Grote's style is heavy and ungainly. He plods along, correct as a rule, but uninspiring and unattractive. He is similarly clumsy in the use of materials. Skilful selection might have appreciably shortened his history; but Grote rarely prunes with sufficient severity, and often he does not prune at all. His habit of pouring out the whole mass of his material in the shape of notes lightens the labour of his successors, but injures his own work as an artistic history. Nevertheless, though Grote had no genius, and nothing that deserves to be called a style, his _History of Greece_ holds the field. It does so because of its solidity and conscientious thoroughness, because of its patient investigation of the origin and meaning of institutions, and because its very faults were, after all, faults which sprang from sympathy. Grote was the first who did full justice to the Athenian people; and he may be pardoned if he sometimes did them more than justice. As these three, Arnold, Thirlwall and Grote, dealt with the ancient world in its glory and greatness, so there were two, Milman and Finlay, who traced its decay, or the process of transition from the ancient to the modern world. [Sidenote: Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868).] Henry Hart Milman in his earlier days wrote poetry. The turning-point in his literary career was the publication of the _History of the Jews_ (1830), the first English work which adequately treats the Jews in their actual historical setting, not in the traditional way as a 'peculiar people' with practically no historical setting at all. Milman afterwards edited Gibbon and wrote a life of the historian; and in 1840 the result of his studies appeared in the _History of Christianity under the Empire_. In 1855 the _History of Latin Christianity down to the Death of Pope Nicholas V._ set the crown upon his labours. This work is Milman's best title to remembrance, and though errors have been detected in it, the tone and spirit are good, the method sound and the scholarship admirable. [Sidenote: George Finlay (1799-1875).] George Finlay has suffered from an unattractive theme, for few care about the obscure fortunes of Greece after its conquest by the Romans. But Finlay was an enthusiast who not only wrote about Greece but lived in it; and this residence (continuous after 1854) imparts to his history its most valuable qualities. Finlay published a series of works on Greece between 1844 and 1861, all of which were summed up in his _History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the Present Time_ (1877). [Sidenote: John Mason Neale (1818-1866).] [Sidenote: Charles Merivale (1808-1893).]