of the author's scheme (which yet had at last to be again in various ways contracted), but also in the labour entailed upon him from 1848 by the preparation of revised editions of the earlier volumes. The 'History' had been received from the first, by all thinkers and scholars with any elevation of view, as the work of a master, not more conversant with his subject by direct and independent study of all the available sources of information than able, by an exceptional philosophical training and political experience, to interpret the multiform phases of Greek life with more than the bare scholar's insight. The first-published volumes, while hardly breaking ground at all with the story of historic Greece, gave the more opportunity for philosophical consideration of the Greek mythopœic faculty; then, as the historic drama became unrolled, the author's warmth of political sympathy gave living interest to a narrative that yet could never be fairly charged with degenerating into a one-sided plea. If apt to be drawn out with an earnestness and explicitness open to criticism from the literary point of view, the political lessons and ethical judgments so characteristic of the book render it the most instructive of histories. Nor even in point of style can it be said that the execution ever falls below the subject; while at places where the author's feelings were specially moved, as in the story of the catastrophe that befell the power of Athens at Syracuse, the narration becomes suffused with a grave and measured eloquence.
Grote's one other composition during all the years of the 'History' had direct relation to his absorbed interest in the politics of ancient Greece. This was a series of 'Seven Letters on the Recent Politics of Switzerland,' reprinted (with an added preface) in a volume towards the end of 1847, after they had appeared weekly in the 'Spectator' from 4 Sept., under the signature 'A. B.,' their authorship not being disclosed till the end. The 'Letters' were the outcome of a visit to Switzerland in July and August, undertaken immediately upon the formation of the Sonderbund (20 July), in which a strife of long standing among the Swiss cantons came to a head. Grote had followed the conflict with a special interest because of the analogy which those small communities bore to the states of ancient Greece. His observations on the spot convinced him that religious jealousy fed by jesuitical ambition was at the root of the political strife, but he had also to blame the radical party for action which left small hope that Swiss unity could be restored. The greater then was his satisfaction when, shortly after his book was published, the Sonderbund was decisively overthrown. This he recorded in a remarkable letter to De Tocqueville, which Mrs. Grote added to the 'Seven Letters' on a second reprint in 1876.
As soon as he had finished his 'History,' Grote, at the beginning of 1856, began putting his papers in order for the work on Plato and Aristotle, which he regarded as its necessary complement. He wrote, however, an independently argued review of his friend Sir G. C. Lewis's 'Inquiry into the Credibility of Early Roman History' (Edinb. Rev. July 1856, reprinted in Minor Works, pp. 207-36), before settling, after a short respite abroad, to his daily task. For some years he continued to speak of the coming work as 'on Plato and Aristotle,' but by 1862 Aristotle had dropped into the background. Not till the spring of 1865 did the three volumes of 'Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates' issue from the press. The size of the work was slightly reduced by the publication (in 1860), in pamphlet form, of a somewhat elaborate dissertation on 'Plato's Doctrine respecting the Rotation of the Earth, and Aristotle's comment upon that Doctrine' (reprinted in Minor Works, pp. 237-75). Here Grote took ground against the interpretation put by Boeckh and others on a famous passage in the 'Timæus;' contending that Plato, while holding the change of day and night to be due to the revolution of the sun in its sphere round the central earth, might also ascribe (for other reasons) a rotatory motion to the earth. The view has not commended itself to later scholars, but it was significant of Grote's whole conception of Plato's thought. Accepting the traditional Platonic canon, he had to reckon with a writer who in different works appears to advocate conclusions at variance with one another. He found in the Platonic writings veins of thought of which little account had been taken in the current view of Plato as an absolute idealist. Above all he was impressed by the fact that the Greek thinker appeared often to be more concerned in Socratic fashion about mere exercise of the dialectical faculty than about any particular conclusions at all. The 'Plato' brings out aspects of Greek thought in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. which philosophical historians have generally thrust into the background, and is thus not likely to lose its importance. Before it was out the aged scholar had betaken himself without a moment's pause to his more congenial occupation with Aristotle. With seventy years upon him he worked as regularly and strenuously as ever; turning aside in 1865 only to express with great warmth his general approval of J. S. Mill's 'Examina-
