Sir William Napier (1785-1860) who fought with distinction under Wellington in the Peninsula, combined with his great personal knowledge of the war conscientious research in documents, and a style of the most brilliant eloquence. Impartial he was not, and he had the fiery temper of the Napiers; but modern research, as in Mr. Oman's great work, now corrects him, and now complements his information.

The great work of George Grote (1794-1871), a Radical in politics, a banker by profession, is "The History of Greece". It is too well known to need description. Though Grote's aim was to set Athenian democracy in what he held to be its true light, he laboured not less assiduously among the mythic legends and the heroic poetry of Hellas; he was most erudite in every fragment of Greek records, and his work, though destitute of much new light recently discovered by excavations of Greek sites and from inscriptions, yet holds its place, unsurpassed, as a general history of Hellas.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868) was educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, and began his literary career as a writer of verse.

The poet-priest Milman
So ready to kill man,

is thus mentioned by Byron, who thought that Milman had attacked him, or Shelley, or both, in "The Quarterly Review". He later wrote "The History of the Jews," now out of date, and his chief and very meritorious work "The History of Latin Christianity" (1855).

Space, and the nature of his subjects, logical, philosophical, political, and social, forbid more than a mention of a man so prominent and influential as John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Mill was privately educated and forced into precocity by his father, James Mill, a Liberal doctrinaire. In 1843 he gave to the world his "System of Logic," in 1848 his "Political Economy"; the former, at least, was for many years read almost as much as the "Ethics" of Aristotle by competitors for honours at Oxford. His "Liberty" (1859) was an extremely advanced book in its day; as was his "Subjection of Women". Mill sowed large handfuls of the seed of the dragon's teeth. He was an earnest, precise, and lucid writer; but not successful in Parliament.

Newman.

The bearers of some of the greatest literary names of the nineteenth century produced books which had vast influence on the development of thought, and yet left little work that, as mere literature, is of the highest merit. They were concerned with the religious, theological, social, and political ideas of their own time, which, like all the ideas personal, as it were, to one or two generations, could not remain fixed, but glided into protean forms of change. Thus John Henry Newman (born in London, 1801, educated at Trinity College, Oxford; Fellow of Oriel, 1822) passed through various phases of religious and ecclesiastical belief; was a leader with Pusey, Keble, and many others in the Oxford Anglican Movement; found that his reason led him into the Roman fold (he was made a Cardinal finally) and wrote voluminously, and in a style confessedly of the highest merit. Yet no doubt his most widely and permanently interesting work took the form of a defensive autobiography ("Apologia pro Vita Sua," 1864), which is more read for its vivid study of his own mental vicissitudes, and personal experiences, than for its theological science. It answers, in his generation, to the "Confessions" of St. Augustine.

Newman describes himself as not only religious but superstitious in boyhood; he read Law's "Serious Call," and crossed himself when he went into the dark. His search for truth was earnest, his nature was almost sceptical but hospitable towards the marvellous, and his own party, to whatsoever party he belonged at any period, never knew where or how far his theory of the Development of Doctrine would carry him. As a tutor of Oriel, and Vicar of St. Mary's, he exercised, as much by his personality and sanctity of life as by his intellect, an unprecedented influence over the minds of the young. In 1843-4 he began to publish "Lives of the English Saints" from the earliest period: many of these were done by Newman's disciples. The narratives abound in miracles of all sorts which proved too much for the faith of J. A. Froude. Newman's doctrine developed in a way which puzzled himself and others. His heart and his tastes drew him towards Catholicism; his earlier ideas caused him to preach against the old faith; at last his reason sided with his "secret longing love of Rome," his "Tract 90" in "Tracts for the Times," alarmed the academic authorities. "I hardly knew where I stood... when I wanted to be in peace and silence I had to speak out, and I incurred the charge of weakness from some men, and of mysteriousness, shuffling, and underhand dealing from the majority". He retired from the University pulpit, and after a period of retreat and reflection, crossed the Rubicon. There was a long and bitter period of trials, of broken friendships, of charges of duplicity and so forth. In reviewing Froude's "History," Charles Kingsley spoke as if more than doubtful of Newman's respect for truth as such; a correspondence followed; Kingsley wrote an offensive pamphlet: "What then does Dr. Newman Mean?" Newman, by this time a man of 63, answered the question in his "Apologia"; first making a terrible display of acute personal irony, and then giving a narrative of the development of his opinions. In later editions he omitted the polemical pages, and when Kingsley died said a Mass for his soul. The book was received with almost universal applause—yet it had not been easy for Kingsley to understand what Newman meant. His "Grammar of Assent" was so many times rewritten as to leave the impression that he himself did not easily ascertain his own meaning. It is curious to find him quoting a writer in "The Penny Cyclopædia" as an authority on the religion of the Australian tribes; the writer was not correctly informed.