if excusable acerbity, but which, if little followed, was never resented by the objects of it. His most important effort was the series of letters he addressed to the 'Times' from 1864 to 1870, which, being translated by the Greek newspapers, produced more effect than his earlier admonitions. He also contributed to 'Blackwood's Magazine,' the 'Athenæum,' and the 'Saturday Review,' and occasionally visited England, not later, however, than 1854. He wrote in Greek on the stone age in 1869, and in the following year published the French narrative of Benjamin Brue, the interpreter who accompanied the Vizier Ali on his expedition into the Morea in 1715. Among his other writings are an essay on the site of the holy sepulchre (1847), and pamphlets on Greek politics (1836) and finance (1844). His essays on classical topography, never collected by himself, were published in 1842 in a German translation by S. F. W. Hoffmann. He died at Athens 26 Jan. 1875; the date 1876 given in the Oxford edition of his history is an unaccountable mistake.
Finlay's great work appeared in sections, as follows: 'Greece under the Romans,' 1844; 'Greece to its Conquest by the Turks,' 1851; 'Greece under Ottoman and Venetian Domination,' 1856; 'Greek Revolution,' 1861. After the author's death the copyright of these several works was offered to the delegates of the Clarendon Press by his representatives, and in 1877 all were brought together under the title of 'A History of Greece from its Conquest by the Romans to the present time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864,' and published in seven volumes under the able editorship of the Rev. H. F. Tozer. The whole had been thoroughly revised by Finlay himself, who, besides aiming throughout at a greater condensation of style, had added several new chapters, chiefly on economical subjects, entirely recast the section on Mediæval Greece and Trebizond, and appended a continuation from 1843 to the enactment of the constitution of 1864. The period covered by the history, therefore, is no less than two thousand and ten years.
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 now 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 his 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. His personal disappointments had indeed caused a censoriousness which somewhat defaces the latter part of his history, and is the more to be regretted as it affected his estimate of the value of his own work, and of its reception by the world. In character he was a frank, high-minded, public-spirited gentleman.
[Autobiography prefixed to vol. i. of the Oxford edition of Finlay's History; Memoir in Athenæum, 1875; Sir Charles Newton in Academy, and Professor Freeman in Saturday Review, 1875.]
FINLAY, JOHN (1782–1810), Scottish poet, was born of humble parents at Glasgow in December 1782. He was educated in one of the academies at Glasgow, and at the age of fourteen entered the university, where he had as a classmate John Wilson ('Christopher North'), who states that he was distinguished 'above most of his contemporaries.' While only nineteen, and still at the university, he published 'Wallace, or the Vale of Ellerslie, and other Poems' in 1802, dedicated to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, the friend of Burns, a second edition with some additions appearing in 1804, and a third in 1817. Professor Wilson describes it as displaying 'a wonderful power of versification,' and possessing 'both the merits and defects which we look for in the early compositions of true genius.' The prospect of obtaining a situation in one of the public offices led him to visit London in 1807, and while there he contributed to the magazines some articles on antiquarian subjects. Not finding suitable employment he returned to Glasgow in 1808, and in that year he published 'Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads, chiefly ancient, with Explanatory Notes and a Glossary.' As the title indicates, the majority of the ballads were not his own composition, but Sir Walter Scott nevertheless wrote of the book: 'The beauty of some imitations of the old Scottish
