Lord Mahon's excellent "History of the War of the Succession in Spain" leaves the same general impression on the mind of the reader as to the effect of that war on the Spanish character, that is left by the contemporary accounts of it. It is, no doubt, the true one.-TICKNOR, GEORGE, 1849, History of Spanish Literature, Period ii, ch. i, note. An accurate, calmly-tempered, and attractive history, will be found in Lord Mahon's "History of England" during an important part of the last century.-REED, HENRY, 1850-55, Lectures on English Literature, p. 259. We are not going to comment on these agreeable volumes at large. We have read them with great interest and enjoyment;not with satisfaction; that is more than we can say. . . . Lord Mahon is not only an upright historian, but a writer, in the main, competent and accomplished for his work. If he makes no parade of philosophical disquisition, his exhibition of events and actors is such that the reader easily gets at the lessons, with the added pleasure of seeming to make them his own discovery. His style is perspicuous and flowing. Though not distinguished by vigor or grace, it gets over the ground evenly, and with speed enough, without Gibbon's stilts, or the grand and lofty tumbling of Carlyle. It has the great merit of a flexibility which makes it equal to dignified narrative, and which, at the same time, permits the introduction, without abruptness or jar, of personal anecdotes and illustrations of a lighter character.-PALFREY, JOHN GORHAM, 1852, Lord Mahon's History of England, North American Review, vol. 75, p. 125. Lord Mahon has brought to the arduous task of continuing Hume's "History" through the eighteenth century, the taste of a scholar, the liberality of a gentleman, and the industry of an antiquarian.-ALISON, SIR ARCHIBALD, 1853, History of Europe, 1815-1852, ch. v. There is no work that can be more safely put in the hands of the American historical student than Lord Mahon's, not only for its tolerant and philosophic views of English affairs, but as enabling a reasonable American to feel and understand how his own history appears to a generous and friendly foreign observer. Such a process is very salutary in this self-compiacent meridian. Lord Stanhope's "Life of Mr. Pitt" has both the excellences and the defects which we should expect from him, and neither of them are what we expect in a great historical writer of the present age. . . . He is not anxious to be original. He travels if possible in the worn track of previous historians; he tells a plain tale in an easy plain way; he shrinks from wonderful novelties; with the cautious skepticism of true commonsense, he is always glad to find that the conclusions at which he arrives coincide with those of former inquirers. His style is characteristic of his matter: he narrates with a gentle sense and languid accuracy, very different from the stimulating rhetoric and exciting brilliancy of his more renowned contemporaries.-BAGEHOT, WALTER, 1861, William Pitt, Works, ed. Morgan, vol. III, p. 123. Earl Stanhope has written from the best materials a most interesting biography of the younger Pitt, with whom he was connected by family ties, by sentiments of gratitude, and by the affinities of political principles; yet he has not hesitated to expose the very grave defects in his character and conduct, and has obtained approbation for candor.-BANCROFT, GEORGE, 1867, Joseph Reed: A Historical Essay. Always writes with dignity and elegance, and inspires confidence in his candor if he does not transport the reader with enthusiasm for his brilliancy.-PORTER, NOAH, 1870, Books and Reading, p. 183. Lord Mahon is a zealous investigator, and a clear and impartial writer. His "History of England" contains an able account, -the best, perhaps, yet written by one not a native,-of the American War of Independence. Unfortunately, however, it involved him in two disputes with American historians. He had charged Sparks with altering Washington's letters, and also with adding matter not contained in them. This charge was indignantly repelled and refuted, and was subsequently withdrawn by Lord Mahon himself. He had also characterized the execution of André as a "blot" upon Washington's career. This led to an exhaustive investigation of the entire subject by Major Charles Biddle of Philadelphia, who showed conclusively "that Washington had no alternative; the prisoner was regularly tried before the proper tribunal, and received the fate which he had incurred."-HART, JOHN S., 1872, A Manual of English Literature, p. 571. The very titles of most of Lord Stanhope's works are enough to show that the writer was totally devoid of enthusiasm. What he brought to his work were the qualities of calm sense and clear judgment, together with a thorough love of truth for its own sake. No one will probably even rise from the perusal of his history, or of the life of Pitt, which is properly its continuation, with a sense that he has gained any clear insight into the inner life of the times of which they treat. But neither will anyone have cause to complain that his feet have been entangled in the meshes of paradox, or that he has been beguiled with party politics under the name of history. The external facts will have been set clearly before the reader, and it will be for him to interpret the riddle as best he can.