Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/225

Rh equivalent to great,&quot;) is the same as that of Hugo Grotius, with whom the Grotes would gladly have traced a relation ship, but the evidence was wanting. George Grote s grand father, Andreas (born in 1710), a merchant of Bremen, removed to England, and after some years of successful business joined Mr George Prescott in founding the banking- house of &quot; Grote, Prescott, & Company &quot; (January 1, 1766). He was married twice. His eldest son by his second marriage, George (born in 1762), was married (in 1793) to Selina, daughter of the Rev. Dr Peck well, one of the countess of Huntingdon s chaplains, whose portrait is pre served in the vestry of the chapel at Chichester, where he ministered. Dr Peckwell was descended on the mother s side from the French Protestant family of De Blosset, who had left Touraine in consequence of the revocation of the edict of Nantes ; and thus the historian, who was the son of George Grote and Selina Peckwell, had a share of that Huguenot blood which has been a rich source of intellectual as well as industrial life in England. Like many other eminent men, George Grote owed much of his future intellectual greatness to his mother s careful training. Having a strong desire to see her son excel in learning, she taught him reading and writing herself, and even grounded him in the elements of Latin before he was sent to the grammar school at Sevenoaks, in his sixth year (1800). The four years spent there gave an earnest of his whole future life. In the language of his biographer, who has lately attained the end of a life inseparably interwoven with his, &quot; he evinced a decided aptitude for study, being rarely found behindhand with his tasks, and ranking habitually above boys of his age in the class to which he belonged.&quot; In his tenth year he was removed to the Charter-house, the headmaster of which, Dr Raine, had the honour of training, along with George Grote, Connop Thirlwall, Dean Wad- dington and his brother Horace, Sir Cresswell Cresswell, Sir Henry Havelock, and other men of future distinction. Grote was not allowed to share the course of most of his schoolfellows at a university ; but this great privation was turned into a pre-eminent distinction by the resolution with which his own strong will and untiring industry supplied the loss. The suppose! advantage of an early application to business led tho father to take George into the bank at the age of sixteen. But his six years at the Charter-house had not only imbued him with a strong taste for classical learning, but had supplied him with that motive to high culture, which forms the most convincing argument in its favour, and to which he remained faithful through a half century of educational disputes and heresies. It was not as an alternative to a life of business, but as its proper complement, that he chose and advocated ancient learning. &quot; Looking forward,&quot; says his biographer, &quot; to a commercial course of life, certain to prove uninteresting in itself, he resolved to provide for himself the higher resources of intellectual occupation.&quot; Engaged in the bank throughout the day, he devoted his early mornings and evenings to a systematic course of reading, of which the chief subjects were the ancient classics, history, metaphysics, and political economy, to the last of which he was attracted by the writings of David Ricardo, whose personal acquaintance he formed in 1817. To these studies he added the learning of German by the aid of a Lutheran clergyman, which, together with his knowledge of French and Italian, placed the stores of Continental scholarship within his reach. His chief recreation was music, and he learned to play the violoncello, to accompany his mother, who was a fine musician. Arrived at the age of manhood (in the winter of 1814-1815), he formed the acquaintance of the young lady who afterwards became his wife, devoted to and worthy of him, the very complement of his life, intellectual as well as social, and finally his biographer in a spirit of loving but not indiscriminate admiration. This was Miss Harriet Lewin, the daughter of Mr Thomas Lewin, of Bexley, in Kent, a gentleman of old family and independent fortune. She was born at Southampton, July 1, 1792, and was consequently nearly two years older than Grote. From causes which need not be related here their intimacy was suspended for three years, during which Grote s studies made steady progress. To this period belongs his earliest literary composition, an essay on his favourite Lucretius, which still exists in MS. His letters also record the careful study of Aristotle, his final estimate of whom formed his last unfinished work. But the most interesting light is thrown on the method and course of his studies in the diary which he kept for Miss Lewin s information. This record bears witness, not only to the wide diversity of his studies in ancient and modern literature, philosophy, and political economy, but also to the fact that he read the authors themselves whom he wished to know, read them as a whole, instead of merely reading what others had written about them. An epoch, perhaps the most critical turning-point of Grote s intellectual life, was formed by his introduction, through David Ricardo, to James Mill, who was then com posing his metaphysical work entitled An Analysis of ike Human Mind. Already attracted to this study, Grote became Mill s admiring disciple in mental and political philosophy. From this time he adopted the fixed principles, from which he never receded, of experience as the source of all knowledge, and utility as the foundation of morals. The views derived from Mill were confirmed by the teaching of Jeremy Bentham, and by intercourse with a band of young disciples, over whom the two philosophers wielded an unbounded influence. Among these John Stuart Mill began now to make his appearance as a boy of twelve years old. It is important to note the influence which the study of metaphysics exercised upon the development of Grote s intellectual character. To the general public he is chiefly known as an historian ; but he was equally dis tinguished as a metaphysical philosopher. To the teaching of Jamea Mill may also be traced his democratic principles and his zeal for freedom of thought, hardening into in tolerance of all religious systems and their ministers. But, however they may have determined his course upon certain occasions, these antipathies never struck their root down into the real soil of his gentle and courteous nature. In 1820, at the age of twenty-four, he was married to Miss Harriet Lewin. They lived at first at the banking- house in Threadneedle Street. The confined situation soon told on Mrs Grote s health, and the death of her only child, a week after its birth, was followed by a dangerous illness. It was at her bedside at Hampstead, during her slow recovery, that Grote composed the first work he pub lished, an Essay on Parliamentary Reform, in reply to an article by Sir James Mackintosh in the Edinburgh Reoiew, No. 61 (1821). The pamphlet is a vigorous assertion of the broadest principles of popular representation, in oppo sition to a scheme of class representation sketched by the reviewer. It proclaimed Grote s adherence to those political views held by the party afterwards called the &quot;philosophic radicals,&quot; and it strongly pleaded for the vote by ballot, of which he afterwards became the parliamentary advocate. The most important parts of this pamphlet were embodied in his later essay on the Essentials of Parlia mentary Reform (1831), reprinted in his Minor Works. In April 1822 Grote sent a vigorous letter to the Morning Chronicle in reply to Canning's speech against Lord John Russell's motion for reform. In the same year he spent much time upon some MSS. of Jeremy Bentham, which the aged philosopher entrusted to his young disciple to put into a readable form. After carefully digesting and 