than Boston. Whatever the far-off ages may show of one increasing purpose, it is out of the question for an historian to marshal the moving forces of the western continent into any orderly sequence, with any controlling aim. The goal is altogether too far away for any historic survey to use it as a measuring point.

We do not believe it would be possible to write a history of the United States upon such a plan as Mr. Winsor has adopted in these two great works, because a topical treatment would inevitably fail to convey a notion of that organic development of national life which is the last and finest disclosure of historical composition. But a cyclopædic work on America, which follows the broad lines of chronology, is not only possible, but by such a treatment alone can justice be done to the subject. The editor of this history explains that he has reserved the first volume, treating of prehistoric America, until the others have been published, that he may avail himself of the latest investigations in a part of the subject which is, as yet, only experimentally known. Meanwhile, the mode in which the volume before us is constructed gives a fair indication of that which is to obtain throughout the series.

We have said that in its general plan the work follows the lines laid down in the Memorial History of Boston, but there is a variation from the plan of that book which requires to be noticed. The title indicates this. Each topic is presented first in a straightforward narrative form, the facts as determined by a rigorous analysis being set forth in their order, and all care taken to strip the narrative of conjecture and mere generalization. This text of the narrative is based upon authorities which are cited in foot-notes; and in these notes also occur those extraneous matters which do not necessarily add to the narrative, but throw light upon it, and give opportunity for the writer to make suggestions. As an instance of this we

may note the striking reflection which the editor makes upon the futile attempt of Columbus to interest certain cities of Italy in his enterprise.

"It cannot but be remarked," says Mr. Winsor, "how Italy, in Columbus, Cabot, and Vespucius, not to name others, led in opening the way to a new stage in the world's progress, which, by making the Atlantic the highway of a commerce that had mainly nurtured Italy on the Mediterranean, conduced to start her republics on that decline which the Turk, sweeping through that inland sea, confirmed and accelerated."

The narrative, besides, is illustrated freely by wood-cuts, which are never imaginative except as they are records of the imaginative and fanciful notions of contemporary travelers. The narrative given, and the reader put in possession of the salient points of the topic, there follows the critical section, which is occupied with a close examination of the sources of history relating to the matter in hand, a fine discrimination of the value of the various authorities, and a thorough and judicial study of the several historical problems which have arisen in the course of the narrative. In connection with this, special notice should be taken of the cartographical work which has been done by the editor. Such a wealth of material in this field has never before been brought together for the service of the student, and we are disposed to think this feature the most important in the work. By no other means can one so readily and so fully put himself in the place of the Spanish discoverers and explorers, and see the continent shaping itself in the consciousness of man.

It has very likely seemed to some who have followed us thus far that the plan of the work compels, after all, a very disjointed product, and that instead of a history one is given a dictionary of history. Undoubtedly this characteristic inheres in the nature of the work;

but when one comes to a practical use of the volume under examination, one is struck by the unifying power which the editor has shown. He is always on hand with his cross-references and his connection of one part with another, and he so pervades the entire work that he succeeds in giving it, with all its diversity of authorship, almost the appearance of being the outgrowth of a single mind. Such a result will be more difficult to attain in some of the subsequent volumes, for there will be a harder struggle between the topical and the strictly chronological method; but in this volume and the next, at least, the sporadic nature of the historic movement easily admits of the monograph treatment.

History, as told in this manner, will have a new charm for many minds, for the scientific mind is found in the public that reads as well as in the students who explore. But there is a use to which this great work will be put, of unquestioned importance. It will serve as the index to historical material from which the writer will construct the story of history, and the sleepless vigilance with which the contributors to this work guard the sources of American life will be the price paid for accurate and trustworthy knowledge on the part of the generality of readers. It is not from such a work as this that popular ideas as to history are directly formed, but from the school-books, the magazine articles, and general histories. The writers of these will use Mr. Winsor's book without any acknowledgment, but it will be for most of them the final authority; and we trust, therefore, that in completing his plan the editor will not allow himself to be swayed by any temporary considerations from making the work as exact as patient scholarship will permit.

