Finlay

Finlay, GEORGE, the historian of Greece, was born of Scottish parents at Faversham, in Kent, where his father, Major John Finlay, was inspector of the government powder-mills, 21st December 1799. After his studies at Glasgow and Göttingen, Philhellenism carried him to Greece, where he met Lord Byron, and devoted himself with patient enthusiasm to the study of Greek history and antiquities. With the exception of a short period of residence in Rome, and of study at Edinburgh University, the whole of his life was spent in the land of his adoption, which he continued to love, spite of the unworthiness of its leaders and of the miserable failure of his own generous schemes for promoting agricultural progress. For relief he turned to the task of writing its history. 'Had the hopes with which I joined the cause of Greece in 1823 been fulfilled,' he wrote in 1855, 'it is not probable that I should have abandoned the active duties of life, and the noble task of labouring to improve the land, for the sterile task of recording its misfortunes.' The first portion of his great work, Greece under the Romans, appeared in 1844, and was followed by the following instalments: The History of Greece from its Conquest by the Crusaders to its Conquest by the Turks, and of the Empire of Trebizond, 1204-1461 (1851); History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires from 716-1453 (1854); History of Greece under Ottoman and Venetian Domination (1856); and History of the Greek Revolution (1861). Finlay devoted the remaining years of his laborious life to revising and partly rewriting his history, but his death at Athens, 26th January 1875, prevented his completing the work, which was issued by the Clarendon Press, under the care of the Rev. H. F. Tozer, with the title, History of Greece from B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864 (7 vols. 1877; vol. i. contains an autobiography). Freeman declares his history the greatest English historical work since Gibbon's Decline and Fall.