ral meeting of citizens. The Greeks were one of those races,
and it happened, as was natural, that there was in process of time a
struggle, the earliest that we know of, between the aristocratical
party, originally represented by the senate, and the popular party,
represented by the 'general meeting.' This is plainly a question of
principle, and its being so has led to its history being written more
than two thousand years afterwards in a very remarkable manner. Some
seventy years ago an English country gentleman named Mitford, who, like
so many of his age, had been terrified into aristocratic opinions by
the first French Revolution, suddenly found that the history of the
Peloponnesian War was the reflex of his own time. He took up his
Thucydides, and there he saw, as in a mirror, the progress and the
struggles of his age. It required some freshness of mind to see this;
at least, it had been hidden for many centuries. All the modern
histories of Greece before Mitford had but the vaguest idea of it; and
not being a man of supreme originality, he would doubtless have had
very little idea of it either, except that the analogy of what he saw
helped him by a telling object-lesson to the understanding of what he
read. Just as in every country of Europe in 1793 there were two
factions, one of the old-world aristocracy, and the other of the
incoming democracy, just so there was in every city of ancient Greece,
in the year 400 B.C., one party of the many and another of the few.
This Mr. Mitford perceived, and being a strong aristocrat, he wrote a
'history,' which is little except a party pamphlet, and which, it must
be said, is even now readable on that very account. The vigour of
passion with which it was written puts life into the words, and retains
the attention of the reader. And that is not all. Mr. Grote, the great
scholar whom we have had lately to mourn, also recognising the identity
between the struggles of Athens and Sparta and the struggles of our
modern world, and taking violently the contrary side to that of
Mitford, being as great a democrat as Mitford was an aristocrat, wrote
a reply, far above Mitford's history in power and learning, but being
in its main characteristic almost identical, being above all things a
book of vigorous political passion, written for persons who care for
politics, and not, as almost all histories of antiquity are and must
be, the book of a man who cares for scholarship more than for anythi