There is something so vast in this projected work, and the scale upon which it is executed is so fine, that one may be forgiven if he feels a little tired in its

presence, and begins to think that the individual man is of little consequence in history. So we remind ourselves that there are other historic methods which are not likely to be left wholly behind in this scientific age. There is a view of history which finds the person a very interesting feature in the landscape, and which indeed fixes itself so exclusively upon a group as to approach biography in its form. Mr. Schuyler, in giving to his work on Colonial New York1 a sub-title more special and limited, has hinted what his preface states frankly: that his historic method is to follow the fortunes of a colonial family through its ramifications, and thereby almost incidentally to disclose a very important source of the being of the colony within which this family found the field of its enterprise. It is doubtful if the same method could be pursued in any other field of American life, unless it were in the history of South Carolina. The foundations of New York were laid in families rather than in persons. The nature of the Dutch tenure confirmed the tendency to give integrity to the family, and the great estates perpetuated names and gave continuity to family life. Then the fact that the Dutch became occupants under English rule served to accentuate their individuality, and differences of manner were of course preserved longer by differences of speech. The head of the house might speak English, but he was in one form or other manorial lord of many who were kept apart from English citizens by their Dutch speech.

The Schuyler family was one of the most conspicuous of all that made up the loosely compacted body of citizens of the New York colony. By marriage it was brought into connection with the other leading families; and thus as one follows the fortunes of the successive

1 Colonial New York: Philip Schuyler and his Family. By GEORGE W. SCHUYLER. New York Charles Scribner's Sons. 1885.

representatives of the Schuyler family one becomes acquainted with names of persons who were pursuing their own independent careers. Mr. Schuyler, while he has given in their proper places formal genealogical tables, has avoided the too technical treatment of genealogists, and has rather built upon his material a good structure of historic and biographic form. It is almost like read ing the stories of the patriarchs to attend to the comings and goings of these generations of Schuylers. By means of this method one looks at the life of a great colony from within; and if one is possessed of a clear knowledge of the successive events in the history of colonial New York, one may, immersed in these agreeably written chronicles, apprehend that personal, scattered activity which was enlarging the borders of civilization in the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk.

Mr. Schuyler writes with a simple, unaffected purpose. His judgments of men are sagacious and apparently candid, and he is so enamored with his subject, so much at home in the slow windings of the genealogical stream, that he communicates his interest to the reader. We may almost say that he is indifferent to the reader. His leisurely style is that of a man who pleases himself with his work, and we are sure that he found it well worth while. He has produced a somewhat unique book, which widens our notion of historic method. It is antiquarianism and genealogy run in a large mould, and one gets a new sense of the possibility of a centrifugal study of history by an examination of those personal forces which lie near the heart of all human organization.

It is easy to delude one's self with the notion that science and scientific methods are working such a revolution in intellectual life that the human race will one of these days accept a new grand division of time, and antiquity will reach down to the nineteenth cen

tury. At any rate, such is the logical deduction from the sentiments of a good many laudatores temporis præsentis. But there is one thing that survives all the changes that come over men's modes of thought, and that is art. How great the apparent difference between the Parthenon and Chartres Cathedral, yet how capable the human spirit is of apprehending the beauty of each! It is so with literary art, and one finds no inconsistency in enjoying Homer and Shakespeare. There is in art an appeal which is undisturbed by the conflict of reason, or by great changes in mental processes; and there is an art of history which leaves Herodotus secure when Rawlinson has said his last word, and keeps Clarendon alive though scientific historians have been busy over documents which he never saw. It is in vain to suppose that the new era of historic research and faithful collation of obscure authorities, the hunt for the beginning of things, the laying bare of foundations, is to put an end to that writing and reading of history which is akin to the writing and reading of poetry, the creation and enjoyment of all forms of art. Only this may fairly be asserted: that the historian who undertakes to recite the epic of a nation is put under heavier bonds to be faithful to minor details, and will be held more strictly accountable for any departure from accuracy. He will also be relieved of much waste of energy by the thoroughness with which the way is preparing before him. The indexes to history, which are increasing in number and efficiency, will make it possible for the literary historian to qualify himself for his task as he could not before, and will help to save him from those false generalizations which an insufficient familiarity with facts renders almost certain.

