d held it till his death in 1868, having
worthily sustained the glory of this the most literary of all great
preferments in the Church of England by tradition, and having earned
among English ecclesiastical historians a place like that of Napier
among their military comrades.

Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, and the
unmistakable impress of that University was on both, though less on
Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more interesting that their chief
historical contemporaries of the same class were, the one a Cambridge
man, and one of the most distinguished, the other not a University man
at all. Both Grote and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the
same public school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born
in 1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that business
for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, or as it then
began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the Philosophical Radicals
of his time--persons who followed Bentham and the elder Mill. He was
elected member for the City in the first Reform Parliament and held the
seat for nine years; though if he had not retired he would probably have
been turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two years
later, and gave himself up to his _History of Greece_, which was
published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He died in 1871, and
was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, four years later, his
school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and junior by three years,
Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of the rare examples of
extraordinary infant precocity (he could read Latin at three and Greek
at four) who have been great scholars and men of distinction in after
life, and to a ripe age. He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born
at Stepney. From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant undergraduate
career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. He entered Lincoln's
Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but preferred the Church, and took
orders in his thirtieth year. He had already shown a strong leaning to
theology, and had translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to
Cambridge, taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his
Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, Master
of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was consoled by
Brougham with a Yorkshi