cratic party. In consequence, sharp fault was found with him, and he was never on cordial terms with the other New England historians; but he persevered in writing history all his life, and for all the diffuse floridity of his style, he is still a respectable authority. A little later, Mr. Richard Hildreth, a somewhat younger man, wrote a "History of the United States" from the Federalist point of view; and Dr. John Gorham Palfrey was for years engaged on his minutely lifeless "History of New England." In these, however, and in the other historians who were writing of our own country there was less imaginative vigour and far less literary power than in Prescott or in the two younger New England historians whose works are indubitably literature.

The first of these younger men was John Lothrop Motley, born in 1814. He graduated at Harvard; he studied for a while in Germany, where he began in youth a lifelong friendship with his fellow-student Prince Bismarck; and toward the end of his life he lived mostly in Europe. At one time he was Minister to Austria, and later to England. He died in England in 1877. As early as 1839 he wrote a novel which deserved its unusual lack of success. A little later he anonymously wrote for the "North American Review" an article. on Peter the Great which attracted much favourable attention; but it was not until 1856, when he was already past forty years old, that he published his first permanent work, "The Rise of the Dutch Republic." This was followed, between 1861 and 1868, by his "History of the United Netherlands," and finally in 1874 by his " John of Barneveld."

Motley's historical work is obviously influenced by the vividly picturesque writings of Carlyle. It is clearly influenced, too, by intense sympathy with that liberal spirit which he believed to characterise the people of the Netherlands during their prolonged conflict with Spain. From these traits result several obvious faults. In trying to be vivid, he becomes artificial. In the matter of character, too, his Spaniards are

apt to be intensely black, and his Netherlanders ripe for the heavenly rewards to which he sends them as serenely as romantic novelists provide for the earthly happiness of heroes and heroines. Yet, for all his sincerely partisan temper, Motley was so industrious in accumulating material, so untiring in his effort vividly to picture its external aspect, and so heartily in sympathy with his work, that he is almost always interesting. What most deeply stirred him was his belief in the abstract right of man to political liberty; and this he wished to celebrate with epic spirit. Belief and spirit alike were characteristically American; in the history of his own country there was abundant evidence of both. The assertion of liberty which finally stirred his imagination to the point of expression, however, was not that of his American forefathers, but the earlier, more brilliantly picturesque, and above all more remote one which had marked the history of a foreign race in Europe. Even so late as Motley's day, in short, the historical imagination of America still needed more ardent stimulant than could be distilled from the copious but juiceless material which had satisfied the acquisitive appetite of Jared Sparks.

The latest and most mature of our New England historians was more national. Francis Parkman, the son of a Unitarian minister, was born at Boston in 1823 and graduated at Harvard in 1844. By that time his health had already shown. signs of infirmity; and this was so aggravated by imprudent physical exposure during a journey across the continent shortly after graduation that he was a lifelong invalid. The brief record of his ailments which he left as a scientific document to the Massachusetts Historical Society unwittingly reveals his astonishing courage. Threatened for a full half-century with ruinous malady of both brain and body, he persisted, by sheer force of will, with literary plans which he had formed almost in boyhood. His imagination was first kindled by the forests of our ancestral continent. These excited his interest

in the native races of America; and this, in turn, obviously brought him to the frequent alliances between the French and the Indians during the first two centuries of our American history. His lifelong work, then, finally resulted in those volumes which record from beginning to end the struggles for the possession of North America between the French, with their Indian allies, and that English-speaking race whose final victory decided that our continent was to be a seminary of English Law.

In the end, then, Parkman's works prove to possess great philosophic interest. With full sympathy for both sides, with untiring industry in the accumulation of material, with good sense so judicial as to forbid him the vagaries of preconception, and with a literary sensitiveness which made his style at first marked by the floridity fashionable in 1850 — finally a model of sound prose, he set forth the struggles which decided the political future of America. Moved to this task by an impulse rather romantic than scientific, to be sure, gifted with a singularly vivid imagination, too careful a scholar to risk undue generalisation, and throughout life so hampered by illness that he could very rarely permit himself prolonged mental effort, Parkman sometimes appears chiefly a writer of romantic narrative. As you grow familiar with his work, however, you feel it so true that you can infuse it with philosophy for yourself. It is hardly too much to say that his writings afford as sound a basis for historic philosophising as does great fiction for philosophising about human nature.

Parkman, who died in 1893, brings the story of renascent scholarship in New England almost to our own day. When the nineteenth century began, our scholarship was merely a traditional memory of classical learning, generally treated as the handmaiden either of professional theology or of professional law. When the spirit of a new life began to declare itself here, and people grew aware of contemporary foreign achievement, there came first a little group of men who

studied in Europe and brought home the full spirit of that continental scholarship which during the present century has so dominated learning in America. As this spirit began to express itself in literary form, it united with our ancestral fondness for historic records to produce, just after the moment when formal oratory most flourished here, an eminent school of historical literature. Most of this history, however, deals with foreign subjects. The historians of New England were generally at their best when stirred by matters remote from any actual human experience enjoyed either by themselves or by such forefathers as they could personally have known even by tradition.

Considering the relation of this school of history to the historical literature of England, one is inevitably reminded that the greatest English history, Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," first appeared in the very year of our Declaration of Independence. In one aspect, of course, the temper of Gibbon is as far from romantic as possible. He is the first, and in certain aspects the greatest, of modern philosophical historians; and his style has all the formality of the century during which he wrote. In another aspect the relation of Gibbon's history to the England which bred him seems very like that of our New England histories to the country and the life which bred their writers. Gibbon and our own historians alike turned to a larger and more splendid field than was afforded by their national annals. Both alike were distinctly affected by an alert consciousness of what excellent work had been done in contemporary foreign countries. Both carefully expressed themselves with conscientious devotion to what they believed the highest literary canons. Both produced work which has lasted not only as history but as literature too. Gibbon wrote in the very year when America declared her independence of England; Prescott began his work in Boston nearly sixty years later. There is an aspect, then, in which our historical literature seems to lag behind

that of the mother country much as Irving's prose-contemporary with the full outburst of nineteenth-century romanticism in England - lags behind the prose of Goldsmith.

The name of Gibbon suggests another fact about our American historians which is not quite so obvious or so certain, but which may help us in our effort to define their national character. Gibbon's power was incomparably greater than that of any American writer; but along with that power Gibbon had a trait which no one can fail to observe, he relished indecency. Whoever shares this relish will find in the untranslated notes to many of his passages plenty of morsels which our present customs forbid us either to translate or to mention in general society. In our American historians there is nothing of the sort. Their writings may not much have enriched human imagination, but they have never befouled it. In the literature of every other country you will find lubricity; in that of America hardly any. Foreigners are · apt to think this trait hypocritical; whoever knows the finer minds of New England will be disposed to believe it a matter not of conscientious determination but rather of instinctive preference.

Very cursory, all this; and there can be no doubt that the historians of New England, like the New England orators, might profitably be made the subject of minute and interesting separate study. Our own concern, however, is chiefly with pure letters. Before we can deal with them intelligently we must glance at still other aspects of renascent New England. We have glanced at its oratory, and at its scholarship. We must now turn to its religion and its philosophy.