rty-six pages to the story of Columbus, he had
undoubtedly material enough well arranged and digested to fill the
volume on this topic alone. I desire to quote a signal example of
compression:

It was November, 1504, when Columbus arrived in Seville, a broken
man, something over twelve years from the time he first set sail
from Palos. Each successive voyage since his first had left him at a
lower point. On his return from the second he was on the defensive;
after his third he was deprived of his viceroyalty; on his fourth he
was shipwrecked.... The last blow, the death of his patron Isabella,
soon followed. It was months before he was able to attend court.
His strength gradually failed, he sank from public view, and on the
eve of Ascension Day, May 20, 1506, he passed away in obscurity
[p. 81].

And I am very fond of this final characterization:

Columbus ... has revealed himself in his writings as few men of
action have been revealed. His hopes, his illusions, his vanity, and
love of money, his devotion to by-gone ideals, his keen and
sensitive observation of the natural world, his credulity and utter
lack of critical power in dealing with literary evidence, his
practical abilities as a navigator, his tenacity of purpose and
boldness of execution, his lack of fidelity as a husband and a
lover,... all stand out in clear relief.... Of all the self-made men
that America has produced, none has had a more dazzling success, a
more pathetic sinking to obscurity, or achieved a more universal
celebrity [p. 82].

His chapter on Magellan is thoroughly interesting. The treatment of
Columbus and Magellan shows what Bourne might have achieved in
historical work if he could have had leisure to select his own subjects
and elaborate them at will.

Before "Spain in America" appeared, he wrote a scholarly introduction to
the vast work on the "Philippine Islands" published by the Arthur H.
Clark Company, of Cleveland, of which fifty-one volumes are already out.
The study of this subject gave Bourne a chance for the exhibition of his
dry wit at one of the gatherings of the American Historical Association.
It was asserted that in the acquisition of the Philippine Islands our
country had violated the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, which properly
confined our indulgence of the land hunger that is preying upon the
world to the Western hemisphere. Bourne t