But if the _History of Greece_ is Thirlwall's most solid contribution to literature, that which gives the best impression of the man, regarded by contemporaries as a rival of the greatest, is his _Letters to a Young Friend_.[3] Few collections of letters give a more charming view of a relation of pure friendship between two people of widely different age. They are weighty too because they touch at many points on questions of universal interest. It has been said that the letters a man writes ought to be ascribed to his correspondent in equal measure with himself; and it is certain that from the sympathy he found in this friendship Thirlwall drew an inspiration nothing else in his life ever gave him. [Sidenote: George Grote (1794-1871).] George Grote, the schoolfellow, friend and rival of Thirlwall, was a man in most respects widely different from the great Bishop. Thirlwall's thought was German in origin, though it was coloured by English ecclesiastical opinion. Grote was a Benthamite, and had all the hardness without quite all the force of that school. It was the rising school, and part of Grote's success was due to the fact that he was moving along the line of least resistance. He was a persevering, clear-sighted, determined man. As a historian of Greece he was patient and thorough. He had marked out the subject as his own more than twenty years before the publication, in 1846, of his first two volumes; and ten years more passed before the work was finished. Indeed, we may say that his whole life was devoted to it; for, according to his conception of history, _Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates_ (1865), and the incomplete Aristotelian studies issued posthumously in 1872, were parts and appendages of the history. Grote was spurred on to this work by political feelings more nearly related to the present time. He was irritated by the Toryism of Mitford's _History of Greece_, which he exposed in an article in the _Westminster Review_. Yet one of his own most conspicuous defects is that he too evidently holds a brief on the opposite side. He does not slur facts, still less does he falsify, but his arguments have sometimes the character of special pleading. Democracy becomes a kind of fetish to him. Its success in the Athens of the fifth century B.C. is made an argument for extending the English franchise in the nineteenth century A.D.; and Grote is wholly blind to the fact that the wide difference of circumstances makes futile all reasoning from the one case to the other.