His considerable literary power became more considerable still in
two of his sons: the eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at
Oxford, Mr. F. T. Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to
be mentioned; while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826
and died in 1888, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most
brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a
Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the expense
of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a century a member of
the consular and diplomatic service of his own. His _Narrative_ of his
Arabian journey, his _Dutch Guiana_, and some remarkable poems are only
a few of his works, all of which have strong character.

Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772-1835), whose
_Lives of Knox_ (1812) and _Melville_ (1819) entitle him to something
like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism in its militant
period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person not given to
nicknames), "the Protestant Hildebrand," was a worthy and learned man of
untiring industry, and his subjects so intimately concern not merely
Scottish but British history for nearly two centuries, that his handling
of them could not but be important. But he was desperately prejudiced,
and his furious attack on Sir Walter Scott's _Old Mortality_, by which
he is perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from
uninteresting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and
aesthetic comprehension.

The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a decade of
historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets; and with Milman and
Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle
in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and Macaulay in 1800, it may probably
challenge comparison with any period of equal length. The batch falls
into three pretty distinct classes, and the individual members of it are
also pretty widely separated in importance, so that it may be more
convenient to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather
than in the direct order of their births.

Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his grandfather
William being the first and not the worst champion of Queen Mary against
the somewhat Philistine estimates of Hume and Robertson, and his father
Alexander a Professor of History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent
writer in various kinds of _belles le