Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/229

Rh Englishwomen of the present century. Endowed in youth with great personal beauty, which matured into a grand expression and noble presence in advanced age, she possessed intellectual powers of the highest order, combined with a lofty sense of duty and the strictest regard to truth. The chief events of her life have been already related in the preceding notice of her husband. Her own writings, besides the biography of Mr Grote, are A Memoir of the Life of Ary Schefer (1860), and Collected Papers (original and reprinted) in Prose and Verse (1862), of which the most important are a "Review of M. Lavergne's Essay on the Rural Economy of England," "Case of the Poor against the Rich correctly stated," a "Review of Thomas Moore's Life and Works," and the "History of East Burnham." But though she wrote lucidly and powerfully, it has been well observed by one of her friends that "her writings fail to give a just idea of the irresistible fascination of her conversation. That she never succeeded in fully transmitting to paper; and it remains a thing of unapproachable excellence and tender memory, only understood by those to whom it offered the highest mental enjoyment."

 GROTEFEND,  (1775-1853), to whose patience and ingenuity the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions was originally due, was born at Münden in Hanover, June 9, 1775. He was educated partly in his native town, partly at Ilfeld, where he remained till 1795, when he entered the university of Göttingen, and there became the friend of Heyne, Tychsen, and Heeren. Heyne's recommendation procured for him an assistant mastership in the Göttingen gymnasium in 1797. While there he published his work De Pasigrapltia sive Scriptura Universali (1799), which first brought him into notice, and led to his appointment in 1803 as prorector of the gymnasium of Frankfort-on-the-Main, and shortly afterwards as conrector. Grotefend was best known during his lifetime as a Latin and Italian philologist, though the attention he paid to his own language is shown by his Anfangsgründe der deutscken Poesie, published in 1815, and his foundation of a society for investigating the German tongue in 1817. In 1821 he became director of the gymnasium at Hanover, a post which he retained till his retirement in 1849, four years before his death. In 1823-4 appeared his revised edition of Wenck's Latin grammar, in two volumes, followed by a smaller grammar for the use of schools in 1826; in 1835-8 a systematic attempt to explain the fragmentary remains of the Umbrian dialect, entitled Rudimenta Linguæ Umbricæ ex Inscriptionibus antiquis enodata (in eight parts); and in 1839 a work of similar character upon Oscan (Rudimenta Linguæ Oscæ). In the same year he published an important memoir on the coins of Bactria, under the name of Die Münzen der griechischen, parthischen, und indoskythischen Könige von Bactrien und den Ländern am Indus. He soon, however, returned to his favourite subject, and brought out a work in five parts, Zur Geographic und Geschichte von Altitalien (1840-2). Previously, in 1836, he had written a preface to Wagenfeld's translation of the spurious Sanchoniathon of Philo Byblius, which professed to have been discovered in the preceding year in the Portuguese convent of Santa Maria de Merinhao. But it was in the East rather than in the West that Grotefend did the work which has given him a lasting name. The mysterious cuneiform inscriptions of Persia had for some time been attracting attention in Europe; exact copies of them had been published by the elder Niebuhr, who lost his eyesight over the work; and Grotefend's friend, Tychsen of Rostock, believed that he had ascertained the characters in the column now known to be Persian to be alphabetic. At this point Grotefend took the matter up. His first discovery was communicated to the Royal Society of Göttingen in 1800, and reviewed by Tychsen two years afterwards. In 1815 he gave an account of it in Heeren's great work on ancient history, and in 1837 published his Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der persepolitanischen Keilschrift. Three years later appeared his Neue Beiträge zur Erläuterung der balylonischen Keilschrift. His discovery may be summed up as follows:—(1) that the Persian inscriptions contain three different forms of cuneiform writing, so that the decipherment of the one would give the key to the decipherment of the others; (2) that the characters of the Persian column are alphabetic and not syllabic; (3) that they must be read from left to right; (4) that the alphabet consists of forty letters, including signs for long and short vowels; and (5) that the Persepolitan inscriptions are written in Zend (which, however, is not the case), and must be ascribed to the age of the Achæmenian princes. The process whereby Grotefend arrived at these conclusions is a prominent illustration of persevering genius. History made it clear that the monuments to which the inscriptions were attached belonged to Cyrus and his successors, whose names ought accordingly to be found in them. By a comparison of texts Grotefend determined the groups of characters by which these names were expressed, and by further observing what characters were common to the several groups, and of how many characters each group consisted, he was able to assign the conjectural values of or Darius to the letters of a frequently recurring one. The native pronunciation of Darius was furnished by Strabo and the Old Testament. The names of Xerxes and Artaxerxes were next deciphered, and the phonetic powers of a good many characters were thus ascertained. The correctness of the decipherment was verified, not only by the fact that the right letters were always found in the right places in each name, but also by the discovery that the word which invariably followed each name, and therefore presumably meant "king," when read by the new alphabet, presented the same form as the Zend term for "monarch." It was clear that a solid basis had been laid for the interpretation of the Persian inscriptions, and all that remained was to work out the results of Grotefend's brilliant discovery, a task ably performed by Burnouf, Lassen, and Rawlinson. Grotefend died the 15th of December 1853.

 GROTIUS,  (1583-1645), in his native country Huig van Groot, but known to the rest of Europe by the Latinized form of the name, was one of the famous men of the 17th century, almost equally eminent for public services and as a writer. He was born at Delft on Easter day, 10th April 1583. The Groots were a branch of a family of distinction, which had been noble in France, but had removed to the Low Countries more than a century before. Their French name was De Cornets, and this cadet branch had taken the name of Groot on the marriage of Hugo's great-grandfather with a Dutch heiress. The father of Hugo was a lawyer in considerable practice, who had four times served the office of burgomaster of Leyden, and was one of the three curators of the university of that place.

In the annals of precocious genius there is no greater prodigy on record than Hugo Grotius, who was able to make good Latin verses at nine, was ripe for the university at twelve, and at fifteen edited the encyclopædic work of Marcianus Capella. At Leyden he was much noticed by J. J. Scaliger, whose habit it was to engage his young friends in the editing of some classical text, less for the sake of the book so produced than as a valuable education for themselves. At fifteen Grotius accompanied Count Justin of Nassau, and the grand pensionary Oldenbarnevelt on their special embassy to the court of France. After a year profitably spent in that country in acquiring the language and making acquaintance with the leading