Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some delightful letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some essays, while Grote, besides his historical work, produced some political and other work before it, with a large but not very good book on Plato, and the beginning of another on Aristotle after it. But it is by their _Histories of Greece_ that they must live in literature. These histories (of which Grote's was planned and begun as early as 1823, though not completed till long afterwards, while Thirlwall's began to appear in 1835, and was finished just after Grote's saw the light) were both written with a certain general similarity of point of view as antidotes to Mitford, and as putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and ever typical history of the Greek states. But in other respects they diverge widely; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars that the more popular, and as the French would say _tapageur_, of the two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and the excellent form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very nearly as much a "party pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the advocate's client being in this case not merely the Athenian democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has absolutely no style; its scale is much too great; the endless discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's eye and mind to impartial and judicial handling; and the reader constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and flourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the Historic Muse.