ess those descriptive powers which, in the work of Mr Alison,
render the parts which are most episodical, invariably the most
interesting; so that, however important and eventful the main stream of
his narrative may be, a reader of Alison always delights to find the
author starting afresh from some remote era, on some distant soil, and
call willingly quit even Paris and her Revolution, to revisit with him
the rustic republics of Switzerland, or to build up Holland again from
the sea, or to call to life the people of Poland, and fill the plains
again with their strange military diet of a hundred thousand mounted
senators.

There is much of the philosopher, little of the artist, in Mr. Grote;
nor are the charms of style those which he has sedulously cultivated, or
by which he is anxious to obtain attention. He writes in a manly,
straightforward manner, and expresses his meaning with sufficient force
and perspicuity: but there is no sustained elegance of diction; there is
often all apparent disdain of it. At least we meet occasionally with
quite conversational expressions, introduced--not, be it remarked, with
that dexterous ease and felicitous taste which render them so effective
in compositions of the highest order--but bluntly, carelessly, as if
they were verily the first that came to hand, and the author did not
think it worth his while to look for others. It should be mentioned,
however, that this inequality of style is partly the effect of a desire
to keep as close as possible in his narrative to the original Greek, so
that it is the crudeness of _translation_ we sometimes encounter. We
raise no quarrel with him ourselves on this point; his language, in
general, is all that is requisite; but a critic disposed to be severe on
the minor delinquencies of style, might justify his censure by
extracting many a hasty and neglected sentence, and many all uncouth
expression. In fine, we accept of the present work as a valuable
contribution to the history of Greece, and to the science itself of
history; we accept it as a manifest improvement upon its predecessors in
some of the highest and most important elements of historical
composition; but we by no means accept it as _the_ History of Greece, as
the final narrative of the people of Athens and Sparta. For this it is
too polemical, diffuse, incondite. On the ground which this writer and
others have been obliged to contend for, which they have conquered and
cleared, our poster