in the dramatic faculty on the one hari, and the metaphysical faculty on the other hand, that he felt himself deficient; and it is accordingly in the political rather than the philosophical or biographical department of Listory,-in giving a combined view of different states or of different peri: is-in analyzing laws, parties, and institutions, that his chief merit consists.

What were his views of Modern History will appear in the mention of his Oxford Professorship. But it was in ancient history that he naturally felt the greatest delight. "I linger round a subject, which nothing could tempt me to quit but the consciousness of treating it too unworthily," were his expressions of regret when he had finished his edition of Thucydides; "the subject of what is miscalled ancient history, the really modern history of the civilization of Greece and Rome, which has for years interested me so deeply, that it is painful to feel myself, after all, so unable to paint it fully." His earliest labours had been devoted not to Roman, but to Greek history; and there still remains amongst his MSS. a short sketch of the rise of the Greek nation, written between 1820 and 1823, and carried down to the time of the Persian wars. And in later years, his edition of Thucydides, undertaken originally with the design of illustrating that author rather historically than philologically, contains in its notes and appendices, the most systematic remains of his studies in this direction, and at one time promised to embody his thoughts on the most striking periods of Athenian history. Nor, after he had abandoned this design, did he ever lose his interest in the subject; his real sympathies (if one may venture to say so) were always with Athens rather than with Rome; some of the most characteristic points of his mind were Greek rather than Roman; from the vacancy of the early Roman annals he was for ever turning to the cotemporary records of the Greek commonwealths to pay "an involuntary tribute of respect and affection to old associations and immortal names on which we can scarcely dwell too long or too often;" the falsehood and emptiness of the Latin historians were for ever suggesting the contrast of their Grecian rivals; the two opposite poles in which he seemed to realize his ideals of the worst and the best qualities of an historian with

feelings of personal antipathy and sympathy towards each, were Livy and Thucydides.

Even these scattered notices of what he had once hoped to have worked out more fully, will often furnish the student of Greek history with the means of entering upon its most remarkable epochs under his guidance. Those who have carefully read his works, or shared his instructions, can still enjoy the light which he has thrown on the rise and progress of the Greek commonwealths, and their analogy with the States of modern Europe; and apply, in their manifold relations, the principles which he has laid down with regard to the peculiar ideas attached in the Greek world to race, to citizenship, and to law. They can still catch the glow of almost passionate enthusiasm, with which he threw himself into the age of Pericles, and the depth of emotion with which he watched, like an eye-witness, the failure of the Syracusan expedition. They can still trace the almost personal sympathy with which he entered into the great crisis of Greek society, when "Socrates, the faithful servant of truth and virtue, fell a victim to the hatred alike of the democratical and aristocratical vulgar;" when, "all that audacity can dare, or subtlety contrive, to make the words of 'good' and 'evil' change their meaning, was tried in the days of Plato, and by his eloquence, and wisdom, and faith unshaken was put to shame." They can well imagine the intense admiration with which he would have dwelt, in detail, on what he has now left only in faint outline:-Alexander at Babylon impressed him as one of the most solemn scenes in all history; the vision of Alexander's career, even to the lively image which he entertained of his youthful and godlike beauty, rose constantly before him as the most signal instance of the effects of a good education against the temptations of power;-as being, beyond anything recorded in Roman history, the career of "the greatest man of the ancient world;" and even after the period, when Greece ceased to possess any real interest for him, he loved to hang with a melancholy pleasure over the last decay of Greek genius and wisdom-"the worn-out and cast-off skin, from which the living serpent had gone forth to carry his youth and vigour to other lands."

But, deep as was his interest in Grecian history, and though in some respects no other part of ancient literature derived so great a light from his researches, it was to his History of Rome that he looked as the chief monument of his historical fame. Led to it partly by his personal feeling of regard towards Niebuhr and Chevalier Bunsen, and by the sense of their encouragement, there was, moreover, something in the subject itself peculiarly attractive to him, whether in the magnificence of the field which it embraced,-(" the History of Rome," he said, "must be in some sort the History of the World,")—or in the congenial element which he naturally found in the character of a people, "whose distinguishing quality was their love of institutions and order, and their reverence for law." Accordingly, after approaching it in various forms, he at last conceived the design of the work, of which the three published volumes are the result, but which he had intended to carry down, in successive periods, to what seemed to him its natural termination in the coronation of Charlemagne. (Pref. vol. i. p. vii.)

