GROTE, GEORGE (I English historian of Greece, was born on Nov. 17, 1794, at Clay Hill, near Beckenham, Kent, of a well-known family of bankers originating from Bremen. He was sent to the Sevenoaks grammar school and afterwards to Charterhouse, but at the age of 16 he entered the bank in which his father was a partner. In 182o he married Harriet Lewin.
In 1817 Grote came under the influence of David Ricardo, and through him of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham. His first published work, the Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform (1821), was a reply to Sir James Mackintosh's article in the Edinburgh Review advocating popular representation, vote by ballot and short parliaments. In April 1822 he published in the Morning Chronicle a letter against Canning's attack on Lord John Russell, and edited, or rather re-wrote, some papers of Ben tham, which he published as Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, by Philip Beau champ (1822). The book was published in the name of Richard Carlile, then in gaol at Dorchester. From 1826 to 183o he worked with J. S. Mill and Henry Brougham in the organization of the new "university" in Gower street. He was a member of the council which organized the faculties and the curriculum of Uni versity college, London; but in 183o, owing to a difference with Mill as to an appointment to one of the philosophical chairs, he resigned his position. In 1849 he was re-elected to the council, in i86o he became treasurer, and on the death of Brougham (1868) president. He became a member of the senate in 185o and was vice-chancellor in 1862. He presented to the college the Marmor Homericum, and finally bequeathed the reversion of 16,000 for the endowment of a chair of philosophy of mind and logic. He succeeded his friend Henry Hallam as a trustee of the British Museum in 1859, and took part in the reorganization of the departments of antiquities and natural science.
At his father's death, in 183o, he became manager of the bank and took a leading position among the city Radicals. In 1831 he published his Essentials of Parliamentary Reform (an elaboration of his previous Statement), and in Dec. 1832 entered parliament as one of the members for the City of London. He sat in the House of Commons until 1841, representing the Benthamite school of "philosophic radicalism." During these years of active public life his interest in Greek history and philosophy increased, and after a trip to Italy in 1842 he devoted himself to literature. In 1846 the first two volumes of the History of Greece appeared, and the remaining ten between 1847 and 1856. In 1847 he visited Switzerland to study a condition of things in some sense analogous to that of the ancient Greek States. This visit resulted in the pub lication in The Spectator of seven weekly letters, later collected in book form. Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates (3 vols.) appeared in 1865, but the work on Aristotle he was not destined to complete. He had only finished the Organon (2nd ed., 188o) when he died on June 18, 1871; he was buried in Westminster Abbey. It is on his History of Greece that Grote's reputation mainly rests. It contains information collected from all sources, simply arranged and expressed in direct, forcible language.