-GAR DINER, SAMUEL RAWSON, 1876, Earl Stanhope, The Academy, Vol. 9, p. 9. The sympathies of Stanhope are with the Tories, and are therefore the very opposite of those of Macaulay. In point of style, too, the works are very dissimilar. Stanhope has shown great diligence in examining authorities, good judgment in weighing testimony, and great impartiality in estimating characters; but in the presentation of his results he is quite devoid of that literary skill which made his predecessor so famous. The style, though generally perspicuous, is formal and stiff, sometimes even incorrect. -ADAMS, CHARLES KENDALL, 1882, A Manual of Historical Literature, p. 465. Was an active historical writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair though not very distinguished style. SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 246. He does not reach distinction either of thought or style.-WALKER, HUGH, 1897, The Age of Tennyson, p. 142. George Finlay 1799-1875 An English historian of the first rank; born in Faversham, Kent, of Scotch blood, Dec. 21, 1799; died in Athens, Greece, Jan. 26, 1875. An ardent Philhellene, he joined Byron's company at Missolonghi in 1823 to assist in liberating Greece from the Turks; and ended by residing there permanently,-at first a cultivator, and then a student of and writer of Greek history. He was for many years the Athens correspondent of the London Times. His "Greece under the Romans, B. C. 146 to A. D. 717" (1844) raised him at once to a place among the few foremost historians: Edward A. Freeman declared it to be the most truly original historical work of modern times; and for sound broad humanity, acute judgment, and luminous common-sense on both the practical and the philosophic sides of history, it has few equals of any age. It is not in the form of detailed annals except in the last part, most of it being a set of essays on the political and social conditions of Greece as a subject province. Succeeding volumes carried the story more in detail down to modern times, ending with two volumes on the Greek Revolution. The whole, revised and some volumes wholly rewritten by the author, was published posthumously in 7 vols. (1877).—WARNER, CHARLES DUDLEY, ed. 1897, Library of the World's Best Literature, Biographical Dictionary, vol. XXIX, p. 189. PERSONAL Of Mr. Finlay it may be said that though he passed a lifetime in the Levant, he never became a Levantine. He was every inch an English gentleman from the beginning to the end, and his loss will be deeply felt by all of his countrymen who have had the advantage of enjoying at Athens his genial hospitality and instructive society.-NEWTON, SIR CHARLES T., 1875, Recollections of Mr. Finlay, The Academy, vol. 7, p. 167. The world is said to know nothing of its greatest men, and certainly the Times seems to know very little of its greatest Correspondent. A man of whom Great Britain may well be proud has passed away in a distant land, and the greatest British newspaper, a paper which had been often honoured with his contributions, a paper commonly so ready with long biographies of every man of the smallest eminence, can give him only a few lines of small print without so much as the heading of his name. No one will grudge to the memory either of Mr. Kingsley or of Lord St. Leonards the full recognition which they have met with; but the most truly original historian of our time and language might surely claim a place alongside of the novelist and the lawyer.-FREEMAN, EDWARD AUGUSTUS, 1875, Mr. Finlay, The Saturday Review, vol. 39, p. 174. His unfortunate investment had at least the good results of compelling his continual residence in the country, with which he became most thoroughly acquainted, and of stimulating his perception of the evils which, in the past as in the present, have deteriorated the Greek character and injured the credit and prosperity of the nation. The publication of his great series of histories commenced in 1844, and was completed in 1861, when he wrote the autobiographical fragment which is almost the sole authority for his life. His correspondence is lost or inaccessible, and, notwithstanding his courteous hospitality, acknowledged by many travellers, little more seems to be known of his life in Greece than his constant endeavours to benefit the country by good advice, sometimes expressed in language of excessive if excusable acerbity, but which, if little followed, was never resented by the objects of it. GARNETT, RICHARD, 1889, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XIX, p. 30. GENERAL It could hardly be said of his account of Greek politicians that he was "to their virtues very kind, and to their faults a little blind." He told the truth about Greece fearlessly, and with no tinge of partisanship, and it is to the credit of the nation that they appreciated his impartiality; and all through their many political vicissitudes respected the one foreigner who, living in their midst, had the courage to tell them of their faults.