An English historian of the first rank; born in Faversham, Kent, of Scotch blood, Dec. 21, 1799; died in Athens, Greece, Jan. 26, 1875. An ardent Philhellene, he joined Byron’s company at Missolonghi in 1823 to assist in liberating Greece from the Turks; and ended by residing there permanently,—at first a cultivator, and then a student of and writer of Greek history. He was for many years the Athens correspondent of the London Times. His “Greece under the Romans, B.C. 146 to A.D. 717” (1844) raised him at once to a place among the few foremost historians: Edward A. Freeman declared it to be the most truly original historical work of modern times; and for sound broad humanity, acute judgment, and luminous common-sense on both the practical and the philosophic sides of history, it has few equals of any age. It is not in the form of detailed annals except in the last part, most of it being a set of essays on the political and social conditions of Greece as a subject province. Succeeding volumes carried the story more in detail down to modern times, ending with two volumes on the Greek Revolution. The whole, revised and some volumes wholly rewritten by the author, was published posthumously in 7 vols. (1877).

Personal

  Of Mr. Finlay it may be said that though he passed a lifetime in the Levant, he never became a Levantine. He was every inch an English gentleman from the beginning to the end, and his loss will be deeply felt by all of his countrymen who have had the advantage of enjoying at Athens his genial hospitality and instructive society.

  The world is said to know nothing of its greatest men, and certainly the Times seems to know very little of its greatest Correspondent. A man of whom Great Britain may well be proud has passed away in a distant land, and the greatest British newspaper, a paper which had been often honoured with his contributions, a paper commonly so ready with long biographies of every man of the smallest eminence, can give him only a few lines of small print without so much as the heading of his name. No one will grudge to the memory either of Mr. Kingsley or of Lord St. Leonards the full recognition which they have met with; but the most truly original historian of our time and language might surely claim a place alongside of the novelist and the lawyer.

  His unfortunate investment had at least the good results of compelling his continual residence in the country, with which he became most thoroughly acquainted, and of stimulating his perception of the evils which, in the past as in the present, have deteriorated the Greek character and injured the credit and prosperity of the nation. The publication of his great series of histories commenced in 1844, and was completed in 1861, when he wrote the autobiographical fragment which is almost the sole authority for his life. His correspondence is lost or inaccessible, and, notwithstanding his courteous hospitality, acknowledged by many travellers, little more seems to be known of his life in Greece than his constant endeavours to benefit the country by good advice, sometimes expressed in language of excessive if excusable acerbity, but which, if little followed, was never resented by the objects of it.

General

  It could hardly be said of his account of Greek politicians that he was “to their virtues very kind, and to their faults a little blind.” He told the truth about Greece fearlessly, and with no tinge of partisanship, and it is to the credit of the nation that they appreciated his impartiality; and all through their many political vicissitudes respected the one foreigner who, living in their midst, had the courage to tell them of their faults.

  Different in every respect as were the two men in position and temper and line of study, far more widely-spread as the fame of the one is than the fame of the other, still he who wishes to master the history of the Greek nation as a whole can as little dispense with Mr. Finlay as he can with Mr. Grote. And it does kindle a certain feeling of indignation when we find the memory of such a man so unworthily dealt with in the quarter where he ought to have met with most honour…. He has left his mark on the historical learning of the age. It is easy to point out faults in his writings. It is plain that they would in some respects have gained if, instead of being written at Athens, they had been written in London, at Oxford, or at Göttingen. But we believe that by such an exchange they would have lost far more than they would have gained. Mr. Finlay was not, in his earlier life, a man of the closet. He went out to Greece to fight; he stayed there to till the ground. He was led to study and to write history in order to explain what he saw in the processes of fighting and tilling the ground. He saw that the phenomena of modern Greece could be understood only by going back to that stage in Grecian history when Greece, from one point of view, might be said to be conquered, while from another point of view she might be said to begin her own work of conquest…. This wide grasp of one side of his subject, of the side with which he was immediately concerned, would have been ill exchanged for any improvements in form and manner which his work would probably have gained had it been done in a Western capital or a Western university. As a contribution to the general history of the Greek nation, as a protest against those who would end Greek history with the fight of Chairôneia or with the burning of Corinth. Mr. Finlay’s “History” marks an epoch. It is quite possible that some one else may tell the tale in some respects better, but it is Mr. Finlay who first showed that there was any tale to tell at all. And his works are hardly less valuable from the Roman than from the Greek side. No one after him, save the most ignorant and thoughtless, can babble any more about “Greeks of the Lower Empire.” He sets before us the true nature and importance of that great and abiding power of the Eastern Rome on which the men of the eleventh century still looked with awe and wonder.

  Finlay was almost the first to point out the permanence of the Greek local institutions, and his legal training and knowledge of political economy enabled him to seize the really important points in the history of the people of Eastern Europe, where others have merely given us personal anecdotes of the rulers. The political and social lessons to be learnt from the history of the Greeks during two thousand years of servitude are perhaps not less than those which we gain from Grote’s sympathetic account of the rise and glory of ancient Hellas.

  It is no empty compliment to compare this work with that of the historian of the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” While some of the qualifications of Gibbon are notably absent, others that Gibbon did not possess are conspicuously present. The author carried on his investigations in the very heart of the country whose turbulent vicissitudes he describes. Spending a large portion of his life in his library, immediately beneath the Acropolis, he had the good fortune not only to complete his great work, but also to subject it to such careful revision as the criticism of recent scholarship had made necessary. The most prominent characteristics of the work are learning, accuracy, and fidelity. In addition, it may be said that the author is severely critical…. As a help to those who would become acquainted with the history of the East, these learned and eloquent volumes have no equals. They are worthy to stand by the side of those of Grote.

  Finlay is a great historian of the type of Polybius, Procopius, and Machiavelli, a man of affairs, who has qualified himself for treating of public transactions by sharing in them, a soldier, a statesman, and an economist. He is not picturesque or eloquent, or a master of the delineation of character, but a singular charm attaches to his pages from the perpetual consciousness of contact with a vigorous intelligence. In the latter portion of his work he speaks with the authority of an acute, though not entirely dispassionate, eye-witness; in the earlier and more extensive portion it is his great glory to have shown how interesting the history of an age of slavery may be made and how much Gibbon had left undone. Gibbon, as his plan requires, exhibits the superficial aspects of the period in a grand panorama; Finlay plunges beneath the surface, and brings to light a wealth of social particulars of which the mere reader of Gibbon could have no notion. This being Finlay’s special department, it is the more to his praise that he has not smothered his story beneath erudition. He may, indeed, even appear at a disadvantage beside the Germans as regards extent and profundity of research, but this inferiority is more than compensated by the advantages incidental to his prolonged residence in the country.

  The history of Greece has been laid before the world as only a man possessing such an extensive and thorough knowledge of the country could do, by George Finlay.