Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 23.djvu/299



being denounced, in rather mixed fashion, as a persecution of unitarianism in favour of orthodoxy, or of theistic philosophy in favour of materialism, or as both the one and the other. In November the decision as to Mr. Martineau was re-affirmed, and a new call for candidates was ordered. Grote, in spite of renewed denunciations, decided to maintain silence and work resolutely for a lay appointment. Curiously enough, he acted in complete forgetfulness that he had taken up the very same position on the first election. Not till some two years later was the old struggle brought to his recollection by the reading of a diary-note of Mrs. Grote's (in presence of the writer of this account), and great was the aged man's surprise at his lapse of memory. His former action had only to be known, to have swept away the misrepresentations showered upon him in 1866; but his very forgetfulness gives the more striking evidence of his ingrained consistency of character. Unfortunately Mrs. Grote, though much impressed by it at the time, has not mentioned the fact in the narrative, otherwise very unsatisfactory and misleading, which she gave (in Personal Life, p. 279) of the events of the year. A second report of the professors recommended the youthful candidate whom Grote had from the first preferred, Mr. Martineau being passed over on the ground of foregone double rejection. Grote in the council (December 1866) was just able, with the help of several men of strenuous character, to bear down various pleas for delay, and then by a more decisive majority to carry the election. The excitement soon died away, and it was little more than a year afterwards that he was raised by universal acclamation to the presidentship. His provision by will of an endowment (in prospect) for the chair, dated 1869, was laden with the characteristic condition, that if a holder of the professorship should at the time of his appointment be, or should afterwards become, 'a minister of the Church of England or of any other religious persuasion,' he should not receive the annual income of the foundation, but this should be 're-invested and added to the principal until the time when the said professorship' should 'be occupied by a layman.' The endowment was made over to the college by Mrs. Grote in 1876, two years before her death.

From 1850 Grote's energies were not less devoted to the University of London, constituted by royal charter as an examining body in 1837, when the 'London University' in Gower Street had accepted incorporation as University College without degree-conferring powers. After a time of little efficiency, the new university, in 1850, had its governing senate reconstituted and strengthened by the addition of seven distinguished men, among whom was Grote. He at once began to join regularly in the senate's deliberations, and very soon took a leading part in preparing the great transformations which the university was to undergo. First, the graduates won the right to form a constituent part of the university with recognised powers, by help, from within the senate, of no one more than of Grote. By the time this right was formally conceded in a new charter (1858), the more radical change was also effected of throwing open the examinations (except in medicine) to all comers. These had been previously confined to candidates from certain affiliated institutions; the list of which, beginning with the two great London colleges (University and King's), had come to include, besides a number of dissenting theological colleges, some merely secondary schools and a place of evening instruction. When Grote joined the senate, the process of affiliation, which had long ceased to have exclusive reference to London, was going steadily forward. Afterwards, it began to be pushed on purpose by some who desired to render all restriction useless. Grote, who had worked so hard to found a teaching university in London, was at first anxious to maintain a system of ordered academic instruction in connection with the examining university. Finding, however, that the affiliation as it had been carried out had destroyed all power of directly securing this, he went over to the other side, and became foremost champion of the cause of open examinations. He essayed (1857), though in vain, to stem the opposition within University College to the proposed change, and drew up for the senate of the university the elaborate report that sought to meet the hostile arguments urged from many different quarters. This report, adopted in the end only by his own casting-vote in the chair, led, in 1857, to the final determination of the question by the new charter of 1858. He took a like decisive part in the protracted deliberations that ensued before the reformed scheme of examinations was launched, advocating in particular the claims of classical learning and of philosophy. At the same time, he was one of the readiest to welcome the idea of instituting special degrees in science (adopted in 1859), though he took care that the word 'science' should be interpreted in no narrow sense of natural as exclusive of mental and moral. Raised in April 1862 to the dignity of vice-chancellor, with chief control thence-forth of the working of the university, he was at first baulked in an effort that year to procure the admission of women to the