self-existent commonwealths was free from vindictive
bitterness, and attended by no violent or wide departure from the past."

A considerable portion of this volume is occupied by a consideration of
the relations between Europe and America. Advancing years do not seem to
chill Mr. Bancroft's faith in progress, his confidence in democracy, his
love of popular institutions, or to check his tendency to throw his
speculations into an aphoristic form, and to present his conclusions
positively, and with less of qualification and limitation than men of a
more cautious temperament would do. So far as literary merit is
concerned, the European chapters will be found the most attractive in
the volume. They are sparkling, rapid, condensed, and pointed; they
gratify our national pride; their animated and picturesque style never
suffers the attention to flag for a moment;--and yet it is in these very
chapters that judicial criticism will find the most frequent occasion to
pause and doubt, whether we consider the direction in which the stream
of thought flows, or their merely rhetorical features. Mr. Bancroft's
glittering generalizations do not always seem to us to wear the sober
livery of truth. For instance, on page 500 we read: "The most stupendous
thought that ever was conceived by man, such as never had been dared by
Socrates or the Academy, by Aristotle or the Stoics, took possession of
Descartes on a November night in his meditations on the banks of the
Danube." It may be coldness of temperament, it may be the chilling
influence of advancing years, but we cannot admire statements like
these, and we are constrained to think them exaggerated and extravagant.

And on the next page Mr. Bancroft says: "Edwards, Reid, Kant, and
Rousseau were all imbued with religiosity, and all except the last, who
spoiled his doctrine by dreamy indolence, were expositors of the active
powers of man." It is certainly an ingenious mind that finds a
resemblance between Edwards and Rousseau. What exactly is the meaning of
"religiosity," we cannot say; but if it be used as a synonyme of
religion, we demur to the assertion that Rousseau was imbued with
religion,--Rousseau, who in his youth allowed an innocent girl to be
ruined by accusing her of a theft which he himself had committed, and in
his ripened manhood sent to a foundling hospital the children he had had
by his mistress,--whose life was despicable and whose moral creed seemed
to be summed up in t