glowing and palpitating with essential truth. It may be that we must surrender the story of the villagers upon the Connecticut sorely beset by Indians at mid-day and about to yield; perhaps no actual, venerable form appears with flowing hair, like that white plume of conquering Navarre, - and with martial mien and voice of command rallies the despairing band, cheering them on to victory, then vanishing in air. The heroic legend may be a fable, but none the less it is the Puritan who marches in the van of our characteristic history, it is the subtle and penetrating influence of New England which has been felt in every part of our national life, as the cool wind blowing from her pine-clad mountains breathes a loftier inspiration, a health more vigorous, a fresher impulse, upon her own green valleys and happy fields. See how she has diffused her population. Like the old statues of the Danube and the Nile, figures reclining upon a reedy shore and from exhaustless urns pouring water which flows abroad in a thousand streams of benediction, so has New England sent forth her children. Following the sun westward, across the Hudson and the Mohawk and the Susquehanna, over the Alleghanies into the valley of the Mississippi, over the Sierra Nevada to the Pacific Ocean, the endless procession from New England has moved for a century, bearing everywhere Puritan principle, Puritan enterprise, and Puritan thrift. A hundred years ago New-Englanders passed beyond the calm Dutch Arcadia upon the Mohawk, and striking into the primeval forest of the ancient Iroquois domain began the settlement of central New York. A little later, upon the Genesee, settlers from Maryland and Pennsylvania met, but the pioneers from New England took the firmest hold and left the deepest and most permanent impression. A hundred years ago there was no white settlement in Ohio. But in 1789 the seed of Ohio was carried from Massachusetts, and from the loins of the great Eastern commonwealth sprang the first great commonwealth of the West. Early in the century a score of settlements beyond the Alleghanies bore the name of Salem, the spot where first in America the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay set foot; and in the dawn of the Revolution the hunters in the remote valley of the Elkhorn, hearing the news of the 19th of April, called their camp Lexington, and thus, in the response of their heroic sympathy, the

Puritan of New England named the early capital of Kentucky. But happier still, while yet the great region of the Northwest lay in primeval wilderness awaiting the creative touch that should lift it into civilization, it was the Puritan instinct which fulfilled the aspiration of Jefferson, and by the Ordinance of 1787 consecrated the Northwest to freedom. So in the civilization of the country has New England been a pioneer, and so deeply upon American life and institutions has the genius of New England impressed itself that in the great civil war the peculiar name of the NewEnglander, the Yankee, became the distinguishing title of the soldier of the Union; the national cause was the Yankee cause; and a son of the West, born in Kentucky and a citizen of Illinois, who had never seen New England twice in his life, became the chief representative Yankee, and with his hand, strong with the will of the people, the Puritan principle of liberty and equal rights broke the chains of a race. New England characteristics have become national qualities. The blood of New England flows with energizing, modifying, progressive power in the veins of every State; and the undaunted spirit of the Puritan, sic semper tyrannis, animates the continent from sea to sea.

[From an oration delivered at the unveiling of a bronze statue of the "Pilgrim," in Central Park, New York City, June 6, 1885. Printed in Unveiling of the Pilgrim Statue by the New England Society in the City of New York. Afterwards included in Orations and Addresses, Harper and Brothers, 1894, vol. i. The text is that of the original publication.]

FRANCIS PARKMAN

[Francis Parkman was born in Boston, Sept. 16, 1823, and died at his country house in Jamaica Plain, one of the suburbs of Boston, Nov. 8, 1893. His ancestors had for several generations been honorably known in Massachusetts. Much of Francis Parkman's early life was spent in the woods. The home of his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall of Medford, was situated on the border of the Middlesex Fells, a superb piece of wild and savage woodland, 4000 acres in extent, within eight miles of Boston. As the boy's health was not robust, he was allowed to spend much of his time in this enchanting solitude, and learned there the craft of huntsman and trapper. He was graduated at Harvard in 1844, with high rank. While in college he spent several months in a journey in Europe, and afterward, in 1846, he travelled in the Rocky Mountain region, in what was then a howling wilderness, and lived for some time in a village of Sioux Indians of the Ogillalah tribe, whose acquaintance with white men was but slight. A graphic account of this wild experience was given in Parkman's first book, The Oregon Trail, published in 1847. Some time afterward he published a historical novel, Vassall Morton, which had not much success. In 1851 he published the first of his great series of histories, The Conspiracy of Pontiac. This remarkable book, though the first to be published, was in its subject the last of the series to which it belongs, and which, with their dates of publication, are as follows: Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), The Jesuits in North America (1867), La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), The Old Régime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. (1877), A Half-Century of Conflict (1892), Montcalm and Wolfe (1884). It will be observed that the last-named work, the climax of the series, was completed before the less important one which precedes it.

