manifest to the
reader. The future historian, who spared no pains to be accurate, falls
into the most extraordinary anachronisms in almost every chapter. Brutus
in a bob-wig, Othello in a swallow-tail coat, could hardly be more
incongruously equipped than some of his characters in the manner of
thought, the phrases, the way of bearing themselves which belong to them
in the tale, but never could have belonged to characters of our
Revolutionary period. He goes so far in his carelessness as to mix up
dates in such a way as almost to convince us that he never looked over
his own manuscript or proofs. His hero is in Prague in June, 1777,
reading a letter received from America in less than a fortnight from the
date of its being written; in August of the same year he is in the
American camp, where he is found in the company of a certain Colonel
Waldron, an officer of some standing in the Revolutionary Army, with whom
he is said to have been constantly associated for some three months,
having arrived in America, as he says, on the 15th of May, that is to
say, six weeks or more before he sailed, according to his previous
account. Bohemia seems to have bewitched his chronology as it did
Shakespeare's geography. To have made his story a consistent series of
contradictions, Morton should have sailed from that Bohemian seashore
which may be found in "A Winter's Tale," but not in the map of Europe.

And yet in the midst of all these marks of haste and negligence, here and
there the philosophical student of history betrays himself, the ideal of
noble achievement glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a
loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The
novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the
writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the
creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the
firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at
work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant
movements are as mysterious, as miraculous, we might truly say, as those
which give shape and order to the confused materials out of which
habitable worlds are evolved. It is too late now to be sensitive over
this unsuccessful attempt as a story and unconscious success as a
self-portraiture. The first sketches of Paul Veronese, the first patterns
of the Gobelin tapestry, are not to be criticised for the sake of
po