ART. X. The Personal Life of George Grote, compiled from family documents, private memoranda, and original letters to and from various friends. By Mrs. GROTE. London: 8vo. 1873. RECOLLECTIONS of the early life, personal tastes, and domestic habits of eminent men are the flowers of biography. We possess their works; we know the public actions which are the fruit of their lives; but the more these are esteemed and admired, the more do we desire a closer intimacy with the men themselves. What page in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' is so welcome and so familiar as the sentence of his own Memoirs in which Gibbon relates his campaign with the Hampshire militia, or transports you in the serene moonlight to his garden at Lausanne on the completion of an imperishable work? The 'Confessions' of Rousseau, with all their faults, will be read long after the Emile' and the 'Nouvelle Héloise' gather dust upon the shelves; and if we had to choose between the Orations of Cicero and his Letters, we should prefer, without hesitation, that correspondence which, with all the life and noise of Rome, brings back to us the grace and playfulness of private friendship. It is only by the men themselves, or by those who have shared in the completest intimacy of their lives, that such details can be preserved. In the three instances we have named, it is mainly due to their own vanity that we know so much about them. The noblest natures in the world are commonly the least understood by posterity, because, silent themselves, there was no one else who could break that silence. Even in an age when biography has become a disease of literature, and every Knight of the Bath must have his memorial, we remain as ignorant as ever of the only things we really care to know-the history of mind and character, the growth and influence of affections, the culture of tastes, and the accidents to which so many of the results of life may be traced. The widow of George Grote was singularly qualified to supply these desiderata in the personal life of her gifted husband. Fifty-two years of married existence had been spent by them in unbroken union. The talents, energy, and ambition of Mrs. Grote fitted her in an extraordinary degree to share the pursuits of her partner, though these lay in severe application to business, in a struggle for political ascendancy, and in a lifelong devotion to a great monument of classical history. Perhaps it may hereafter devolve upon some other pen to record the life of the historian of Greece more fully as a politician and a scholar; but Mrs. Grote has accomplished in her eightieth year what no one else could have attempted; she has shown us with what incomparable steadiness of application, this young London banker persevered in the course he had the courage to conceive, until, without neglecting any one of the ordinary duties of his calling in life, he rose to be the most conspicuous member of an important political party in Parliament, and to leave a name unsurpassed by any in English historical literature. 4 There was in Mr. Grote so genuine a simplicity of character-so entire an absence of pretension and display-that one might live with him for years without discovering that he was really engaged in the active prosecution of some of the greatest works of the time. He took an eager and influential▾ part in politics without aspiring to the rank or emoluments of office; he devoted his life to a great historical work without an ardent thirst for literary fame. The distinctions which these performances did eventually obtain for him, seemed to take him by surprise. At his bank, at the University of London, at the British Museum, in the House of Commons, in his study, he thought only of what was to be done; all was substance, nothing surface-esse quam videri should have been his motto. This equable and unselfish temperament was, doubtless, the source of that old and never-failing courtesy which gave to his manners so peculiar a charm. If there was something of stateliness about him, it was ever ready to relax into kindness; and in one thing he was absolutely singular, that although on many subjects his own convictions were intense and exclusive, he was never betrayed into the slightest mark of asperity or intolerance towards those from whom he differed. Nor was he wanting in that best of faculties, that of unbending from the serious pursuits and duties of life, and plunging with equal interest into its minor pastimes. His friend Lewis used to say that life would be tolerable but for its amusements; but to Grote almost every occupation was an amusement and every amusement a pleasure. A gallop through Burnham Beeches or across the Surrey downs on his favourite mare, a quartett of Beethoven, a game of billiards or of whist, the last new opera or even ballet, a dinner at The Club,' or a ramble by the Loire and the Seine, all awakened the same sense of hearty, though temperate enjoyment. Yet above all these pleasures he would have placed discussion on matters of opinion with those whose principles of philosophy agreed in the main with his own, and the exchange of the results of the highest classical criticism. The very last time we had the happiness to see him, he discussed with singular animation an article on the 'Chorizontes," which had then recently appeared in this Journal, as if the date and authorship of the Homeric poems were, after all, problems which gave an interest to human life. If it be true that Judæa and Hellas represent the two ideas or influences which have swayed for two thousand years, in opposite directions, the mind and culture of the human race, it is certain that the Muse of Solyma' was not the tutelary spirit of Mr. Grote. The spiritual, the mysterious, the infinite had to his ear no voice, to his intellect no charm. But the clear and distinct forms of Greek art, the graceful reproduction of the powers of nature, the practical tendency of Greek political life, and the conclusions of the Epicurean school of Greek philosophy, found in Mr. Grote a cordial admirer and a willing disciple. For in him, as in many other philosophic minds, there was a living spring of sensibility and passion which unconsciously governed his researches and his reason; and he was so much the creature of his own tastes and associations, that his feelings operated on his judgments more largely than he himself supposed. But whatever may have been the good fortune of his later years, his boyhood and youth were passed in a very different school. His grandfather, Andrew Grote, had come over from Bremen to London, married in England, and established in 1766 the well-known banking-house of Grote, Prescott, and Company. Mr. George Grote, the eldest child of Andrew Grote