In the summer of 1865 I had occasion almost daily to pass by the pleasant windows of Little, Brown & Co., in Boston, and it was not an easy thing to do without stopping for a moment to look in upon their ample treasures. Among the freshest novelties there displayed were to be seen Lord Derby's translation of the Iliad, Forsyth's Life of Cicero, Colonel Higginson's Epictetus, a new edition of Edmund Burke's writings, and the tasteful reprint of Froude's History of England, just in from the Riverside Press. One day, in the midst of such time-honoured classics and new books on well-worn themes, there appeared a stranger that claimed attention and aroused curiosity. It was a modest crown octavo, clad in sombre garb, and bearing the title "Pioneers of France in the New World." The author's name was not familiar to me, but presently I remembered having seen it upon a stouter volume labelled "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," of which many copies used to stand in a row far back in the inner and dusky regions of the shop. This older book I had once taken down from its shelf, just to quiet a lazy doubt as to whether Pontiac might be the name of a man or a place. Had that conspiracy been an event in Merovingian Gaul or in Borgia's Italy, I should have felt a twinge of conscience at not knowing about it; but the deeds of feathered and painted red men on the Great Lakes and the Alleghanies, only a century old, seemed remote and trivial. Indeed, with the old-fashioned study of the humanities, which tended to keep the Mediterranean too exclusively in the centre of one's field of vision, it was not always easy to get one's historical perspective correctly adjusted. Scenes and events that come within the direct line of our spiritual ancestry, which until yesterday was all in the Old World, thus become unduly magnified, so as to deaden our sense of the interest and importance of the things that have happened since our forefathers went forth from their homesteads to grapple with the terrors of an outlying wilderness. We find no difficulty in realizing the historic significance of Marathon and Chalons, of the barons at Runnymede or Luther at Wittenberg; and scarcely a hill or a meadow in the Romans Europe but blooms for us with flowers of romance. Literature and philosophy, art and song, have expended their richest treasures in adding to the witchery of Old World spots and Old World themes.

But as we learn to broaden our horizon, the perspective becomes somewhat shifted. It begins to dawn upon us that in New World events, also, there is a rare and potent fascination. Not only is there the interest of their present importance, which nobody would be likely to deny, but there is the charm of a historic past as full of romance as any chapter whatever in the annals of mankind. The Alleghanies as well as the Apennines have looked down upon great causes lost and won, and the Mohawk Valley is classic ground no less than the banks of the Rhine. To appreciate these things thirty years ago required the vision of a master in the field of history; and when I carried home and read the "Pioneers of France," I saw at once that in Francis Parkman we had found such a master. The reading of the book was for me, as doubtless for many others, a pioneer experience in this New World. It was a delightful experience, repeated and prolonged for many a year, as those glorious volumes came one after another from the press, until the story of the struggle between France and England for the possession of North America was at last completed. It was an experience of which the full significance required study in many and apparently diverse fields to realize. By step after step one would alight upon new ways of regarding America and its place in universal history.

First and most obvious, plainly visible from the threshold of the subject, was its extreme picturesqueness. It is a widespread notion that American history is commonplace and dull; and as for the American red man, he is often thought to be finally disposed of when we have stigmatized him as a bloodthirsty demon and grovelling beast. It is safe to say that those who entertain such notions have never read Mr. Parkman. In the theme which occupied him his poet's eye saw nothing that was dull or commonplace. To bring him vividly before us, I will quote his own words from one of the introductory pages of his opening volume:—

"The French dominion is a memory of the past; and when we evoke its departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us: an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here with their dauntless hardihood put to shame the boldest sons of toil."

When a writer in sentences that are mere generalizations gives us such pictures as these, one has much to expect from his detailed narrative, glowing with sympathy and crowded with incident. In Parkman's books such expectations are never disappointed. What was an uncouth and howling wilderness in the world of literature he has taken for his own domain, and peopled it forever with living figures, dainty and winsome, or grim and terrible, or sprightly and gay. Never shall be forgotten the beautiful earnestness, the devout serenity, the blithe courage, of Champlain; never can we forget the saintly Marie de l'Incarnation, the delicate and long-suffering Lalemant, the lionlike BrÉbeuf, the chivalrous Maisonneuve, the grim and wily Pontiac, or that man against whom fate sickened of contending, the mighty and masterful La Salle. These, with many a comrade and foe, have now their place in literature as permanent and sure as Tancred or St. Boniface, as the Cid or Robert Bruce. As the wand of Scott revealed unsuspected depths of human interest in Border castle and Highland glen, so it seems that North America was but awaiting the magician's touch that should invest its rivers and hillsides with memories of great days gone by. Parkman's sweep has been a wide one, and many are the spots that his wand has touched, from the cliffs of the Saguenay to the Texas coast, and from Acadia to the western slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

