As these three, Arnold, Thirlwall and Grote, dealt with the ancient world in its glory and greatness, so there were two, Milman and Finlay, who traced its decay, or the process of transition from the ancient to the modern world.
Henry Hart Milman
(1791-1868).
Henry Hart Milman in his earlier days wrote poetry. The turning-point in his literary career was the publication of the History of the Jews (1830), the first English work which adequately treats the Jews in their actual historical setting, not in the traditional way as a ‘peculiar people’ with practically no historical setting at all. Milman afterwards edited Gibbon and wrote a life of the historian; and in 1840 the result of his studies appeared in the History of Christianity under the Empire. In 1855 the History of Latin Christianity down to the Death of Pope Nicholas V. set the crown upon his labours. This work is Milman’s best title to remembrance, and though errors have been detected in it, the tone and spirit are good, the method sound and the scholarship admirable.
George Finlay
(1799-1875).
George Finlay has suffered from an unattractive theme, for few care about the obscure fortunes of Greece after its conquest by the Romans. But Finlay was an enthusiast who not only wrote about Greece but lived in it; and this residence (continuous after 1854) imparts to his history its most valuable qualities. Finlay published a series of works on Greece between 1844 and 1861, all of which were summed up in his History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time (1877).
John Mason Neale
(1818-1866).
Charles Merivale
(1808-1893).
Among historians of less importance, John Mason Neale did for the Holy Eastern Church a service similar to that performed by Milman for the Latin Church; but he is more likely to be remembered as a hymn-writer than as a historian. Charles Merivale was likewise a subordinate member of the group of ancient historians. His principal work was a History of the Romans under the Empire (1850-1862). Its worst defect is that the author is not quite equal to his subject. Merivale was a respectable historian, but the successful treatment of the Romans under the Empire demanded a great one.
James Anthony Froude
(1818-1894).
Among the writers of modern history the next in rank after Macaulay and Carlyle is James Anthony Froude, the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, famous for his connexion with the Oxford movement. For a time J. A. Froude himself was a Tractarian, and he took orders. But Newman’s drift to Rome forced him in the opposite direction. His first considerable book, The Nemesis of Faith (1849), records his change of mind and indicates how impossible it must always have been for him to rest permanently in the position of the Tractarians.
Leaving Oxford and the Tractarians, Froude fell under the spell of Carlyle. They were introduced to each other soon after this, but it was not till Froude’s settlement in London in 1860 that they became intimate. Carlyle’s influence upon his disciple was almost wholly good. The younger man had the good sense not to imitate his master’s style, while he learnt from him clear, sharply-outlined, fearless judgment; and the mists of Tractarianism rolled away for ever.