barbarity which were original holders of this realm.
Speaking for myself, no author ever helped me to knowledge of the
character of the aborigines of North America as Francis Parkman has
done. I see that wild past, and feel it. And he has written the
thrilling story of the French attempt to build an empire; and the
attempt was courageous to the verge of wonder. There was in the
Frenchman a careless ease and courage and sprightliness of temper,
which lifted him above danger, as a boat is lifted on a billow's
shoulders. Those perils were his drink; with a laugh and a jest he met
his appointment with death as he would have met tryst with a woman. In
"The Romance of American Geography," I have described the genius of the
French voyager, for which I have an unbounded admiration, and in which
I take an intemperate delight. He is the discoverer at his best, but
the colonizer at his worst. The Jesuits had a brave chapter in the
French occupancy. Their labors and sufferings and voyagings, their
fealty to what they thought to be the cause of God, makes us proud of
them, as if they were our own fellow-citizens. The settlement of
Montreal and Quebec and contiguous territory, the religious fervor that
mixed with the military spirit as waters of two streams mingle in a
mountain-meadow,--read Parkman, and discover the dramatic instincts of
these episodes which can be rehearsed no more upon our continent.
Their day is past; but it was a great and stirring day. Gilbert
Parker's "The Seats of the Mighty" is a chapter, torn from Parkman's
"French Regime in Canada." All his facts and the romance are accurate,
and are taken from Parkman's narrative, which misses nothing, but tells
all. Parker's "Pierre and his People," and "An Adventure of the North"
are tales of adventure, dewy with the freshness of a frontier world,
and are in brief a section of the old French voyagers' days. Parkman's
"Wolfe and Montcalm" is a picture, painted in smoke and blood, where
heroism of Englishmen and Frenchmen mix themselves in an inextricable
confusion. Pray you read Parkman, and be transported to a world where
great deeds were done by men whose lives were as contradictory as an
April day; but "their works do follow them" for all that, and do
glorify them. Be glad for Francis Parkman, historian.

Many historians there are. John Fiske has written chapters on the
discovery and colonization days; Rhodes has written on our
Constitutional history;