senting minister, the Rev. John Hoppus, had been seriously considered, but no recommendation was made, in face of Grote's urgent contention, adhered to by Mill and Brougham, that in a professedly unsectarian institution no minister of religion could fitly occupy a philosophical chair. The 'university' consequently opened in 1828 with neither of its philosophical chairs filled. Then, in the spring of 1829, if not earlier, Grote put forward for the chair of moral and political philosophy his friend Charles Cameron. Cameron was formally recommended by the education-committee in June, but the council in July, at the instance of Z. Macaulay and others who would have no teaching of morals without a religious basis, passed the recommendation by with a resolution not to elect 'at present.' In the vacation some of the party proceeded to seek out a clerical candidate; and, with the consent of Mill and Brougham, Hoppus was recommended in November for the other professorship of mental philosophy, denied to him in 1827. Grote, though knowing that the appointment to this chair would be considered in committee, was for some reason absent. Mrs. Grote (Personal Life, p. 59) speaks of him as too busy otherwise, in the autumn of this year, to be able to attend meetings, but the minute-books report differently, and she has here overlooked more than one memorandum of peculiar interest which she made at the time. Grote was profoundly chagrined that the master in whom his confidence had till then been absolute should abandon the principle maintained in 1827, for the sake only, as it seemed, of appeasing orthodox sentiment in friends or enemies of the 'university.' At the council-meeting of 5 Dec., specially summoned to decide upon the committee's recommendation, he made a vehement but unavailing protest against the appointment. The incident had the effect of deciding him (Posth. Papers, p. 35) to withdraw, for a considerable term of years, from the educational work to which he had given the first of his public service. At the first opportunity, a few weeks later, he resigned his place on the council, to the regret, expressly recorded (2 Feb. 1830), of the colleagues who knew what his labours had been.
Grote went abroad for the first time in the spring of 1830, with his wife. They were bound for Switzerland, but bad weather and still more the exciting state of politics kept them in Paris. Mrs. Grote (Life of Ary Scheffer) has given a bright account of their visit to the veteran Lafayette at La Grange, to whom, as to other leading men of the opposition, they were introduced by their friend Charles Comte, son-in-law of J. B. Say and a refugee in England for some years past. With him had begun, and now were extended, those close relations with French liberals that remained to the last a special feature in the lives of both husband and wife. Hastily summoned home, to find his father already dead (6 July), Grote was now able to give practical proof of his interest in the cause of political reform. The moment he heard, 29 July, of the uprising in Paris on the previous day, he sent 500l. to Charles Comte for the use of the revolutionary leaders, with an expression of regret that he could not be at their side in the struggle. Nor, though much engrossed in the next months by the duties devolving on him as his father's executor and by the business which fell to him as a full partner in the bank, was he less eager to turn to public use at home his new personal freedom and his now ample means. The character he had acquired as a man of business in the previous years began to give him a leading position among city reformers; and he also established relations with the active spirits (like Joseph Parkes) who were preparing in the provinces the victory of 1832. In the first weeks of 1831, at the request of James Mill, he threw off a considerable pamphlet, 'The Essentials of Parliamentary Reform' (reprinted in Minor Works, pp. 1-55), in which he took up the special argument of his 'Statement' often years before, while he further developed, with an infectious enthusiasm and absolute hopefulness, the most advanced proposals favoured in the Benthamite circle. A little later in the year he refused to stand for parliament at the general election, still hoping to complete his 'History' before entering on political life ; but the passage of the Reform Bill, in the struggle for which he bore no small part as a private citizen, roused a feverish expectation of immediate practical results which proved too much for his scholarly scruples. In June he announced himself as a candidate for the city of London; in October he indicated in a telling and comprehensive address the special reforms for which he desired to work; and in December, after an exciting conflict, he emerged at the head of the poll, followed by three other liberals.
Grote sat through three parliaments till 1841, when he refused to be again nominated. At his second and third elections (January 1835, July 1837) he lost ground greatly at the poll, falling first to the third place among four liberals, then to the fourth, with the first tory only six votes behind him. The general reaction had soon set in, while the strenuousness and independence of his own
