In comparing Thirlwall's history with Grote's, the North British Review has the following judicious remarks: "Many persons, probably, who have no special devotion to Grecian history wish to study its main outlines in something higher than a mere school-book. To such readers we should certainly recommend Thirlwall rather than Grote. The comparative brevity, the greater clearness and terseness of the narrative, the freedom from diversions and digressions, all render it far better suited for such a purpose. But for the political thinker, who regards Grecian history chiefly in its practical bearing, Mr. Grote's work is far better adapted. The one is the work of a scholar, an enlarged and practical scholar indeed, but still one in whom the character of the scholar is the primary one. The other is the work of a politician and man of business, a London banker, a Radical M. P., whose devotion to ancient history and literature forms the most illustrious confutation of the charges brought against such studies as being useless and impractical." "The style of Thirlwall," says Dr. Samuel Warren of England, in his Introduction to Law Studies, "is dry, terse, and exact--not fitted, perhaps, for the historical tyro, but most acceptable to the advanced student who is in quest of things." GEORGE GROTE, Member of Parliament, and a London banker, who wrote a history of Greece in twelve volumes, published from 1846 to 1855, has been styled, by way of eminence, the historian of Greece, because his work is universally admitted by critics to be the best for the advanced student that has yet been written. The London Athenæum styles his history "a great literary undertaking, equally notable whether we regard it as an accession of standard value in our language, or as an honorable monument of what English scholarship can do." The London Quarterly Review says: "Errors the most inveterate, that have been handed down without misgiving from generation to generation, have been for the first time corrected by Mr. Grote; facts the most familiar have been presented in new aspects and relations; things dimly seen, and only partially apprehended previously, have now assumed their true proportions and real significance; while numerous traits of Grecian character; and new veins of Grecian thought and feeling, have been revealed to the eyes of scholars by Mr. Grote's searching criticism, like new forms of animated nature by the microscope."