Thought and Understanding;" and by Mr. T. E. Poynting, from 2 Tim. i. 10, on "the Resurrection of Christ." In the afternoon, the examination was resumed by Professor Wallace with the senior Hebrew class; next, by Professor Tayler and the senior Ecclesiastical History class; and was concluded by Professor Wallace and the Evidences of Natural and Revealed Reli gion class. Professor Wallace then gave a valedictory address, which we must reserve till our next No. A sermon was delivered by Mr. T. L. Marshall, from Philipp. iii. 12, on "Progressive Christianity;" and the exercises of the examination closed with a sermon by Mr. John Davies, from Luke xvii. 21, on "the Kingdom of God within us.' The business finally closed with an address from the venerable Visitor, Rev. William Turner. On the following day, the Trustees held a long and important meeting. Dudley Double Lecture.-June 2, being Whit-Tuesday, was the anniversary of this institution. The Rev. Stephenson Hunter opened the service with prayer, and then preached, from Exod. xii. 26, 27, on "the circumstances preceding and attending the appointment of the Passover," especially on "the plagues of Egypt." After a hymn, the Rev. Alexander Paterson delivered a discourse on "the life of Christ in the soul of the believer," his text being Gal. iii. 20. Rev. Charles Berry.-On Tuesday, June 2nd, a meeting was held, at Leicester, of the pupils of the Rev. Charles Berry, to present him with a testimonial of their "admiration of his attainments, respect for his character, and grateful remembrance of his services to them as a preceptor." The social position and the character of the gentlemen who united in this mark of respect added largely to its value; and to Mr. Berry's mind, we doubt not, that value was enhanced by the fact, that men of various opinions, political and religious, had cordially united to do him honour. The proceedings were very spirited and interesting, but our limited space prevents all detail. MARRIAGES. 1846. June 14, at North-gate-end chapel, Halifax, by Rev. J. H. Ryland, of Bradford, Mr. ABRAHAM BALDWIN to Miss MARY AARON, both of Halifax. June 16, at Bank-Street chapel, Bolton, by Rev. Franklin Baker, M.A., Mr. THOMAS SCOWCROFT to Mrs. ANN June 18, at the Unitarian chapel, NOTICES TO CORRESPONDENTS. On the 23rd of June, a pile of communications, pressing for immediate inser tion, were received by the Editor, for all of which, under other circumstances, he would have found room, but then it was impossible. Our friends forget that the arrangements of a Magazine differ widely from those of a Newspaper, and do not admit of the same rapidity of movement. It is very rarely that we can make use for the next No. of our Magazine of any communication reaching us at Dukinfield later than the 20th of the month. By timely and special prearrangement, a day or two more may occasionally be afforded; but, residing as we do more than 200 miles from the press, this can only be an occasional exception to our rule. Many articles of Review, Critical Notices and Obituary, are again unavoidably postponed. Room, it is hoped, will be found for L., of Taunton, in our next; also for Mr. Davis. THIS work was undertaken, as the author informs us in his Preface, many years ago, when Mitford's History was the medium through which Greece was chiefly known to the English public. That work, with all its glaring faults, had a very important influence upon the study of Grecian history among us. Its party bias was manifest; begun under the influence of an almost personal animosity against the republican institutions of America, and continued with the passionate hatred of an English Churchman and Tory against the French Revolution, it was marked throughout by a contempt and horror of Democracy, and the desire to depreciate every man whom its admirers had been accustomed to extol. There might be room for an Iconoclast to exercise his zeal among these objects of the established classical idolatry; but Mitford's own idolatry was equally profound and more absurd. Not contented with dismounting the demagogues from their pedestals, he set up the tyrants in their place: nor was he scrupulous as to the means which he employed for this purpose. In his zeal to whitewash Dionysius or blacken Demosthenes, he makes so free with his authorities, that the same painful question has sometimes forced itself upon us, as during a comparison of Hume's statements with his quotations-Is there not positive bad faith here? Is it possible that men of acute minds can have been so blinded by their prejudices, as not to see the injustice they were committing? With all this unfairness, amounting at times to gross misrepresentation, Mitford has the great merit of recalling attention to the wide difference in value between the contemporary evidence of Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, and that of the writers of the Roman empire, who, if not misled, as Mitford alleges, by a longing for the freedom which they had lost, to magnify the virtues of the heroes of Greek democracy, were certainly very much inferior to their predecessors in the means of knowing and the power of discriminating the truth. As a history of Greece, Mitford's work is very defective, omitting many things which are essential to a complete view of the national character; but it has an original vigour, even in its rude style, which places it far above the plausible generalities and affected elegance of Gillies, then his only rival in our literature. A new era began with the publication of Dr. Thirlwall's