In our own country we have so far had no general history which can rest its hope of long life upon its artistic

quality. Possibly it is not time yet to look for such a book, but it is pleasant to see promise of it in the fragmentary work which Colonel Higginson has put forth. We say fragmentary, not only because the book stops just as the drums are beginning to beat for the great fray which gives reality to all American history, but because the plan of the work as so far carried out does not seem to show an attempt at true perspective. While, for example the early, half-legendary history is given in a charming manner, so important a phase as the relations between the French and the English is hardly more than allusively treated. If one accepts the book, however, as a graceful series of sketches of interesting passages in United States history, one will not be disappointed in his reading. Especially does Colonel Higginson give life to his story when he comes down to a period just beyond the memory of man, and we are confident that he could write a history of the Union from 1837 to 1861 which would contain so fine an infusion of personality as would give the book a long life in literature.

That he regards this history as an historical essay rather than a full, comprehensive survey is evident from several slight indications. There is almost an entire absence of reference to authorities, and there is also a curious fashion of appeal in the text to personal authorities." Boat-building had there begun" (in New England, that is), he tells us, "according to Colonel C. D.

1 A Larger History of the United States of America to the Close of President Jackson's Administration. By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIG

Wright, in 1624;" but whether Colonel Wright mentioned this fact to him at the club, or set it down in some book, the reader is not told. Such pleasant little trivialities, also, as "The landing of Columbus has been commemorated by the fine design of Turner, engraved in Rogers's poems," help to give a discursive character to the history, and to relieve the reader from too severe a habit of mind.

It is not our purpose to give a detailed examination of this book, but to welcome it as an indication that there is a view of history which is not scientific, but strictly literary. A writer of Colonel Higginson's strong aesthetic tendencies takes up the subject of United States history. His book is sure to be eagerly read and enjoyed. It may be hacked to pieces by a critic bred in the scientific school, but it has, what the scientific history is very apt to lack, a sense of form, a grace of style, those agreeable qualities which win readers who are indifferent to the subject, but are ready to be pleased. The conception of our history as a theme capable of artistic presentation has not commonly been held, but the reason for this has been largely in the failure to grasp the true meaning of American development. We are fortunate in having the collection of material in the hands of so competent an editor as Mr. Winsor, and we are very sure that we shall yet have a historian who will hold his own place as long and as triumphantly as a poet holds his.

THE salon is so distinctively a French institution that it is not a little startling to find an Englishwoman ruling it; but this circumstance adds, perhaps, to the interest of its history. The true story of the salon itself is, of course, not to be told. Senior himself would not be voluminous enough to hold even its typical conversation, and the social agreeableness of it must escape in the monologue that every undramatic book is forced to be. The esprit, the spirit of freshness and surprise which is its genius loci, is a butterfly thing, and has its momentary life in constant motion; it is dead when pinned to the page. The list of the guests may be recorded, and the ménu; with a good reporter there is a chance that some of the talk may survive in a moribund state; the sense that there was 66 a good time" may be keen even to the tantalizing point; but the banquet is cleared away. The French salon is as incommunicable as the English home; one must be born to it. In a certain way it has been the home of literary men in France. There, in the arm-chair by the hearth, one sees Châteaubriand; and he belongs in that place as naturally as Dryden in the inn's chimney-corner, or Wordsworth in his wooded walk. Sometimes one seems to get to the private life of a great French writer in the salon of which he was the habitué; but for the most part it is only a deception, due to the repeated expression of his traits in one spot, or to the letters which salon life has often brought into being. So when one reads accounts of the brilliant company, the eloquence and wit and spring of the conversation, and some genre anecdote, he frequently deludes himself into thinking this the real thing; but if he begins to ask how the group looked, and what was the accent and manner, and what the nobodies

were doing with themselves while the big flies buzzed, and, in short, how the acting went on, he will see that the social part, the distinctive thing in the whole, has dropped out of the tale.

This is why we say that it is fortunate for this book, with which our readers have already made acquaintance, that its heroine was an Englishwoman. It is her character, rather than her salon, which is prominent in the volume, and its interest is largely, and perhaps mainly, due to the English eccentricities of her nature. Of her girlhood and younger days we are told but little; there was a fascination that clung to her then, when her freshness, originality, and unconsciousness, together with a certain unconventional daring, made her, one thinks, not unlike that very modern figure, the American girl abroad. The anecdotes of her at the beginning of her career seem a good deal like the stories of our grandmothers' conquests, traditionary and not easily imagined by younger people; for in this memorial of her she is undeniably past middle age when we really begin to know her, and she comes to the mind in the "oldwitch" garb she adopted, and clothed with the irresponsible prerogatives of word and action that belong to the old, and are tolerated in them only when they are past any reformation of man