only contemptuous discouragement for his
intellectual pursuits, and his mother's
puritanical severity rendered the home-life
uncongenial. By nature he was greatly dependent
on the sympathy of others·if he was to do
justice to his powers and overcome an
everhaunting tendency to mental depression. It
was his good fortune, then, through his friend
Norman, to form another intimacy destined
to affect his whole career. He fell deeply in
love (1814-15) with the fascinating and
accomplished Harriet Lewin [see
Grote, Harriet], whose family was then
settled in Kent a few miles off'. His advances
were received with no disfavour, but presently
the ill-offices of a supposed friend, in reality
a disappointed rival, Peter Elmsley [q. v.], led
him to believe that Miss Lewin was already
engaged. The thought that he was being trifled
with came upon Grote as a crushing blow. In the
first prostration, he bound himself never to
propose marriage to any one without first
obtaining his father's sanction. The elder Grote
thus had power to prevent the renewal of the suit
to Miss Lewin when, after a few weeks, the
rival's deception was exposed; and, some three
years later, when the young people by chance
met again and understood each other, could
still insist that they should not be united for
two years more, and that the families should
meanwhile have no intercourse. To Grote
himself the whole five years (from 1815) were
a time of much suffering. Some verses printed
for private circulation by his widow in 1872
('Poems by George Grote,' 1815-23, pp. 40)
belong almost wholly to this period. A more
promising effort of his pen, from 1817, was
a short essay on Lucretius, which, with some
reflection of his own melancholy in the course
of its special criticism, has in it a vein of
superior observation on the conditions and
limits of the poetic art generally (pp. 1-16
in a miscellaneous collection of
Posthumous Papers printed by Mrs. Grote,
again privately, in 1874). The emotional
tension was lessened from 1818, when he could
hold converse with his betrothed, at least in
writing. They kept diaries for each other's
benefit; his diary carefully records all his
reading. He was steadily becoming more engrossed
in philosophical as well as in economical and
classical study; going beyond English thinkers,
like Berkeley, Hume, and Butler, to Kant, then
little regarded in England, and this although
he was just then (from 1818) coming under
the very different influence of James Mill.
To Mill he was introduced by Ricardo, with
whom his interest in political economy had led
him to seek relations in 1817. It is evident,
from a letter in 1819
(Personal Life of George Grote, p. 21),
that he had scruples of feeling as well as of
understanding to overcome before yielding
himself to Mill's dominion. Mill next introduced
him to his own master, Bentham. By 1820 he had
thus finally chosen his leaders in thought and
public action, though his scholarly habits
continued always to give him a wider outlook
than was common in the Bentham-Mill circle.
Tired of waiting, Grote and Miss Lewin were married, without their fathers' knowledge, at Bexley Church early in the morning of Sunday, 5 March 1820. Mr. Lewin was informed in a day or two by his daughter, who had immediately returned home; the elder Grote, not till after some weeks. The step was condoned, and the young couple, in the course of the year, were established with moderate means in a house adjoining the bank. They lived as much as they could away from the city, on account of Mrs. Grote's health, at first occasionally, afterwards (from 1826) permanently ; but Grote, having now thrown upon him much of the weight of his father's part in the business, was bound to be in daily attendance at the bank, and, for a certain period of the year, to see to the opening and locking-up. His public authorship began in 1821 with a 'Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform,' directed mainly against a theory of class-representation set forth in the 'Edinburgh Review' by Sir J. Mackintosh. This pamphlet (summarised in introduction to Minor Works of George Grote) shows the influence of James Mill's theory of government; but Grote already contends fervently for his own favourite ideas of political reform, such as secrecy of voting and frequency of election. Next year, besides making a vigorous onslaught, in the 'Morning Chronicle,' upon a declaration by Canning against parliamentary reform, he accomplished a difficult task in connection with Bentham. An 'Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind, by Philip Beauchamp,' issued in 1822 by Richard Carlile [q. v.], then safe in Dorchester gaol, was the work of Grote, founded upon a mass of written material committed to him by Bentham. The manuscripts, upon which Bentham had worked in his irregular fashion from 1815, were, with his covering letter of suggestions as to the use to be made of them, given by Mrs. Grote to the British Museum after her husband's death. A comparison of them with the printed volume shows the enormous amount of labour required to bring them into form. Grote had practically to write the essay, leaving aside the greater part of the materials before him and giving to the remnant a shape that was his rather than