History of Greece, in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopædia, by far the most valuable of the historical portion of that series. Had it possessed no other merit A History of Greece. I. Legendary Greece. II. Grecian History to the Reign of Peisistratus at Athens. By George Grote, Esq. 2 vols. Vol. I. pp. 648. Vol. II. pp. 615. than that of exhibiting the results of the erudition and sagacity with which the Germans had investigated every part of Greek antiquity, this alone would have been sufficient to place it immeasurably above all preceding histories of Greece. But though the author has manifestly and avowedly been indebted to them for the germ of all his leading ideas, he has not merely transplanted them into another language. His own learning is vast and ready to his use; he is cautious and subtle in weighing and sifting testimony; and the sobriety of his mind corrects the propensity to carry every thing to extremes in theory and generalization, which is a besetting sin of our Teutonic brethren. We cannot attribute to him any marked excellence of historic style; but his narrative is always clear, and his sympathy with the cause of freedom elevates him at times above his ordinary unimpassioned level. He had in fact done so much for Greek history, that when we saw the annunciation of this work of Mr. Grote's, we were inclined to think that he had undertaken a work of supererogation, and must necessarily repeat in a great degree the ideas of Thirlwall. He himself acknowledges that had his "early friend's" History appeared a few years sooner, he should probably never have conceived the design of his own work. We are glad, however, that he has not thrown away the results of so many years' study. Multa fiunt eadem sed aliter; even the features of nature present themselves differently to artists and travellers of genius, and yet there is truth in all their pictures. Ancient history, at least early ancient history, cannot be written like that of our Civil Wars; the scattered facts must be combined by the interposition of a good deal of theory, and we shall only attain the true conception of it by the result of many attempts to recover its idea, made by men of various powers of mind. Mr. Grote possesses the endowments of an historian in more ample measure than we had been prepared to expect. We looked confidently for learning, sagacity and independence on established opinions; we had some apprehension that political forms and economical arrangements might be too exclusively the objects of his attention; and that literature and art, and the finer influences of which national character is the result, might not meet in him with the sensibility requisite for their appreciation. We have not found this to be the case. In point of originality, we should place him above Dr. Thirlwall, the only one of his predecessors with whom he can at all be compared. Probably the haste in which the necessity of serial publication compelled the Bishop to prepare his work, prevented him from thoroughly examining every portion of his authorities; but it is certain that he has sometimes taken up with the ready-made conclusions of his German guides, where Mr. Grote, by more deliberate research, has perceived their opinions to be unsound. I. The first portion of Mr. Grote's work is entitled Legendary Greece, the period usually known as the heroic or mythic age. How to deal with this and with corresponding periods, either in the history of individual nations or the human race, is one of the most perplexing questions for the historian. To admit nothing as deserving the name of history, till the age of written records and chronological registers, would be very unacceptable to the popular mind, which abhors a vacuum in history, as nature was thought to do in physics; and amounts to a declaration that many solid-looking volumes, the work of grave, laborious and learned men, are "such stuff as dreams are made of." To claim for the legends of the Greeks the historic faith with which they were received in the days of polytheism, would be absurd; but every one who has handled them before Mr. Grote has flattered himself that there was real history in them, and that he had succeeded in extracting it. Some have considered this residuum to be the personal and political history of the kings and warriors, craftsmen and navigators of the earliest ages of Greece; others, only the general facts of the affinity of tribes and the diffusion of population, art and religious opinion. Mr. Grote makes no attempt to extract any history, general or particular, from these legends, but he relates them all, whether divine or heroic, as illustrative of the faith, manners and institutions of the people who believed them, and therefore essential to a right conception of the sentiments and character of that people, not only in the age which immediately succeeds the legendary, but as long as any nationality remained among them. "The times," he says, (Preface, p. xii) "anterior to the Olympiads, which I thus set apart from the region of history, are discernible only through a different atmosphere-that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first [?] Greeks, and known only through their legends, without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this-if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture-I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him, on exhibiting his masterpiece of imitative art-The curtain is the picture.' What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot