in the preparation of his Annals, published from 1736 to 1755, made a collection of documents which served him as the basis for a chronological conspectus of the history of New England, which, unluckily, reached only to 1633. Like his follower, Abiel Holmes, he has long since been forgotten, except by specialists; the work of both Prince and Holmes was that of laying rough stones which are hidden out of sight by the finished structure. The first general historian of America upon the model of the three great contemporary English writers, Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, was Thomas Hutchinson in his History of Massachusetts Bay. An official, a man of property, of high connections, much experiences in town and colonial government, he began to publish in 1764. His second volume was published three years later, when the storm-cloud of the Revolution was already gathering. A third volume, which includes the unhappy history of the pre-revolutionary controversies, did not appear till long after his death. In Hutchinson as in Prince, we have a study of historical sources, though very limited in kind; he seems scarcely to have known that there were manuscript records of the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature, and his history is directly founded on private papers and the records of the governor and council. What is really important in Hutchinson is his attempt to write a history in a narrative form, covering a century and a half, which should deal with events in their right proportions, and in which he should also apply the same methods of judgment and segregation to a period within which he had himself lived. Nobody now reads Hutchinson for his style, and his account of early Massachusetts is long since surpassed, but the experience of the trained public man gives a permanent value to his conclusions, and his is distinctly a genuine historian's work.

Among the evidences of a quickened national consciousness was the growth of a new school of historians immediately after the Revolution. Among them were several notable historians of a single commonwealth-Proud's Pennsylvania, Trumbull's Connecticut, Burk's Virginia, and-far the best of them all-Belknap's New Hampshire. At the same time arose several conscientious and hard-working writers, who wrought upon the history of their country, taking into view not a colony nor a section, but the whole nation; and they also conceived the modern idea of choosing a limited field and treating it with thoroughness and in detail. Of these the most notable are Ramsay, Mercy Warren, and Timothy Pitkin. Dr. Ramsay, whose book, published in 1811, describes much of the military side of the Revolution, and includes an invaluable discussion of the effects of that great struggle on the political and social life of Americans. Mercy Warren was the first woman to publish a narrative history, which, however one-sided, was written

by an eye-witness, and that eye-witness a woman of high education and great spirit. It was this able person, called by her friends the Marcia of the American Revolution, who ventured to attack the great John Adams and accused him of leaning towards monarchism. Better than all the others is honest Pitkin, whose history, published in 1828, covers with clearness and insight the history of the foundation of the American republic from 1763 to 1797, with a few foot-notes referring to the scanty sources available at that time. Pitkin had a strong liking for statistics, and his books remained until to a few years ago almost the only well-thought discussion of the political and economic conditions of the colonies, as a background for a discussion of the causes of the Revolution.

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Besides these important studies of material at first-hand, the great libraries contain many so-called histories of the United States, published in the first third of the nineteenth century. It seems to have been a habit of the New England country clergy to combine with the country newspapers to produce a history; the parson furnished scissors, paste, and circumambient rhetoric, and produced a manuscript chiefly out of extracts from his predecessors; the printer set it up on the off days when the week's paper was printed and copy for the next had not yet appeared. This process, not unknown in later and wiser generations, adds nothing to American historiography and needs no further description.

Although up to 1830 there had appeared no account of the development of America which is now read as a classic, and still less any first-hand American history of a foreign country-the foundations were laying upon which historians might safely build. During the whole time from the beginning of the Revolution down, materials were being collected and made available, without which the work of Hildreth and Bancroft would have been impossible. It is the happy fortune of America that the great men of the revolutionary period either kept copies of their letters or wrote such important documents that they were preserved by those who received them. In the letters of Washington and Franklin, of John Jay, of Jefferson, of Madison, of Monroc, and a score of other revolutionary worthies, we find the true spirit of their times, and in 1791, Dr. Jeremy Belknap, himself the author of the excellent history of New Hampshire, founded in Boston the Massachusetts Historical Society, the first in time of a long series of public-spirited organizations, whose aim it has been to collect memorials which would otherwise perish, and to put them in permanent form for later generations.

Our ancestors have always been rather tenacious of public records, partly because of the importance of such evidence in settling questions of property, and partly from an instinctive feeling that what they were doing was worth remembrancing. It is this sense of doing something worth while which

finds expression in the famous resolutions of the Cambridge town meeting in 1765: "that this vote be recorded in the town book that the children yet unborn might see the desire their ancestors had for their freedom and happiness." Accident, neglect, the Revolutionary War, caused the loss of many precious records, especially in the South, but enough remained to make an almost inexhaustible mine for the antiquary and investigator. Three different influences were brought to bear side by side with each other to effect the publication of historical material: the historical societies; the state governments, in many cases animated by the societies; and the strong historical spirit of a few investigators. Of these latter, the chief is Jared Sparks, who published his edition of the Writings of Washington in 1836, followed by his Franklin's Works, and by his Correspondence of the American Revolution; he also established a series of brief biographies, all of them edited and several written by Mr. Sparks. It is hard to overestimate the influence of this man, endued as he was with an immense capacity to take advantage of his great opportunities. According to the historical canons of his time he was a most intelligent editor; he thought it his duty to correct the mistakes of grammar or expression in the originals before him, so that he might more clearly bring out the sense; and it wounded him that the Father of his Country should misspell. Sparks's editions, therefore, overlay the originals with literary shellac and varnish, but he does not conceal the original grain. Himself a conscientious investigator, a careful historical writer, he combines within his own achievements three historical triumphs: he opened up great evidences of truth; he was the first exemplar of the co-operative method of writing history; and he was himself no mean author.

