of a city famed far more for monuments, pleasure-grounds, and
beautiful women, than for lawlessness and sans-culottism, a city proud
of its families and its culture, a city one of the oldest and richest in
the land. However unpleasant it may be to look at the black side of such
a city's history, yet the study must be profitable if by it we
Americans, proud of our tolerance and our humanity, jealous of aught
past or present that may blot our escutcheon, wondering at and
scornfully pitying nations that could have had Lord George Gordon riots
and blood-thirsty land-leagues, a reign of terror and a commune,--if we
may learn not to be quite so arrogant in our righteousness, quite so
boastful in our Pharisaism; if we may learn how much reason we of the
New World have to bear in mind, when we read about the past and present
of the Old World, the divine command: "He that is without sin among you,
let him first cast a stone at her."

Yet Scharf gives merely the bare details of these, the most vivid scenes
in Baltimore's history, and goes little into causes or results, leaving
us almost wholly in the dark as to how a civilized city in the most
enlightened country on earth could have grafted on its history such
anomalous things as these riots. This feature of Baltimore's history
seems to us to be the feature most peculiar to itself, and, therefore,
like that feature of a human face peculiar to the person we are
studying, the most interesting; but our historian gives it no
distinctive treatment, puts no emphasis on it, forces the reader to
compare, contrast, account for, explain, and draw conclusions for
himself. That he should slide over this side of Baltimore's history
would be natural enough, but of this he cannot be accused. His treatment
of this subject is characteristic of the whole book.

As a good example of an even more disappointing type of chronological
histories we may take the History of Lynn, including Lynnfield, Saugus,
Swampscott, and Nahant, by Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, an octavo
of six hundred and twenty pages, published in 1865. The book seems to
have been condensed from a series of very poor diaries, and the mass of
detail under the year-headings is ridiculous in its minuteness and
laughable in its absurdity. Every year has its paragraphic entries, more
or less full. The narrative of one year may here be quoted to show the
nature of the whole, and, for that matter, the nature of fifty similar
town hist