we may content ourselves here by simply stating what appears to be the _rationale_ of the process by which the distinguished author of the History of Greece was led into the maintenance of such an untenable position. Now the influences which acted on the learned historian’s mind in this matter seem reducible to three--(1.) Mr. Grote is characteristically a polemical historian; from beginning to end of his book he has in his eye, and is writing against, a class of writers who had made it a business, in writing the history of Greece, to write against the Athenian democracy, and through that, against democracy in general. With such a literary mission, Mr. Grote, however triumphant in the main, was constantly exposed to the strong temptation of vindicating characters that had been previously abused, and abusing those whose respectability had hitherto stood unquestioned; (2.) In the course of his sweeping progress of knocking down old ideals and setting up new ones, no figures were more likely to call his chivalrous faculty of vindication into play than the Sophists; for they were, as we have seen, the natural guides of the lusty young democracy, and as such the special favourites of a historian whose business it was to justify and glorify the Athenians in all the characteristic phases of their social and political life. And to a certain extent no doubt the distinguished historian was right in maintaining that the antagonists of Socrates were not so black as they had been painted by many, but represented a considerable element of civic worth and respectability. But he was certainly not justified in wiping out that antagonism altogether from the record,--an antagonism which was just as marked in Athens as that more famous one in Jerusalem four centuries later, between the Scribes and Pharisees and the first preachers of the Gospel. The manner in which Mr. Grote endeavours to confound Socrates with the herd of Sophists, from the mere external resemblance of the weapons which they used, is unworthy of a great historian. It was enough that such a confusion should have blinded the eyes of the Athenian vulgar, and their great jest-maker Aristophanes, without being made at this time of day to serve as a serious vindication of the great mass of Sophistical teachers; but (3.) Mr. Grote was led to elevate the Sophists, and so, comparatively, to degrade their great antagonist, not only from his position as the champion of Athenian democracy, but from his sympathy with the philosophical principles of the Sophists, as opposed to those of Socrates and Plato. These principles are those of the Sensational as opposed to what is commonly called the Ideal or Intellectual philosophy, the philosophy which gathers its conclusions exclusively from what is external, while looking with suspicion on any categorical intuitions, God-given instincts, or God-seeking aspirations that may assert themselves from within. With this temper Mr. Grote is naturally