Thirlwall, CONNOP, a great English bishop and historian of Greece, was born, of good Northumbrian stock, at Stepney in Middlesex, January 11, 1797. He was a child of almost unexampled precocity, learned Latin at three, read Greek at four, and at eleven published Primitiae (1809), a volume of poems and sermons which in later years he did his best to suppress. He next went to Charterhouse, where Grote, Julius Hare, and Henry Havelock were among his schoolfellows; entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1814, and in the February of the following year carried off the Craven scholarship, which only Porson and Professor Kennedy have done as freshmen. That same year he gained the Bell scholarship; in 1818 he graduated as 22d senior optime—there being yet no classical tripos—but his real rank was better marked by the first Chancellor's classical medal. In October he was elected to a Trinity fellowship, and next spent about a year on the Continent, making fast friendship with Bunsen at Rome. He entered as a law-student at Lincoln's Inn in February 1820, and soon after joined the famous debating society that included Mill, Macaulay, Charles Austin, Romilly, the two Bulwers, Samuel Wilberforce, and later Maurice and John Sterling. He was called to the bar in 1825, but the natural bent of his mind prevailed, and in 1827 he took orders.
Already in 1825 he had translated Schleiermacher's Essay on St Luke and written an introduction—a remarkable performance for a barrister. His return to Cambridge was marked by the commencement, in conjunction with his dear friend Julius Hare, of a translation of Niebuhr's History of Rome (vol. i. 1828; ii. 1832). Their famous Philological Museum (1831-33) saw only six numbers, but contained some remarkable papers, among them Thirlwall's 'On the Irony of Sophocles.' Besides all this he took a full share of college and clerical work—the latter at Over, 8 miles from Cambridge. In 1834 he signed the petition in favour of the admission of dissenters to academic degrees, and in May put forth a weighty pamphlet in defence of the measure. Thirlwall pointed out with characteristic plainness the perfunctory nature of the religious education that existed, and expressed the belief that compulsory chapel services were 'a hindrance and not a help to the religious life.' The Master of the College, Dr Chr. Wordsworth, now called on him to resign the assistant-tutorship, which he did at once, though under protest. Almost immediately he was presented by Lord Brougham to the quiet Yorkshire living of Kirby-Underdale. Here he wrote for Lardner's Cyclopædia his History of Greece (8 vols. 1835-47; improved ed. 1847-52). In 1840 Lord Melbourne raised Thirlwall to the see of St David's, and within six months thereafter he preached in perfect Welsh. For thirty-four years he laboured with the utmost diligence in his diocese, building churches, parsonages, and schools, and augmenting poor livings (to the extent of £30,000 from his own pocket); and, though he wrote no great work, his eleven Charges remain an enduring monument of breadth of view and soundness of judgment in reference to all ecclesiastical controversies of one generation. His Primary Charge (1840) was a catholic-spirited apology for the Tractarian party then being vehemently charged against by almost every bishop and archdeacon in England. In later days (Charges of 1866 and 1872) he modified greatly his approval of the spirit that animated the new party, but his grave warnings and protests against their Romanising tendencies rise characteristically into a serenely judicial region far above the heated and vulgar atmosphere of polemical debate. Thirlwall joined in the encyclical letter censuring Essays and Reviews, but was one of the four bishops who refused to inhibit Bishop Colenso. He supported the Maynooth grant, the admission of Jews to parliament, and alone amongst the bishops voted for the disestablishment of the Irish Church, although he would have preferred to see a measure of concurrent endowment. He was appointed chairman of the Old Testament Revision Committee, and resigned his see in May 1874, retiring to Bath, where he died, July 27, 1875.
Thirlwall's massive understanding, vast learning, and fundamental breadth and fairness of mind were a combination of enormous value to the Church of England; and no words of epitaph could have been found better than those inscribed on the granite slab over his grave in Westminster Abbey, where he sleeps side by side with his brother-historian Grote: 'Cor sapiens et intelligens ad discernendum judicium.' He never married, but lived throughout life in the midst of his nephews and their children, and his love for cats rivalled Southey's. And few men have left a more pleasing though unconscious monument of noble character than the beautiful series of letters to a young lady—the Letters to a Friend, edited by Dean Stanley in 1881.
His Remains, Literary and Theological, fill three volumes (vols. i. and ii. Charges, 1877; vol. iii. Essays, Speeches, Sermons, 1878), edited by Dean (Bishop) Perowne. The Letters, Literary and Theological, were edited by Dean Perowne and the Rev. Lewis Stokes in 1881. See the Edinburgh Review for April 1876.