-NEWTON, SIR CHARLES T., 1875, Recollections of Mr. Finlay, The Academy, vol. 7, p. 167. Different in every respect as were the two men in position and temper and line of study, far more widely-spread as the fame of the one is than the fame of the other, still he who wishes to master the history of the Greek nation as a whole can as little dispense with Mr. Finlay as he can with Mr. Grote. And it does kindle a certain feeling of indignation when we find the memory of such a man so unworthily dealt with in the quarter where he ought to have met with most honour. . . . He has left his mark on the historical learning of the age. It is easy to point out faults in his writings. It is plain that they would in some respects have gained if, instead of being written at Athens, they had been written in London, at Oxford, or at Göttingen. But we believe that by such an exchange they would have lost far more than they would have gained. Mr. Finlay was not, in his earlier life, a man of the closet. He went out to Greece to fight; he stayed there to till the ground. He was led to study and to write history in order to explain what he saw in the processes of fighting and tilling the ground. He saw that the phenomena of modern Greece could be understood only by going back to that stage in Grecian history when Greece, from one point of view, might be said to be conquered, while from another point of view she might be said to begin her own work of conquest. . . . This wide grasp of one side of his subject, of the side with which he was immediately concerned, would have been ill exchanged for any improvements in form and manner which his work would probably have gained had it been done in a Western capital or a Western university. As a contribution to the general history of the Greek nation, as a protest against those who would end Greek history with the fight of Chairôneia or with the burning of Corinth, Mr. Finlay's "History" marks an epoch. It is quite possible that some one else may tell the tale in some respects better, but it is Mr. Finlay who first showed that there was any tale to tell at all. And his works are hardly less valuable from the Roman than from the Greek side. No one after him, save the most ignorant and thoughtless, can babble any more about "Greeks of the Lower Empire." He sets before us the true nature and importance of that great and abiding power of the Eastern Rome on which the men of the eleventh century still looked with awe and wonder.-FREEMAN, EDWARD AUGUSTUS, 1875, Mr. Finlay, The Saturday Review, vol. 39, pp. 174. 175. Finlay was almost the first to point out the permanence of the Greek local institutions, and his legal training and knowledge of political economy enabled him to seize the really important points in the history of the people of Eastern Europe, where others have merely given us personal anecdotes of the rulers. The political and social lessons to be learnt from the history of the Greeks during two thousand years of servitude are perhaps not less than those which we gain from Grote's sympathetic account of the rise and glory of ancient Hellas.-BOASE, CHARLES WILLIAM, 1878, Finlay's History of Greece, The Academy, vol. 13, p. 135. It is no empty compliment to compare this work with that of the historian of the "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." While some of the qualifications of Gibbon are notably absent, others that Gibbon did not possess are conspicuously present. The author carried on his investigations in the very heart of the country whose turbulent vicissitudes he describes. Spending a large portion of his life in his library, immediately beneath the Acropolis, he had the good fortune not only to complete his great work, but also to subject it to such careful revision as the criticism of recent scholarship had made necessary. The most prominent characteristics of the work are learning, accuracy, and fidelity. In addition, it may be said that the author is severely critical. . . . As a help to those who would become acquainted with the history of the East, these learned and eloquent volumes have no equals. They are worthy to stand by the side of those of Grote.-ADAMS, CHARLES KENDALL, 1882, A Manual of Historical Literature, pp. 102, 103. Finlay is a great historian of the type of Polybius, Procopius, and Machiavelli, a man of affairs, who has qualified himself for treating of public transactions by sharing in them, a soldier, a statesman, and an economist. He is not picturesque or eloquent, or a master of the delineation of character, but a singular charm attaches to his pages from the perpetual consciousness of contact with a vigorous intelligence. In the latter portion of his work he speaks with the authority of an acute, though not entirely dispassionate, eye-witness; in the earlier and more extensive portion it is his great glory to have shown how interesting the history of an age of slavery may be made and how much Gibbon had left undone. Gibbon, as his plan requires, exhibits the superficial aspects of the period in a grand panorama; Finlay plunges beneath the surface, and brings to light a wealth of social particulars of which the mere reader of Gibbon could have no notion. This being Finlay's special department, it is the more to his praise that he has not smothered his story beneath erudition. He may, indeed, even appear at a disadvantage beside the Germans as regards extent and profundity of research, but this inferiority is more than compensated by the advantages incidental. to his prolonged residence in the country.GARNETT, RICHARD, 1889, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XIX, p. 31. The history of Greece has been laid before the world as only a man possessing such an extensive and thorough knowledge of the country could do, by George Finlay. -OLIPHANT, MARGARET Ŏ. W., 1892, The Victorian Age of English Literature, p. 561. Sir John Gardner Wilkinson Orientalist, was born at Hardendale, Westmoreland, and educated at Harrow, and at Exeter College, Oxford. When quite a young man he visited Egypt for the sake of nis health, and remained there for twelve years, during