a bytoure bumblith in the myre."

My friend canceled his note. It is, of course, now established that the
bittern "booms"--not in the mud--but in the air.

Mr. Roosevelt was historian, biographer, essayist, and writer of
narrative papers on hunting, outdoor life, and natural history, and in
all these departments did solid, important work. His "Winning of the
West" is little, if at all, inferior in historical interest to the
similar writings of Parkman and John Fiske. His "History of the Naval
War of 1812" is an astonishing performance for a young man of
twenty-four, only two years out of college. For it required a careful
sifting of evidence and weighing of authorities. The job was done with
patient thoroughness, and the book is accepted, I believe, as
authoritative. It is to me a somewhat tedious tale. One sea fight is
much like another, a record of meaningless slaughter.

Of the three lives, those of Gouverneur Morris, T. H. Benton, and Oliver
Cromwell, I cannot speak with confidence, having read only the last. I
should guess that the life of Benton was written more _con amore_ than
the others, for the frontier was this historian's favorite scene. The
life of Cromwell is not so much a formal biography as a continuous essay
in interpretation of a character still partly enigmatic in spite of all
the light that so many acute psychologists have shed upon it. It is a
relief to read for once a book which is without preface, footnote, or
reference. It cannot be said that the biographer contributes anything
very new to our knowledge of his subject. The most novel features of his
work are the analogies that he draws between situations in English and
American political history. These are usually ingenious and
illuminating, sometimes a little misleading; as where he praises
Lincoln's readiness to acquiesce in the result of the election in 1864
and to retire peaceably in favor of McClellan; contrasting it with
Cromwell's dissolution of his Parliaments and usurpation of the supreme
power. There was a certain likeness in the exigencies, to be sure, but a
broad difference between the problems confronting the two rulers.
Lincoln was a constitutional President with strictly limited powers,
bound by usage and precedent. For him to have kept his seat by military
force, in defiance of a Democratic majority, would have been an act of
treason. But the Lord Protector held a new office, unknown to the old
constitution of England and wit