Mr. Parkman was eminent in the culture of roses, and author of a work entitled The Book of Roses (1866). He was president of the Horticultural Society, and was at one time Professor of Horticulture in Harvard University. He was afterward an Overseer and finally a Fellow of the University. No biography of him has as yet been published except the brief sketch by the present writer, prefixed to the revised and illustrated edition of his complete works, in twenty volumes (Boston, 1897-1898).]

THE significance of Parkman in literary history lies chiefly in the fact that he was the first great American historian to deal on

a large scale with American themes. Two men of genius before him had taken subjects from the ever-fascinating age of maritime discovery. Seventy years ago Washington Irving published a biography of Columbus which still remains without a worthy rival in any language; in his life of Washington the same writer was less successful. Prescott's narratives of Spanish conquest in Mexico and Peru, extremely brilliant but inadequate and misleading because of the writer's imperfect acquaintance with American archæology, barely approach the threshold of American history, properly so called. Our only other historian of genius occupied himself with the noble story of the Netherlands and their war of independence. For American history one had to choose between the jejune registration of Hildreth and the vapid rhetoric of Bancroft. Far above such writers we must rank Palfrey, in spite of his one-sidedness; but his work, though excellent, is without genius; it does not clothe with warm flesh and red blood the dry bones of the past. Before Parkman wrote it used commonly to be said, either that our country had no history, or else that such as it had was devoid of romantic interest. What! Two and a half centuries, more crowded with incident and richer in records than any that had gone before, and yet no history! A leading race of men thrust into a savage wilderness, to work out a new civilization under these strange conditions, and yet no romantic interest! Truly the history was there, and the romance was there, only it needed the touch of the artist to bring it out. So it might have seemed in Dr. Johnson's day that there was but little of interest in Britain north of the Tweed, but the enchanter, Scott, forever dispelled such a monstrous illusion.

The first thing that strikes us in reading Parkman's books is their picturesqueness. But they are equally remarkable for their minute accuracy and for their wealth of knowledge. For patient and careful research Parkman has never been excelled by any of the Dryasdust family. He would follow up a clew with the tenacity of a sleuth-hound. It was very rarely that anything escaped him, and it is but seldom that the most jealous criticism has detected a weak spot in his statements or in his conclusions.

Parkman's accuracy, indeed, is a notable element of his picturesqueness. His descriptions are vivid because in every small

detail they are true to life. His preparation for his subject was admirable. It grew naturally out of his early wanderings in the Middlesex Fells. A passionate love of wild nature took possession of him, and in youth he conceived the plan of writing the history of the American wilderness, and the mighty struggle between Frenchmen and Englishmen for the mastery of it. This struggle between political despotism and political liberty for the possession of such a vast area of virgin soil for future growth and expansion gives to the theme an epic grandeur. For dealing with such a subject Parkman prepared himself by various experiences. Though his sojourn with a wild tribe of Sioux in 1846 was not long, yet he brought away from it knowledge of the highest value, for his faculty of observation was as keen as that of any naturalist. On his first journey in Europe, during his college days, he had spent several weeks in a monastery of Passionists at Rome, and what he saw there must have been of infinite service to him in studying the labors of Jesuits and Franciscans in the New World.

The next thing in order was to study history at its sources, and this involved much tedious exploration and several journeys in Europe. A notable monument of this research exists in a cabinet now standing in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, containing nearly two hundred folio volumes of documents transcribed from the originals by expert copyists. Ability to incur heavy expense is a prerequisite for such undertakings, and herein our historian was favored by fortune. Against this great advantage were to be offset the hardships entailed by delicate health and inability to use the eyes for reading and writing. Parkman always dictated instead of holding the pen, and his huge mass of documents in French, Italian, Latin, and other languages, had to be read aloud to him, while it was but seldom that he could work for more than half an hour without stopping to take a long rest. The heroism shown year after year in contending with physical ailments was the index of a character fit to be mated, for its pertinacious courage, with the heroes that live in his shining pages.

Parkman's descriptions seem like the reports of an eyewitness. The realism is so strong that the author seems to have come in person fresh from the scenes he describes, with the smoke of the