which time he devoted himself to the study of Egyptian antiquities. A paper of his on "A Part of the Eastern Desert of Upper Egypt" was read before the Geographical Society in 1830, and was a record of a journey of exploration made with Captain Burton. The paper had been written, however, as early as 1823. In 1827-8 Wilkinson published his "Materia Hieroglyphica," containing the Egyptian Pantheon and the succession of the Pharaohs; his "Extracts from the Hieroglyphical Subjects" in 1830; "Thebes and Ancient Egypt" in 1833; and "The Topography of Thebes, and General View of Egypt," in 1835. His magnum opus, "The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians" (1837-41; 3rd ed. by Dr. Birch, 1878), is the standard authority on all matters relating to Egyptian art; and its value is enhanced by the beautiful illustrations with which it is enriched by its author. It is written to support no particular theory, but contents itself with picturesque description. It was followed by the very popular "Modern Egypt and Thebes" (1844), and a condensed edition entitled "Handbook for Travelers in Egypt" (1847). Sir Gardner Wilkinson, who had been knighted in 1839, then published a work on "Dalmatia and Montenegro" (1848); and, returning to Egyptology, "A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians" (1854), "Egypt in the Time of the Pharaohs" (1857), and "The Architecture of Ancient Egypt" (1860); he also wrote "On Colour and the Necessity of a General Diffusion of Taste" (1858). He also contributed some most valuable notes and illustrations to the Egyptian chapters of Professor Rawlinson's translation of "Herodotus." Most of his Egyptian collections are in the British Museum, and Sir Gardner Wilkinson also presented Harrow School with a museum of Egyptian art.-SANDERS, LLOYD C., ed. 1887, Celebrities of the Century, p. 1052. PERSONAL I heard a lecture on digestion (part of a course on the physics of human nature), by Wilkinson at the Whittington Club. I was very much pleased with him: his voice clear, manner collected, like one who knew what he was about; his style rich, a good deal of originality in his metaphors and a little mysticism, tending to show that there is in the universe a digestive or assimilative process going on, which connects man with nature, and the present with the other life. -ROBINSON, HENRY CRABB, 1848, Diary, Sept. 27; Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence, ed. Sadler, vol. II, p. 377. Notwithstanding his numerous publications, filling no less than twenty-two volumes, four of which are of plates from the author's drawings,-in one case lithographed by himself,-besides contributing to the publications of Societies, a great mass of materials remains in Sir Gardner's hands. His note-books are full of drawings beautifully and clearly executed, as well as careful memoranda of every object he met interesting to a student of archælogy and art. His works exhibit but a selection, and it would be a boon to knowledge could he be prevailed upon to publish these note-books as they stand.-REEVE, LOVELL, 1863, ed. Portraits of Men of Eminence, p. 80. Sir Gardner Wilkinson was one of the fortunate few of whom, despite a well-worn maxim, it could be asserted in his life-time that he was happy. He achieved success and he was rewarded with honours. He saw his principal work become a classic. And he enjoyed in equal proportion the gifts of culture, of fortune, and of taste. Not many scholars are also artists, and few artists are also distinguished for scholarship; but Sir Gardiner Wilkinson was both scholar and artist. He, moreover, added to this rare combination two tastes which are, perhaps above all others, delightful to their possessors-namely, the love of archæology and the love of travel. . . . Sir Gardner Wilkinson was not a witty man; but he had a playful humour, and a keen sense of the ludicrous. Even the staid pages of "Manners and Customs" sparkle occasionally with flashes of fun. His own manners were charming, and his good-nature was proverbial. His books, his notes, his sketches, were freely at the service of all who sought information at his hands; and with ladies. he was a universal favourite. One who knew him writes of him to me as being "truly a courteous gentleman in all his ways and doings." He loved society, and When society repaid him with interest. in the intervals of foreign work and travel he resided in England, he lived in the gay world of forty years ago; kept his cab; and even while writing his "Manners and Customs" and drawing his own illustrations upon the wood, he used to be about every night at all the fashionable entertainments of the season.-EDWARDS, AMELIA B., 1879, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, The Academy, vol. 15, pp. 251, 252. GENERAL I need scarcely mention the admirable work of Sir Gardner Wilkinson, in which he has availed himself of the paintings, sculptures, and monuments of the ancient Egyptians to restore their manners and customs, and to place their public and private life. before us, as fully as if they still occupied the banks of the Nile. I shall frequently have occasion to refer to it in the course of this and the following chapters.-LAYARD, AUSTEN HENRY, 1849, Nineveh and its Remains, vol. II, pt. ii, ch. i. His volumes, on the whole, afford more materials for grave study and meditation than for the entertainment of the passing hour, so that the lovers of very light reading will be apt to pass them by altogether. |