The present period has been fruitful also in departments of scholarship cognate to literary criticism. Among scholars in the old sense of the term the most distinguished were John Conington at Oxford and H. A. J. Munro at Cambridge. The former had the more versatile literary gift, but the latter was far more 'high built' in learning, and his edition of Lucretius is admittedly one of the triumphs of English classical culture. In the same sphere the great statesman, W. E. Gladstone, deserves mention, less perhaps for the positive value of his _Juventus Mundi_ and Homeric studies, than for the extraordinary energy which made such work possible amidst the distractions of party politics. More characteristic of the age has been the development of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English lore. Benjamin Thorpe and Joseph Bosworth both did valuable work in this sphere. The former edited Caedmon in 1832, and in the course of his long life supervised editions of nearly all the more important remains of Anglo-Saxon literature. Bosworth's name is identified with the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, which, though now philologically rather antiquated, was in its time a bold undertaking. Sir Frederick Madden, a somewhat younger man, performed for a later period the work Thorpe did for the beginning of our literature. The accomplished Richard Chenevix Trench, for twenty years Archbishop of Dublin, was not only an agreeable poet, but did great service to the study of the English language. His _Study of Words_ and _English Past and Present_ have done more to popularise philology than, probably, any other books we possess. The study of Eastern civilisation has been another special line of modern research. The explorations of Layard threw a flood of light upon Nineveh, and, in the still more remote East, Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson achieved the remarkable feat of deciphering the Persian cuneiform inscriptions. Curiously enough, the same thing was done independently and almost simultaneously by Dr. Edward Hincks. Another portion of the East was studied by E. W. Lane, the greatest English Arabic scholar of his time, the best translator before Sir Richard Burton of the _Arabian Nights_, and author of one of the best books on life in the East, the _Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians_. [Sidenote: George Borrow (1803-1881).]