and after weighing the old and modern theories in the balance of a singularly judicial mind, was content to fall back upon the 'old opinion' that the whole of Scripture proceeded from the ' constant and uniform operation of this Spirit,' cleared from 'the exaggerations with which it has been loaded and which were not implied in the judgment of the primitive Church when it fixed the Canon,' and seeking the operation of the Spirit, not in any temporary, physical, or even intellectual changes wrought in its subjects, but in the continual presence and action of what is most vital and essential in Christianity ' itself.' *

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It is important both in its bearing on the writer's consistency, and as showing what were his maturest thoughts on this great question, to turn to his latest utterances; and with this view we anticipate what would otherwise have come before us at a subsequent stage of our review of his life and work. At the time when Dr. Rowland Williams had startled the minds of many of the clergy by the publication of his Rational 'Godliness,' and especially by the views on Inspiration which that volume contained, Bishop Thirlwall, who was practically compelled by his position as Visitor of St. David's College, Lampeter, where Dr. Williams held the office of Vice-Principal, to deal with the questions thus raised, did not shrink from defending the statement that the Church was before the Bible, as a speaker is before his voice;' and that Holy 'Scripture is not the foundation of the Christian faith so 'much as its creature, its expression, and its embodiment.' † Even in reference to the wider statement that if that Spirit 'by which every man spake of old is for ever a living and a present power, its later lessons may well transcend its earlier,' he speaks in a passage of singular eloquence, with a wisdom and a calmness not often found in Episcopal Charges:

'I should be sorry to put an invidious construction on this language. Though it may lend itself on the one hand to a Romish theory of development, on the other to the fancies of individual enthusiasts, I am persuaded that the author's meaning is equally remote from both. And I would not deny that there is a sense in which the statement may be accepted, and in which it will be found not only not to depreciate, but to enhance the value and dignity of Holy Scripture. For the fulness of the stream is the glory of its fountain; and it is because the Ganges is not lost among its native hills, but deepens and widens until it reaches the ocean, that so many pilgrimages are made to its springs. And to the end of time there can be no assignable limits to the true development, and, above all, to the practical application, of the truths

* Introd. p. xix.

† Charge for 1857, p. 78.

contained in Holy Scripture; and so the later stages of this development may well "transcend the earlier, the new things be better than "the old."

Speculations as to what might have been Connop Thirlwall's career had he continued in his chambers in the Temple are not, perhaps, very profitable, yet it is scarcely possible to avoid indulging in them. The success of a nisi prius advocate, who can persuade juries by eloquent declamation, or make his way to high office through brilliant oratory in the House of Commons, would hardly, we may believe, have been his portion. But there are regions of law, dealing with the application of complicated or apparently conflicting principles, in which his intellect, at once so strong in its grasp and so subtle in its handling, would have found full scope and asserted its mastery. We cannot help feeling that if the Church gained the rare treasure of a judge-like Bishop, the State lost one whose name would have stood high in its catalogue of illustrious judges, who might have rivalled the fame of Stowell in threading his way through the labyrinth of International Law, and might have disputed the palm with Cockburn in disentangling and exposing some gigantic imposture. To the last he so far retained the old taste as to find a special delight in tracking the course of the more prominent causes célèbres of the day, and expressing his judgment on them.

An interesting passage in the Autobiography of Mr. John Stuart Mill enables us to picture to ourselves some of the surroundings of this period of Bishop Thirlwall's life. We find his name in 1825 among the members of the Debating Society which owed its birth to Mr. Mill and other disciples of Bentham, but which, as it expanded, came to include Macaulay and Frederick Maurice and John Sterling, Albany Fonblanque and the two Bulwers, the present Earl Grey and -as if the company of prophets would not be complete without a Saul among them-Samuel Wilberforce. Well-nigh all the names in Mr. Mill's list now belong to the history of the past; but it is not difficult to imagine the intellectual passages-atarms, the conflict of feelings and principles, which must have been the result of the collision in debate of minds of so high an order and for the most so ready in eloquent utterance. Whether he came, as Hare did about the same period, and Maurice somewhat later, under the influence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as the representative of a new school of thought in religion and in politics, which was neither Whig nor Tory,

* Charge for 1857, p. 81.

orthodox nor, in the usual sense of the term, rationalistic, we have no means of knowing. His writings at all events have no trace of the teaching of the Seer of Highgate, and the clear, analytical character of mind which distinguished him throughout was hardly likely to be impressed by the discursive, halfmystic monologues in which the problems of the universe seemed to the speaker to be solved by some new formula intelligible only to the initiated.

We may probably trace, in part at least, the recollection of these early days in the exceptional and courageous action of Bishop Thirlwall when Mr. Mill offered himself in 1865 as a candidate for Westminster. Among the electioneering agencies employed by Mr. Mill's opponents, one was the circulation of a placard containing a sentence from his Examination of Sir 'W. Hamilton's Philosophy' (p. 183), in which he had said, that if he had to go to Hell' because he could not worship Being who was not good in the sense in which he applied that term to his fellow creatures,' then, rather than pay that homage where it was not due, to Hell he would go. The quotation was intended to shock the minds of the electors as bold, irreverent, blasphemous. The Record' and the Morning Advertiser' either opened the attack, or followed it up, in leading articles. Bishop Thirlwall, in a letter published at the time, maintained, on the contrary, that it was the ut terance of a conviction in harmony with the purest spirit of Christian morality,' that nothing but an intellectual and 'moral incapacity worthy of the "Record" and its satellite' could have failed to recognise its truth, and that it thrilled' him with a sense of the ethical sublime.' It is interesting to note that the same paper that contained the Bishop's letter (the Spectator' of June 17, 1865) contained one from Mr. Maurice defending what Mill had said in yet more earnest and impassioned language.

