detail cares could not crush the scholar and author. Grote became an occasional contributor to periodical literature. He was a member of the Utilitarian Society of Philosophers and was wont to meet with them in a room donated the:n in his bank building. In 1825 he was one of the founders of the new University of London. In spite of the many other claims upon his time, he gave the university that unremitting attention to details necessary to its success. His business

experience and ability contributed largely to the raising of money and the organization of the enterprise.

Not until his fiftieth year was he free to enter upon continuous literary work. The first tvo volumes of his History of Greece appeared in 1845. The work was completed in 1856, when the author was sixty-two years old. Grote's long and successful working career, extending almost to the day of his death, has been attributed to the thoughtful provision made by his devoted wife for his rest and recreation outside working hours -a hint to bankers' wives!

The proverbial modesty of bankers was evinced by Grote, when in 1869 Premier Gladstone offered him a peerage as a tribute to his "character, services, and attainments." The heart of the old radical was warmed by this rec

ognition, but the honor was unhesitatingly declined.

Grote was a statesmanly historian, distinct from the rhetorician, the journalistic story-teller, or the chronicler. His experiences and observation in the British Parliament, coupled with his extensive banking experience, gave him a commanding view of the people whose development he laboriously followed. As one writer puts it, his "noble personality gives weight to his every sentence, as an athlete's whole frame and training goes into each blow he strikes.'

"The Death, Character and Work of Alexander the Great" is well chosen by critics as an illustration of the literary method and style of the historian of Greece. Grote vividly features the intense sorrow felt by Alexander for the death of his friend Hephæstian, his gloom intensified by omens of coming ills; the brutalizing feasts following the obsequies; his own reckless part in the revelry, followed by unmeasured indulgences which resulted in a fever that, despite all efforts and prayers for his relief, proved fatal.

C

XIII

CHARLES SPRAGUE

1791-1874

HARLES SPRAGUE was a first-class banker and a second-grade poet. But it

is no mean distinction to be ranked next in class to Bryant, Whittier, Longfellow and Lowell. Born in Boston near the close of the eighteenth century, he lived far on into the nineteenth. After receiving a common-school education, at an early age he entered a mercantile house. At the age of eighteen he was made teller of the State Bank of Boston. At twenty-one he engaged in business for himself. At twentythree he accepted the cashiership of the pioneer Globe bank of Boston, and for forty years thereafter he served in that capacity.

Like Halleck, he found his chief delight in versifying. In his time he was highly honored as an occasion poet and orator, and his verse was much admired and quoted. Many were the prophecies that his poetry would live. But, though his death occurred within the memory of men in middle life, the name of Charles Sprague is scarcely recalled by the present-day student of literature.