th a glance at parts adjacent and an occasional
distant view of regions beyond.

Graphic, powerful, and popular as are Carleton's books, he does not
wholly escape the limitations of his heredity and environment.
Generous as he is, and means to be, to other States, nationalities,
and sections in the United States, beyond those in the six Eastern
States, the student more familiar with the great constructive forces
of the Middle, the Southern, and the Western States, who knows the
power of Princeton as well as of Harvard, of Dutch as well as of
Yankee, without necessarily contesting Carleton's statements of fact,
is inclined to discern larger streams of influence, and to give
greater credit to sources and developments of power, and to men and
institutions west and south of the Hudson River, than does Carleton in
his books.

Yet to the millions of his readers, history seemed to be written in a
new way. It was different from anything to which they had been
accustomed. Peter Parley had, indeed, in his time, created a fresh
style of historical narration, which captivated unnumbered readers by
its simple and direct method of presenting subjects known in their
general outline, but not made of sufficient human or present interest.
These works had suited exactly the stage of culture which the majority
of young people in our country had reached when the Parley books were
written. It is doubtful, however, whether those same works would have
achieved a like success in the last three decades of this century.
Education had been so much improved, schools were so much more
general, the development of the press and cheap reading matter was so
great, that in the enlargement of view consequent upon the successful
issue of the great civil war, a higher order of historical narration
was a necessity. He who would win the new generation needed to be
neither a professional scholar, a man of research, nor a genius, but
he must know human nature well, and be familiar with great national
movements, the causes and the channels of power. This equipment,
together with a style fashioned, indeed, in the newspaper office, but
deepened and enriched by the study of language, of rhetoric, and of
masterly literary methods, as seen in the best English prose, made
Carleton the elect historian for the new generation, and the educator
of the youth of our own and the coming century.

Carleton is a maker of pictures. He turns types into prismatics, and
paragra