As it was, however, his return to Cambridge to take orders and hold a tutorship at Trinity opened the way for labours that were more congenial to the culture of the scholar. In conjunction with his friend Hare he translated Niebuhr's "History of Rome,' and thus led the way to the reception of that method of historical study in which it still remains a master-piece and a model, though its conclusions may have been more or less modified by the labours of later scholars, as Mommsen and Ihne, and Sir G. Cornewall Lewis.* In the same

*It may be noted as marking the difference of the air we breathe in these regions now from that which the first labourers had to en

partnership too he became one of the editors of the Philologi'cal Museum' (1832-33), and was naturally one of the chief contributors. The list of subjects handled by him brings out with sufficient vividness the wide range of his reading, and his treatment of them illustrates the power at once of minute criticism and of a generalising grasp of thought which continued afterwards to characterise his writings. Dissertations on the myths of Ancæus, of Memnon, and of Ogyges, on the cycle of Socratic questions historical and philosophical, in papers on Xenophon, Niebuhr, and Delbrueck, and again on Socrates, Schleiermacher, and Delbrueck, and an elaborate review of Kruse's Hellas,' are all interesting as part of the training by which he was qualifying himself for the great work which was first to carry his fame beyond the limits of the University. But the paper most remarkable in every way from its profound insight, and its application of a subtle analysis to a poet's thoughts, is his essay On the Irony of Sophocles.' As we follow his inquiry into the nature and laws of an art in which he was himself so consummate a master, and see how he traces their operation in every scene and well-nigh every speech of the great tragedian, we regret that he was never led in the course of his literary labours to appear in the character of a commentator on Shakspeare. In any selection from Bishop Thirlwall's writings, such as that which has been announced under the editorship of Professor Perowne, this Essay ought not to be omitted.

These articles, however, were but the prelude to the task upon which he was soon to enter. The circumstances under which he began his great work were not, perhaps, the most favourable. Though familiar, as we have seen, not only with the broad pathways but with every hole and corner of Greek research, it does not seem that he had spontaneously formed the purpose of concentrating all this vast and varied knowledge on one single book which should take its place as a κтnua ès deì in the historical literature of England. The impulse which was

counter that in an article in the Quarterly Review' (No. lxxvii.), which appeared shortly after the publication of the English version of Niebuhr's History,' the historian himself was denounced as 'a pert, 'dull scoffer,' and the translators charged with 'reproducing the most 'offensive paragraphs written since the days of the "Philosophical Dictionary." It is only fair to our contemporary to add, that the actual review of the book (No. Ixiii.) was temperate and scholarly, and that even the offensive note complimented Mr. Thirlwall on the ability shown in his Preface to the translation of Schleiermacher, and in that to his version of some of Tieck's tales.

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needed to give form and shape and permanency to what might otherwise have left no other memorial of itself than a few scholarly essays and reviews came from without. Among the early enterprises for the diffusion of the results of scientific and historical labours beyond the circle of professed scholars and men of science was a certain series started by the publishers of this Review, and known from the name of its editor (an active, pushing, able man of science, the close of whose career clouded a reputation that had been gained by many useful labours), as Lardner's Cyclopædia. To this series Mr. Thirlwall was invited to contribute a History of Greece. Taking the standard recognised for other subjects, what was probably expected was a popular narrative brought within the compass of two or three duodecimo volumes. To work on this scale, however, was soon found to be difficult, if not impossible, for one who in his treatment even of subordinate questions connected with his subject ever aimed at a singularly elaborate completeness. The Advertisement' to the first volume (published in 1835), accordingly states apologetically that the plan of the little work, thus begun, had been considerably enlarged 'since it was first undertaken,' and that the author feared that a critical eye might be able to detect some traces of this variation from the original design in the manner of treating one or two subjects. There still remained, however, after that first enlargement, the uneasy sense that he was writing for two different sets of readers, whose wants might not always 'exactly coincide,' one, that of the large class who had neither leisure nor means to study Greek history for themselves in its original sources,' the other, that of the scholars to whom the writer would more willingly have addressed himself; and to this may be ascribed, we believe, the fact that the verdict of most students has, of late years, assigned the first place among the writers of the history of Greece, not to Thirlwall, but to Grote. In knowledge the former was at least the equal of the latter, in calmness of judgment and freedom from the partisanship which transfers the feelings of modern political contests to those of analogous parties in the conflicts of ancient commonwealths, he stood confessedly on a higher elevation. The latter had, however, the almost inestimable advantage of a self-chosen task, of working at his own will and at his own leisure, without the fear of remonstrances from an impatient editor pressing for volumes in succession at fixed intervals, and the result was that what he produced was more manifestly a labour of love, that to which he had not only brought all the vast stores of his information, but into which he had transfused