Upon the foundations thus laid, and infused with that lively national spirit which began to be distinctly felt after the War of 1812, there now appears a writer who had a combination, almost unexampled in America up to that time, of an historian's qualities: ambition, training, wealth, social connections, political experience, and an intense desire to write a history. of his country from its earliest beginnings down to the end of his own time. That man was George Bancroft, who, beginning his self-imposed task about 1830, in 1883 was still systematically engaged on it. A whole cycle of national history had passed by between the beginning and end of his work, and his fifty years of labor was enough only to bring him from the discovery of America down to the adoption of the federal Constitution in 1788.

Here at least was a different conception of history, so different from those who preceded him that he became the founder of a new school. Besides a capacity for vast labor, Bancroft created a machinery for the assembling of material up to that time unknown in America: he sent all over the world

for transcripts of documents; he collected a valuable library; as Secretary of the Navy under Polk, he had opportunities for intimate acquaintance with the archives of the federal government; he wrote patiently, and repeatedly rewrote his own work, which in its most elaborated form includes twelve good-sized volumes. That Bancroft is to-day rather the companion of the scholar than of the patriot reader is not strange; he began and carried on his work in the midst of an atmosphere of what may be called professional history; his intellectual predecessor was Robertson; his intellectual compeers were Macaulay and Prescott. He wrote to be read and chose the style which most attracted readers half a century ago; he wrote to justify his fathers for the Revolution, and his mind was quicker to grasp the grievances of the colonies than the difficulties of the English administration. A sincere and honest man whose public service has been enormous, Bancroft is now neglected by readers, and his example is avoided by writers. It is unfortunate for Bancroft's permanent fame that a considerable part of his work has no foot-notes; his reason was that other people followed him on his authorities, without giving him credit; he thus cut off not only a means of checking his conclusions, but also a useful aid to inquirers. Bancroft has often been charged with rearranging and docking his quotations. His habit of referring to many materials available only in his own collection of transcripts makes it difficult to examine this charge, but where he refers to printed materials he does not seem consciously to have altered the sense of a quotation by omission or transposition.

Side by side with Bancroft is a writer much less known and much less appreciated, who nevertheless has deserved well of his countrymen—Richard Hildreth, who attempted the same task as Bancroft, and in six volumes, the last of them published in 1856, brought down his history from the earliest colonial times to 1820. In many respects Hildreth more nearly approaches to the modern standard of the historian than any one who preceded or accompanied him. He has such a grasp of facts and so well knows how to assemble them, and to discriminate among them, that almost any event of large importance that has happened in our history is mentioned in his volumes. He, too, had his thesis to prove; strongly federalist in sympathy, his later volumes are to a considerable degree a justification of the Hamiltonian theory of government; and like Bancroft, he does not see fit to append those footnotes which are a restraint upon a writer, an opportunity to examine his ground, and a useful equipment for later investigators.

Only one other general history of the United States in the period from 1830 to 1860 need be mentioned here. Tucker's History of the United States, published in 1857 and covering the period from 1774 to 1841, is the only work of the kind written by a Southern man. Just why most of the

history-writing down to the Civil War was done by New England men is not easy to discover; traditional interest in history, good libraries, the influence of a live State historical society, the nearness of a book-buying public, the close connection between literary and public life-these are some of the reasons. Tucker aimed to look at our history from a different angle, but he has little of the method or style of the trained historian, he does not attract the reader, and is less quoted than his careful work deserves.

So far, most of the interest of American writers had been given to their own country; it was a mark of a growth in cosmopolitanism when two writers chose for their themes fields of European history, though in both cases there was a connection with American history in its wider aspects. Prescott chose first the Spaniards in America, and then the Spanish monarchy in the sixteenth century. In his time he was considered one of the safest as well as one of the most brilliant historical writers. Brilliant he is, and he chose for his theme the romantic period which connected European civilization with the earliest phases of American history. His Ferdinand and Isabella, his Conquest of Peru, his Conquest of Mexico, his Charles V., his Philip II., published during the two decades from 1837 to 1858, were read with interest and enthusiasm by scholars, business men, and school-boys, just as Macaulay was read at the same time both in England and America. In every way he is a notable figure, this man almost blind, working patiently year after year in his Boston library and slowly committing to the press his beautifully written volumes, which are still among our best historical works, although the methods of the author and his judgment of his sources are no longer accepted as final.

Motley came a little later, chose a similar theme, but without a direct connection with American history. His Dutch Republic, his United Netherlands, his John of Barneveld, have been sources of inspiration to thousands of readers; and if the maturer student now searches them in vain for any insight into the organization of the marvellous military people whom he described; if he finds little about their colonies and nothing about their government; if he learns not the source of their wealth, nor the secret of their national persistence, he does get a striking picture of the heroism of the laterday Athenians contending against the Persians of the sixteenth century. Motley was really not an historian, but a describer of mighty historic deeds.

Motley began to publish in 1856, and continued long after the Civil War, but he belongs to the ante-bellum school, and that school, notwithstanding its great services, had as yet treated history only in partial fashion. Materials were collected and much learning was expended in explaining and annotating them and in brief articles and papers founded upon them. Upon the other side, several ambitious attempts had been made to give in one con