The two earlier volumes occupy a place in the History of Rome, and of the ancient world generally, which in England had not and has not been otherwise filled up. Yet in the subjects of which they treat, his peculiar talents had hardly a fair field for their exercise. The want of personal characters and of distinct events, which Niebuhr was to a certain extent able to supply from the richness of his learning and the felicity of his conjectures, was necessarily a disadvantage to an historian whose strength lay in combining what was already known, rather than in decyphering what was unknown, and whose veneration for his predecessor made him distrustful not only of dissenting from his judgment, but even of seeing or discovering, more, than had been by him seen or discovered before. "No man," as he said,

can step gracefully or boldly when he is groping his way in the dark," (Hist. Rome, i. p. 133,) and it is with a melancholy interest that we read his complaint of the obscurity of the subject:-"I can but encourage myself, whilst painfully feeling my way in such thick darkness, with the hope of arriving at last at the light, and enjoying all the freshness and fulness of a detailed cotemporary history." (Hist. Rome, ii. p. 447.) But

the narrative of the second Punic war, which occupies the third and posthumous volume, both as being comparatively unbroken ground, and as affording so full a scope for his talents in military and geographical descriptions, may well be taken as a measure of his historical powers, and has been pronounced by his editor, Archdeacon Hare, to be the first history which "has given anything like an adequate representation of the wonderful genius and noble character of Hannibal." With this volume the work was broken off: but it is impossible not to dwell for a moment on what it would have been had he lived to complete it.

The outline in his early articles in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, of the later history of the Civil Wars, "a subject so glorious," he writes in 1824," that I groan beforehand when I think how certainly I shall fail in doing it justice,"-provokes of itself the desire to see how he would have gone over the same ground again with his added knowledge and experience—how the characters of the time, which even in this rough sketch stand out more clearly than in any other English work on the same period, would have been reproduced-how he would have represented the pure character and military genius of his favourite hero, Pompey-or expressed his mingled admiration and abhorrence of the intellectual power and moral degradation of Cæsar;-how he would have done justice to the coarseness and cruelty of Marius, "the lowest of democrats"—or amidst all his crimes, to the views of "the most sincere of aristocrats," Sylla. And in advancing to the further times of the Empire, his scattered hints exhibit his strong desire to reach those events,

a

a It may be necessary, (especially since the recent publication of Niebuhr's Lectures, where a very different opinion is advocated,) to refer to Dr. Arnold's own estimate of the moral character of Pompey, which, it is believed, he retained unaltered, in the Encyc. Metrop. ii. 252. (Later Roman Commonwealth, vol. i. 542.) The following extract from a letter of General Napier may not be without interest in confirmation of an opinion which he had himself formed independently of it. "Tell Dr. Arnold to beware of falling into the error of Pompey being a bad general; he was a very great one, perhaps in a purely military sense greater than Cæsar."-At the same time it should be observed, that his admiration of Cæsar's intellectual greatness was always very strong, and it was almost with an indignant animation that, on the starting of an objection that Cæsar's victories were only gained over inferior enemies, he at once denied the inference, and instantly recounted campaign after campaign in refutation.

M

to which all the intervening volumes seemed to him only a prelude. "I would not overstrain my eyes or my faculties," he writes in 1840, "but whilst eyesight and strength are yet undecayed, I want to get through the earlier Roman History, to come down to the Imperial and Christian times, which form a subject of such deep interest." What his general admiration for Niebuhr was as a practical motive in the earlier part of his work, that his deep aversion to Gibbon, as a man, was in the latter part. "My highest ambition," he said, as early as 1826, "and what I hope to do as far as I can, is to make my history the very reverse of Gibbon in this respect,-that whereas the whole spirit of his work, from its low morality, is hostile to religion, without speaking directly against it; so my greatest desire would be, in my History, by its high morals and its general tone, to be of use to the cause, without actually bringing it forward.”

There would have been the place for his unfolding the rise of the Christian Church, not in a distinct ecclesiastical history, but as he thought it ought to be written in conjunction with the history of the world. "The period from Augustus to Aurelian," he writes, as far back as 1824, "I will not willingly give up to any one, because I have a particular object, namely, to blend the civil and religious history together more than has ever yet been done." There he would, on the one hand, have expressed his view of the external influences, which checked the free growth of the early Church-the gradual revival of Judaic principles under a Christian form-the gradual extinction of individual responsibility, under the system of government, Roman and Gentile in its origin, which, according to his latest opinion, took possession of the Church rulers from the time of Cyprian. There, on the other hand, he would have dwelt on the selfdenying zeal and devotion to truth, which peculiarly endeared to him the very name of Martyr, and on the bond of Christian brotherhood, which he delighted to feel with such men as Athanasius and Augustine, discerning, even in what he thought. their weaknesses, a signal testimony to the triumph of Christianity, unaided by other means, than its intrinsic excellence and holiness. Lastly, with that analytical method, which he