episcopal charges were certainly the best delivered in his day, and his history, without ever exciting any enthusiasm, has so steadily maintained its high position, that of recent years it is perhaps rather rising than falling in popular esteem[11:1].
his coldness;
his fairness and accuracy;
but without enthusiasm.
But the absence of passion, since it checks enthusiasm in the reader, is a fatal want in any historian. The case before us is a remarkable instance. Both the learning and fairness of Thirlwall are conspicuous. It is difficult for any competent reader to avoid wondering at his caution in receiving doubtful evidence, and his acuteness in modestly suggesting solutions which have since been proved by further evidence. Of course the great body of our materials, the Greek classics, lay before him; the pioneers of modern German philology such as Wolf, Hermann, K. O. Müller, Welcker, were accessible to him. In ordering and criticising these materials he left nothing to be desired, and the student of to-day who is really intimate with Thirlwall's history may boast that he has a sound and accurate view of all the main questions in the political and social development of the Hellenic nation. But he will never have been carried away with enthusiasm; he will never remember with delight great passages of burning force or picturesque beauty such as those which adorn the histories of Gibbon or of Arnold.
He has before him the type of a historian like Hallam, whose work would be the most instructive possible on its period, were it not the dullest of writing. It would be unfair to Thirlwall to say he is dull, but he is too cold and passionless for modern readers. To use the words of Bacon: Lumen siccum et aridum ingenia madida offendit et torret.
Clinton's Fasti.
His merits.
The mention of these qualities in Thirlwall suggests to me that I ought not to omit some mention of the great work of a very similar student—this, too, stimulated by Mitford—I mean the Fasti Hellenici, 'a civil and literary chronology of the Greeks from the earliest times to the death of Augustus[12:1].' It is not, properly speaking, a history, but the materials for the fullest possible history of Greece, with all its offshoots, such as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Hither Asia, arranged and tabulated with a patience and care to which I know no parallel. Any one who examines this work will wonder that it could have been accomplished within the fifteen years during which the several volumes appeared. It is astonishing how difficult the student finds it to detect a passage in the obscurest author that Clinton has not seen; and his ordinary habit is not to indicate, but to quote all the passages verbatim. The book is quite unsuited for a schoolboy, but to any serious enquirer into the history of Greece it is positively indispensable. The influence of Gaisford, then probably the greatest of Greek scholars,
obtained for the book the adequate setting of the Clarendon Press. Clinton worked with a calmness and deliberation quite exceptional; and though he knew no German, had so completely mastered his subject that the Germans have since indeed translated, re-edited, and abridged him: they have never been able to supersede him. Even when he is wrong or obsolete, he can be corrected by the full materials he has laid before the reader. But the perfect coldness of his reasoning, the absence of all passion, the abnegation of all style, make the book unapproachable except to a specialist.
