The mention of these qualities in Thirlwall suggests to me that I ought not to omit some mention of the great work of a very similar student--this, too, stimulated by Mitford--I mean the _Fasti Hellenici_, 'a civil and literary chronology of the Greeks from the earliest times to the death of Augustus[12:1].' It is not, properly speaking, a history, but the materials for the fullest possible history of Greece, with all its offshoots, such as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Hither Asia, arranged and tabulated with a patience and care to which I know no parallel. Any one who examines this work will wonder that it could have been accomplished within the fifteen years during which the several volumes appeared. It is astonishing how difficult the student finds it to detect a passage in the obscurest author that Clinton has not seen; and his ordinary habit is not to indicate, but to quote all the passages _verbatim_. The book is quite unsuited for a schoolboy, but to any serious enquirer into the history of Greece it is positively indispensable. The influence of Gaisford, then probably the greatest of Greek scholars, obtained for the book the adequate setting of the Clarendon Press. Clinton worked with a calmness and deliberation quite exceptional; and though he knew no German, had so completely mastered his subject that the Germans have since indeed translated, re-edited, and abridged him: they have never been able to supersede him. Even when he is wrong or obsolete, he can be corrected by the full materials he has laid before the reader. But the perfect coldness of his reasoning, the absence of all passion, the abnegation of all style, make the book unapproachable except to a specialist. [Sidenote: Contrast of Grote's life.] [Sidenote: His theory Radicalism.] § 6. For the same reason Thirlwall's great and solid book was ousted at once from public favour by the appearance of Grote's history. Two minds more unlike can hardly be imagined, admitting that they were both honest and hard workers, and that both knew German as well as Greek, Latin, and French. Instead of a cold, calm college don, loving cautious statement and accurate rendering as the highest of virtues; instead of a mild and orthodox Liberal both in religion and politics,--we have a business man, foreign to university life and its traditions, a sceptic in religion, a Positivist in philosophy, and above all an advanced Radical in politics, invading the subject hitherto thought the preserve and apanage of the pedagogue or the pedant. Of course he occasionally missed the exact force of an optative, or the logic of a particle; he excited the fury of men like Shilleto, to whom accuracy in Greek prose was the one perfection, containing all the Law and the Prophets. What was far worse, he even mistook and misstated evidence which bore against his theories, and was quite capable of being unfair, not from dishonesty, but from prejudice. [Sidenote: The influences of his time.]