e masters of Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman.
This article wishes to point out the quality and range of American
historians, with an expressed hope of causing research in this ample
and fertile field.

Though first on the soil of the Western Hemisphere, the Spaniard has
made no acknowledged and valuable contribution to American history.
Nor, indeed, has any nation of this hemisphere, save our own. The
French and Spanish Jesuit submitted religious monographs touching the
early days of occupancy of New France and Mexico; but these will
readily be seen to be rather chronicles than histories. And the
historian, native to the United States, is he in whose hands have been
the historical studies of our Western World. La Salle, Hennepin,
Marquette, and Las Casas have written faulty but valuable memoirs; but
they do not reach the dignity and value of histories, being what one
might name crude ore rather than refined gold.

Another thing worthy a glad emphasis is, that America is her own
historian. The New World has begotten the writers of its own story.
How fully this is true will not be appreciated until a detailed and
instantaneous survey is taken. Look down on this plain of history as
one does on Tuscany from an Alp. Thus, and thus only, can we value our
possession. In this estimate, mention is made of the greater
historians, not because others are not worthy of notice, but because
the scope of this essay does not allow, inasmuch as reference is here
had to the specific gravity of the historian and the epoch of our
history he has exploited.

Washington Irving, essayist, biographer, humorist, was, before all, a
historian in temper, and was drawn as by some subtle and unseen
attraction to study that nation to which America owed its discovery.
Irving is an evident American. He loved the land through whose
palisades the stately Hudson flowed. What touched America touched
Irving, and who had loved or helped America had won Irving's heart as a
trophy. And such evident patriotism is commendable in citizen and
writer. We love not Caesar less, but Rome the more, when we believe in
America before all nations of history. I love the patriot above the
cosmopolitan, because in him is an honest look, a homeliness that
touches the heart like the sight of a pasture-field, with its broken
bars, where our childhood ran with happy feet. Carlyle was against
things because they were English; so was Matthew Arnold. These me