Neither can we congratulate Mr Grote on possessing the art of arrangement or compression, on the knowing when to abbreviate, or how to omit. His subject has in itself this unavoidable disadvantage, that the history of Greece lies scattered and broken up amongst many independent cities and communities: this disadvantage our author's voluminous and discursive manner does nothing to remedy, does much to aggravate. One would almost suspect that Mr Grote had entertained the idea that it belonged to the history of Greece to give us an account of all that the Greeks knew of history. It seems sufficient that a subject has been mentioned by Herodotus to entitle it to a place in his pages. This fulness of matter, it may be said, will enrich the work. Very true. But what if, in this process of enriching, the work be made unreadable? What if the treasures be so piled up and heaped together that to get at them may be little less difficult than to extract the precious metals originally from the mine? If the work advance on the plan hitherto pursued, it will be found that, "A History of Greece" is far too restricted a title, and that it should rather have been called a history of the ancient world during the times when the Greeks rose and flourished;--so well disposed does the author appear to wander over to Phoenicia and Assyria, to Babylon and Egypt. Mr Alison might as well have entitled his great historical work simply a history of the French Revolution. It is true, there is no reason to be given why Mr Grote should not do for ancient Europe during the period of the development of the Greeks, what Mr Alison has done for modern Europe during the great drama enacted by the people of France. Unhappily, however, Mr Grote does not possess 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.