by a second marriage, was the father of the historian. He was educated, like his more illustrious son, at the Charter House, and afterwards sent abroad to study and travel till the age of 21, with more liberality than he afterwards showed to his own family. This gentleman married a daughter of Dr. Peckwell, one of the Countess of Huntingdon's chaplains, who brought a very strong cast of Evangelical opinions into the family, and he succeeded in due time to the management of the bank in Threadneedle Street. This memoir brings vividly before us, by a few expressive but not ill-natured touches, the character and habits of these worthy but unamiable people. The strict discipline of parental authority and filial duty, a harsh and ascetic form of religious belief, the abhorrence of innocent amusements, the love of unprovoked restraint, rendered the early life of two generations back a very different thing from what it now is; though we are not sure that these disagreeable and galling restrictions did not contribute to form characters of more strength and endurance than the laxity and indulgence of modern times. In George Grote they obviously produced an intense aversion for the whole system under which he had been educated, and a sense of positive wrong which he never shook off. The iron had entered into his soul, and the repulsive form of authority to which he had been subjected in early life, gave an irresistible impulse to his thoughts and feelings in the opposite direction. His school-life at the Charter House lasted only six years, from the age of ten to sixteen. The Waddingtons, the present Bishop of St. David's, afterwards his rival in Greek history, Havelock the soldier and Cresswell the Judge, were among his schoolfellows: but with the utmost respect for the scholarship and powers of tuition of Dr. Raine, then head master, we are utterly at a loss to conceive by what process a lad, who left school at sixteen, never went to college, and was at once chained down to the desk of a banking-house, could have acquired the vast and accurate scholarship which distinguished Mr. Grote. For with strong leanings to intellectual culture of the highest order, he stuck to the drudgery of his bank for two and thirty years, even so much as to accompany the 'walk clerk' with the bills for presentation, and attend in the City to lock up the safe. But whilst he performed these duties with unremitting diligence, living on a comparatively small income, in the City or in a north-eastern suburb of London, he entered upon a course of classical and philosophical reading of extraordinary extent and profundity, and he mastered three modern languages. He was necessarily a self-educated man, and his studies were carried on with scanty time and opportunities, no leisure, no good society, no encouragement. The natural bent of his mind to philosophy and letters must have been irresistible: but the result fills us with amazement. 'George Grote's letters to his friends teem with lamentations over the wearisome obligations to which his father subjected him, in the shape of stupid evenings passed in Threadneedle Street with the City friends, over the bottle, &c. His Diaries, up to 1820, reveal similar complaints. "My studies on other subjects have not lately been so regular as they might have been. A routine of business which stupefies the mind (affigit humi divinæ particulam aura), and engagements, if possible, more stupid still, fill up nearly the whole measure of my occupations. A numerous family and the present artificial state of society absolutely imprison me to such an extent, that I can enjoy but very little solitude. And it is dull and wretched to the last degree to a mind which has a glimpse of a nobler sphere of action, to witness the total exclusion of intellect which disgraces general con versation. "O miseras hominum mentes! O pectora cœca! "In my present frame of mind I could preach for hours on the subject of those noble lines of Lucretius."-Extract from letter to G. W. Norman, April, 1817. 'With George W. Norman he kept up a steady intellectual and intimate intercourse, and the advantage of such a companion at the age when the character is forming cannot be too highly estimated. They read books in common, chiefly on historical and political subjects, and they both applied themselves seriously to the science of Political Economy, then coming into something like "vogue among the rising generation, as being a proper object of study. 'Presently, another companion became the sharer of these pursuits, viz., Mr. Charles Cameron, son of the ex-Governor of the Bahamas and of Lady Margaret Cameron, daughter of the Earl of Errol. He lived a good deal with his family (they residing in the neighbourhood of Bromley), though he himself was studying for the English Bar. Charles Cameron's mind was at once vigorous and subtle, delighting in dialectic exercise, wherein he excelled as a disputant, for he was much given to the study of mental science generally. The intercourse with this young man, of nearly the same age as himself (perhaps a year or two older), which George Grote maintained, as well in London as in Kent, served to whet his relish for intellectual labour, whilst the searching analytic turn of Cameron's mind led his friend into that channel of inquiry which almost inevitably conducts the traveller beyond the limits of orthodoxy. Metaphysics now took hold of Grote with considerable fervour, and, between discussions and study, the three friends advanced far in their acquaintance with this tempting branch of knowledge. 'Grote's mind had, from the beginning, a pronounced tendency to the poetic and imaginative vein. Norman was not without a certain sympathy for the sentimental class of literature, and he encouraged Grote in his faculty of poetical composition, which, at this period, really was incontestable. 'Cameron, however, acted more strongly upon the sterner qualities of his friend's intellect, and his example and conversation rather served to exalt the severer exercises in his esteem, whilst they insensibly damped the literary and sentimental cast of his thought and fancy. Cameron thus conducted Grote, as it were a stage, on the great path of development, both of character and objects of study.' Two important events soon befell George Grote which exercised a decisive influence over his life. The first was the attachment he formed in 1815 for Miss Harriet Lewin, the daughter of a neighbouring Kentish country gentleman, which, after a certain amount of romance, treachery on the part of rivals, and obduracy on the part of close-fisted parents, ended in 1820 in a union of singular congeniality and happiness. It is difficult to speak of the accomplished and venerable authoress |