sociate.

If History may be properly defined, as I think it should be--a
narrative of national life, claiming the utmost comprehension of fact,
date, description, biography, annals, and chronicle, woven together
with brilliant analysis and wholesome philosophy,--I hope I may not be
considered unjust in the opinion that, as yet, our country has but one
writer who will be classed with Hume and Gibbon. This is certainly no
disparagement of others, for it is, probably, the result of extent of
aim rather than of quality or power. No American, of acknowledged
superiority, has yet equalled George Bancroft in the breadth of his
theme, the extent of time and place covered, the variety of character,
circumstance, and nationality concerned, the corresponding research,
the sparkling story, and the philosophic analysis of his National
History.

Prescott, the prince of scholars and gentlemen, matchless in the
department he chose, was rather a biographer than a historian. He
selected stirring epochs and their prominent men, the pivots of certain
times, upon whom the affairs of two worlds turned at critical
periods,--the great warders who stood at the portals of America and
Europe in the sixteenth century. Thus, Ferdinand and Isabella, Cortez,
Pizarro, Charles V., and Philip II., wonderfully as they revive in the
books of Prescott, exquisite in accuracy, harmonious style, and
enamelled finish, are but beautiful cabinet-pictures of the princes and
heroes of the age. The Life of a Nation requires a taller and wider
canvas, a bolder and broader brush. And, so it is with the historical
labors of Irving and Motley, though the latter has closely approached
the true grandeur of History in his narrative of the Rise of the Dutch
Republic. Yet, it must ever remain as the highest praise of our late
colleague, that, in the field of national _biographies_, national in
all their elements, he stands beside the masters on the platform of
acknowledged success. He was the real pioneer in the unexplored
wilderness of our historical literature. "Indeed," says one familiar
with his works, "it requires considerable knowledge on the part of a
reader, _a knowledge of the state of things, of the obstacles and
perplexities, in the way of effort, and of the hard conditions of
success, at the time when Mr. Sparks gave himself to his large and
costly enterprise_, in order that his eminent devotion and success may
be, even in degree, appreciated." But he brought