| An authoritative position among English historians of ancient Rome was long held by George Long’s Decline of the Roman Republic (1864–74), of which the first volume appeared in the same year as the last of Merivale’s principal work. Long was one of the most productive classical scholars of his day, and one of the most trustworthy teachers of general history: besides a long series of volumes of Charles Knight’s Penny Cyclopaedia, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 16 he edited the seven volumes of its Biographical Dictionary, which, although—or, perhaps, because—they covered only the letter A, remained the one precursor deserving the name of the later Dictionary of National Biography. Long’s qualifications as a historian were not limited to indefatigable industry: he wrote with lucidity and judgment, and he had in him a strain of high philosophic morality such as became the translator of Marcus Aurelius. |
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