much service to the historian of Greece. It has been said indeed of him that he never could quite keep from regarding the struggles of parties in Athens as exactly illustrating the principles disputed between the Liberals and the Tories in England. It does not seem to us, however, that his political career affected his historical studies in any way, but by throwing greater vitality and nervousness into his descriptions of Athenian controversies. The difference between a man who has mingled anywhere in the active life of politics, and one who only knows that life from books and the talk of others, is specially likely to show itself in such a study as Grote’s history. His political training enabled Grote to see in the statesmen and soldiers of the Greek peoples men and not trees walking. It taught him how to make the dry bones live. Mr. Grote began life as what would have been called in later years a Philosophical Radical. He was a close friend of Stuart Mill, although he did not always agree with Mill in his opinions.

  Mr. Grote must be pronounced, therefore, more of a Millite than John Stuart Mill himself. His attitude in the well-known controversy as to the Chair of Logic in University College in 1866, when Dr. James Martineau was a candidate, and was defeated almost entirely by his influence, is an unpleasant illustration of the same extreme tendency. The event is not one on which we are called to dwell; but it is highly significant, as showing how thoroughly so great an intellect can shut out all the influence of higher religious speculation, and intrench itself with undeviating complacency within the narrowest limits on so great a subject. This very intensity of negative dogmatism made Grote, to some extent, a power in his time even in relation to religion; it is the warrant of our touching his career at all in a manner in which we would rather have refrained from doing, seeing how great a figure he is otherwise. But the limits within which he confined his mind on this subject prove sufficiently that he was not, in any real sense, a teacher, and he can hardly be said to have exercised any definite influence on the development of religious thought.

  Grote poured forth the precious contents of his portentous note-books with as little care for rhythm and as little sense of proportion as a German professor.

  In scope and conception all is admirable, but Grote’s attitude is too confident, the very assurance of his knowledge in itself begets indefinable suspicions. The arguments are too good, the causes of things too abundantly evident, and despite the clearness of atmosphere we are not inclined to believe that the last secrets of the Hellenic temper and genius are presented to us in these pat conclusions of a disciple of Bentham. Were his reputation now in the balance, to part from so indefatigable a worker, and, despite his limitations, so strong a thinker and writer, with no word of praise, would be scant courtesy, and scanter appreciation. But we have passed in our intellectual development the point at which Grote, like his fellow-historian Macaulay, was an inspiring force, and no discriminating estimate could assign him the rank among Englishmen which he held among his contemporaries. Rhetoric has lost its ancient charm, we are no longer enamoured of logical vigour, unaccompanied by imaginative insight, or of style that lacks the light and shade everywhere present in nature…. Indisputably, history was the field of Grote’s best work, his equipment as historian embraced not a few of the essential qualities; a fresh and real interest in life, its colour, breadth, and variety, a true instinct for narrative, an impartial judgment, the patience of the student, and the knowledge of the man of affairs. A little more, and he might have been a great man; as it is, we can only say, that he is a commanding figure in the history of English scholarship.