ead of the perpetual
singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter
discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.

It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have sacrificed a
little too much, considering his age and its demands, to mere
dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and indeed he never
tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally far superior to Grote's,
he united a much fairer and more judicial mind, and the faculty of
writing--instead of loose stuff not exactly ungrammatical nor always
uncomely, but entirely devoid of any grace of style--an excellent kind
of classical English, but slightly changed from the best eighteenth
century models. And he had what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that
the historian need not--nay, that he ought not to--parade every detail
of the arguments by which he has reached his conclusions; but should
state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional
emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly
exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward as
examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods of historical
writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very much more than
popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might with advantage have put
on, now and then, a little more pomp and circumstance. But still the
contrast holds; and until fresh discoveries like that of the _Athenian
Polity_ accumulate to an extent which calls for and obtains a new real
historian of Greece, it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the
first rank as such in English.

Intimately connected with all these historians in time and style, but
having over them the temporary advantage of being famous in another way,
and the, as some think, permanent disadvantage of falling prematurely
out of public favour, was Thomas Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the
Isle of Wight, on 13th June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected a
fellow of Oriel--a distinction which was, and remained for two decades,
almost the highest in the University--and he gained both Chancellor's
Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was not in his time, as it
was very shortly afterwards, a centre of ecclesiastical orthodoxy; but
rather the home of a curious transition blend of thought which in
different persons took the high-and-dry or the Rationali