by any ingenuity be withdrawn. I undertake only to shew it as it stands-not to efface, still less to re-paint it." In the same way Mr. Grote deals with the heroic genealogies of the Greeks, on which so much labour has been bestowed, in the hope of establishing an authentic chronology by their means, when all except the terminating god were believed to have been real persons, or to discriminate the real from the unreal, if faith were not strong enough to admit them all. "In the retrospective faith of a Greek, the ideas of worship and ancestry coalesced every association of men, large or small, in whom there existed a feeling of present union, traced back that union to some common initial progenitor, and that progenitor again was either the god whom they worshiped, or some semi-divine being closely allied to him. What the feelings of the community require is, a continuous pedigree to connect them with this respected source of existence, beyond which they do not think of looking back. The names of this genealogy are to a great degree gentile or local names familiar to the people-rivers, mountains, springs, lakes, demes, &c., embodied as persons and introduced as acting or suffering: they are moreover called kings or chiefs; but the existence of a body of subjects surrounding them is tacitly implied, rather than distinctly set forth; for their own personal exploits or family proceedings constitute for the most part the whole matter of narrative. It will be seen from the mere description of these genealogies that they included elements human and historical, as well as divine and extra-historical; and if we could determine the time at which any genealogy was first framed, we should be able to assure ourselves that the men then represented as pre sent, together with their fathers and grandfathers, were real persons of flesh and blood. But this is a point which can seldom be ascertained."-I. 110. Elsewhere (II. 50) Mr. Grote contends, successfully we think, against the arbitrary proceedings of the chronologers, especially Mr. Clinton, who, being unwilling that so large a portion of time should be withdrawn from the domain of their science, and yet clearly perceiving that many of the names in the genealogies are fictitious, fix arbitrarily on a certain number to be retained for chronological purposes. "The ablest chronologist can accomplish nothing, unless he is supplied with a certain basis of matters of fact, pure and distinguishable from fiction, and authenticated by witnesses both knowing the truth and willing to declare it. Possessing this preliminary stock, he may reason from it to refute distinct falsehoods and to correct partial mistakes, but if all the original statements submitted to him contain truth, at least wherever there is truth, in a sort of chemical combination with fiction, which he has no means of decomposing, he is in the condition of one who tries to solve a problem without data; he is first obliged to construct his own data, and from them to extract his conclusions. The statements of the epic poets correspond to this description; the proportion of truth contained in them is unassignable, and the constant and intimate admixture of fiction is indisputable. Of such a character are all the deposing witnesses, even where their tales agree; and it is out of a heap of such tales, not agreeing, but discrepant in a thousand ways, and without a morsel of pure authenticated truth, that the critic is called upon to draw out a methodical series of historical events adorned with chronological dates." These extracts will enable our readers to understand in what light Mr. Grote regards the whole legendary history of Greece. He renounces entirely the attempt to separate the historical from the fictitious element. But what is then to be done with that mass of tales respecting gods, heroes and men, which the Greek poetry and tradition presents? Since no art of critical refinery can separate the metal from the earth, is the whole mass to be thrown aside as useless, and Greek history to begin with the era of the Olympiads? This would be to suppress a great and most important fact, that there existed, long before the commencement of the Olympiads, a people in Greece, believing with undoubting faith in these traditions, acknowledging the being and providence of these divinities, referring their own origin to this heroic ancestry, and deducing their national or local institutions and customs from these events. They must therefore be given, but given for what they are worth. Mr. Grote accordingly has occupied the whole of the first and a part of the second volume with the mythology and legendary history, such as we have it in the poets and mythographers. He most carefully abstains from drawing the smallest inferences as to historical facts, even where they might seem the most obvious and safe, telling the tale to the English reader, as Homer or Hesiod, Apollodorus, or the Scholiast on Pindar and Apollonius, have told it to him. The history of the gods comes first in order; and here we must regret that more care has not been exercised in discriminating the real objects of national belief and worship, from the sportive and momentary personifications of poetry. Mr. Grote seems to regard the Theogony of Hesiod as a Confession of Faith, subscribed by the whole Greek nation in the 8th or 9th century B.C., and upon the strength of it places among the objects of religious belief, not only "Chaos and Night, Æther and Day, Earth, the Mountains and the Sea," but "all the progeny of Night, |