William Mitford - Later Life and Legacy

Later Life and Legacy

While his book was progressing, Mitford was a Tory member of the House of Commons, with intervals, from 1785 to 1818, but it does not appear that he ever visited Greece. He was for many years a member of the Court of Verderers of the New Forest, a county magistrate and a colonel in the Hampshire Militia. After a long illness, he died at Exbury. In addition to his History of Greece, he published a few smaller works, the most important of which was an Essay on the Harmony of Language, 1774. The style of Mitford is natural and lucid, but without the rich colour of Gibbon. He affected some oddities both of language and of orthography, for which he was censured and which he endeavoured to revise.

Typical for such a man, Mitford was an impassioned anti-Jacobin from the 1790s, and his partiality for a monarchy led him to be unjust to the Athenians. Hence his History of Greece, after having had no peer in European literature for half a century, faded in interest on the appearance of the work of George Grote. Clinton, too, in his Fasti hellenici, charged Mitford with "a general negligence of dates," though admitting that in his philosophical range "he is far superior to any former writer" on Greek history. Byron, who dilated on Mitford's shortcomings, nevertheless declared that he was "perhaps the best of all modern historians altogether." This Mitford certainly was not, but his pre-eminence in the little school of English historians who succeeded Hume and Gibbon would be easier to maintain.

William Mitford's younger brother John (1748–1830) was a lawyer and politician who became Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Mitford's cousin, the Rev. John Mitford (1781–1859), was editor of the Gentleman's Magazine and of various editions of the English poets. He was distantly related to the novelist Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1865).