nd lived to be seventy-seven. As
editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took what we now
consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text, and this error
of judgment has somewhat clouded his just reputation as a pioneer in
historical research.

George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a horseback-riding
sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his clergyman father a taste
for history. He studied in Germany after leaving Harvard, turned
schoolmaster, Democratic politician and office-holder, served as
Secretary of the Navy, Minister to England and then to the German
Empire, and won distinction in each of his avocations, though the real
passion of his life was his "History of the United States," which he
succeeded in bringing down to the adoption of the Constitution. The
first volume, which appeared in 1834, reads today like a stump speech by
a sturdy Democratic orator of the Jacksonian period. But there was
solid stuff in it, nevertheless, and as Bancroft proceeded, decade after
decade, he discarded some of his rhetoric and philosophy of democracy
and utilized increasingly the vast stores of documents which his energy
and his high political positions had made it possible for him to obtain.
Late in life he condensed his ten great volumes to six. Posterity will
doubtless condense these in turn, as posterity has a way of doing,
but Bancroft the historian realized his own youthful ambition with
a completeness rare in the history of human effort and performed a
monumental service to his country. He was less of an artist, however,
than Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the
well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians. All of
these men, together with their friend George Ticknor, who wrote the
"History of Spanish Literature" and whose own "Life and Letters"
pictures a whole generation, had the professional advantages of
inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make deliberate choice of a
historical field which offered freshness and picturesqueness of theme.
All were tireless workers in spite of every physical handicap; all
enjoyed social security and the rich reward of full recognition by their
contemporaries. They had their world as in their time, as Chaucer makes
the Wife of Bath say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live in.

Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the rich
Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born i