A HISTORY OF GREECE,
FROM THE EARLIEST PERIOD TO THE CLOSE OF THE GENERATION CONTEMPORARY WITH ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
BY GEORGE GROTE, ESQ.
Vol. XII. contains Portrait, Maps, and Index. Complete in 12 vols. 12mo, Muslin, $9 00; Sheep, $12 00; Half Calf, $15 00.
It is not often that a work of such magnitude is undertaken; more seldom still is such a work so perseveringly carried on, and so soon and yet so worthily accomplished. Mr. Grote has illustrated and invested with an entirely new significance a portion of the past history of humanity, which he, perhaps, thinks the most splendid that has been, and which all allow to have been very splendid. He has made great Greeks live again before us, and has enabled us to realize Greek modes of thinking. He has added a great historical work to the language, taking its place with other great histories, and yet not like any of them in the special combination of merits which it exhibits: scholarship and learning such as we have been accustomed to demand only in Germans; an art of grouping and narration different from that of Hume, different from that of Gibbon, and yet producing the effect of sustained charm and pleasure; a peculiarly keen interest in events of the political order, and a wide knowledge of the business of politics; and, finally, harmonizing all, a spirit of sober philosophical generalization always tending to view facts collectively in their speculative bearing as well as to record them individually. It is at once an ample and detailed narrative of the history of Greece, and a lucid philosophy of Grecian history.—London Athenæum, March 8, 1856.
Mr. Grote will be emphatically the historian of the people of Greece.—Dublin University Magazine.
The acute intelligence, the discipline, faculty of intellect, and the excellent erudition every one would look for from Mr. Grote; but they will here also find the element which harmonizes these, and without which, on such a theme, an orderly and solid work could not have been written.—Examiner.
A work second to that of Gibbon alone in English historical literature. Mr. Grote gives the philosophy as well as the facts of history, and it would be difficult to find an author combining in the same degree the accurate learning of the scholar with the experience of a practical statesman. The completion of this great work may well be hailed with some degree of national pride and satisfaction.—Literary Gazette, March 8, 1856.
The better acquainted any one is with Grecian history, and with the manner in which that history has heretofore been written, the higher will be his estimation of this work. Mr. Grote’s familiarity both with the great highways and the obscurest by-paths of Grecian literature and antiquity has seldom been equaled, and not often approached, in unlearned England; while those Germans who have rivaled it have seldom possessed the quality which eminently characterizes Mr. Grote, of keeping historical imagination severely under the restraints of evidence. The great charm of Mr. Grote’s history has been throughout the cordial admiration he feels for the people whose acts and fortunes he has to relate. * * We bid Mr. Grote farewell; heartily congratulating him on the conclusion of a work which is a monument of English learning, of English clear-sightedness, and of English love of freedom and the characters it produces.—Spectator.
Endeavor to become acquainted with Mr. Grote, who is engaged on a Greek History. I expect a great deal from this production.—Niebuhr, the Historian, to Professor Lieber.