e personal narratives of
the time, exaggeration and misrepresentation were then almost so
consistent with honesty, that any one who essays to digest trustworthy
history from them may be more embarrassed by the abundance than he would
be by the paucity of his materials. Our author has spared no pains or
expense in the gathering of plans, pamphlets, and solid volumes, in
procuring copies of unpublished documents, and in consulting all the
known sources of information. He discriminates with skill, and knows
when to trust himself and to encourage his readers in relying upon them.

It has been with all these means for faithful and profitable work in his
possession, gathered around him in aggravating reminders of their
unwrought wealth, and with a spirit of craving ardor to digest and
reproduce them, that Mr. Parkman has been compelled to suffer the
discipline of a form of invalidism which disables without destroying or
even impairing the power and will for continuous intellectual
employment. Brief intervals of relief and a recent period of promise and
hopefulness of full restoration have been heroically devoted to the
production of that instalment of his whole plan which we have in the
volume before us.

That plan, as his first and comprehensive title indicates, covers a
narration of the initiatory schemes and measures for the exploration and
settlement of the New World by France and England. As France had the
precedence in that enterprise, this first volume is fitly devoted to its
rehearsal. The French story is also far more picturesque, more brilliant
and sombre, too, in its details. There is more of the wild, the
romantic, and the tragic in it. Mr. Parkman briefly, but strikingly,
contrasts the spirit which animated and the fortunes which befell the
representatives of the two European nations,--the one of which has
wrought the romance, the other of which has moulded the living
development, of North America.

Under the specific title of this volume,--the "Pioneers of France in the
New World,"--the author gives us historical narratives of stirring and
even heroic enterprise in two localities at extreme points of our
present territory: first, the story of the sadly abortive attempt made
by the Huguenots to effect a settlement in Florida; and second, the
adventures, undertakings, and discoveries of Champlain, his predecessors
and associates, in and near Canada. The volume is touchingly dedicated
to three near kinsmen of th