Representative British Orations Volume 4 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
History
Representative British Orations Volume 4 (of 4): With Introductions and Explanatory Notes
Speeches, addresses, etc., English
NOTE 11, p. 151.--George Finlay has titles to fame other than his
connection with the rather sordid _cause célèbre_ of Don Pacifico.
As remarked above, he was not born in Scotland, but at Faversham,
Kent, Dec. 21, 1799; and passed the greater part of his long life far
from the north. While pursuing the study of Roman Jurisprudence at
Göttingen, about 1821, he met a Greek student from whose conversation
he was led to set out for Greece, like many another young Englishman
of the epoch, prepared to take part in the war for independence then
bursting forth. Arrived in Greece, also like many other English
Phil-Hellenes he had the usual encounter with Lord Byron (in his case
at Cephalonia), who communicated to him the well-known failure of his
illusions concerning the Greek character. More than the ordinary run
of Phil-Hellenes Finlay seems to have impressed himself upon the poet;
and they spent much time together at Athens and Mesolonghi. Finlay was
soon in the thick of the insurrection, and accompanied the chieftain
Odysseus on an expedition into the Morea, during which he saw much to
confirm Lord Byron’s pessimistic views. Nevertheless, at the close of
the war, his practical sympathy with Greece manifested itself in the
purchase of an estate in Attica, from which he hoped to be of use to
the country by the extension of economic and civil improvements. This
hope he soon considered to be useless: but his money was locked up in
his land purchases, and, as he himself said, there was nothing else to
do but to study. With the exception of a few absences, the remainder of
his life was spent in Greece, where he accomplished no small service
to the country of his residence, and one of great importance to the
world. The former lay in his severe, but justifiable, criticisms, in
the form of pamphlets or newspaper correspondence, of palpable errors
in Greek politics and administration. These censures, often translated
into the Greek papers, after a time really bore fruit, and, strangely
enough, did not arouse the touchy Greek character to resentment
against the critic. His service to the world was the composition of a
monumental history of Late, Byzantine, and Modern Greece, definitively
published, in 1877, by the Clarendon Press. The work covers the least
known and most confusing period of Greek history, known previously in
English almost solely by the picturesque, but rather un-oriented pages
of Gibbon. Of it Dr. Richard Garnett, in the “National Dictionary of
Biography,” says: “Finlay is a great historian of the type of Polybius,
Procopius, and Machiavelli, a man of affairs, who has qualified himself
for treating of public transactions by sharing in them, a soldier, a
statesman, and an economist.” In a word, the book is much more minute
than Gibbon; and, due doubtless to Finlay’s thorough understanding of
the Greek race, it is luminous on matters of social description, where
Gibbon preserves a large silence. Compared with the other Phil-Hellenes
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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