I do not forget that earlier writers than Parkman had felt something of the picturesqueness and the elements of dramatic force in the history of the conquest of our continent. In particular, the characteristics of the red men and the incidents of forest life had long ago been made the theme of novels and poems, such as they were; I wonder how many people of to-day remember even the names of such books as "Yonnondio" or "Kabaosa"? All such work was thrown into the shade by that of Fenimore Cooper, whose genius, though limited, was undeniable. But when we mention Cooper we are brought at once by contrast to the secret of Parkman's power. It has long been recognized that Cooper's Indians are more or less unreal; just such creatures never existed anywhere. When Corneille and Racine put ancient Greeks or Romans on the stage they dressed them in velvet and gold lace, flowing wigs and high buckled shoes, and made them talk like Louis XIV.'s courtiers; in seventeenth-century dramatists the historical sense was lacking. In the next age it was not much better. When Rousseau had occasion to philosophize about men in a state of nature he invented the Noble Savage, an insufferable creature whom any real savage would justly loathe and despise. The noble savage has figured extensively in modern literature, and has left his mark upon Cooper's pleasant pages as well as upon many a chapter of serious history. But you cannot introduce unreal Indians as factors in the development of a narrative without throwing a shimmer of unreality about the whole story. It is like bringing in ghosts or goblins among live men and women: it instantly converts sober narrative into fairy tale; the two worlds will no more mix than oil and water. The ancient and mediÆval minds did not find it so, as the numberless histories encumbered with the supernatural testify; but the modern mind does find it so. The modern mind has taken a little draught, the prelude to deeper draughts, at the healing and purifying well of science; and it has begun to be dissatisfied with anything short of exact truth. When any unsound element enters into a narrative, the taint is quickly tasted, and its flavour spoils the whole.

We are then brought, I say, to the secret of Parkman's power. His Indians are true to the life. In his pages Pontiac is a man of warm flesh and blood, as much so as Montcalm or Israel Putnam. This solid reality in the Indians makes the whole work real and convincing. Here is the great contrast between Parkman's work and that of Prescott, in so far as the latter dealt with American themes. In reading Prescott's account of the conquest of Mexico, one feels one's self in the world of the "Arabian Nights;" indeed, the author himself, in occasional comments, lets us see that he is unable to get rid of just such a feeling.

His story moves on in a region that is unreal to him, and therefore tantalizing to the reader; his Montezuma is a personality like none that ever existed beneath the moon. This is because Prescott simply followed his Spanish authorities not only in their statements of physical fact, but in their inevitable misconceptions of the strange Aztec society which they encountered; the Aztecs in his story are unreal, and this false note vitiates it all. In his Peruvian story Prescott followed safer leaders in Garcilasso de la Vega and Cieza de Leon, and made a much truer picture; but he lacked the ethnological knowledge needful for coming into touch with that ancient society, and one often feels this as the weak spot in a narrative of marvellous power and beauty.

Now it was Parkman's good fortune at an early age to realize that in order to do his work it was first of all necessary to know the Indian by personal fellowship and contact. It was also his good fortune that the right sort of Indians were still accessible. What would not Prescott have given, what would not any student of human evolution give, for a chance to pass a week or even a day in such a community as the Tlascala of Xicotencatl or the Mexico of Montezuma! That phase of social development has long since disappeared. But fifty years ago, on our great western plains and among the Rocky Mountains, there still prevailed a state of society essentially similar to that which greeted the eyes of Champlain upon the St. Lawrence and of John Smith upon the Chickahominy. In those days the Oregon Trail had changed but little since the memorable journey of Lewis and Clark in the beginning of the present century. In 1846, two years after taking his bachelor degree at Harvard, young Parkman had a taste of the excitements of savage life in that primeval wilderness. He was accompanied by his kinsman, Mr. Quincy Shaw. They joined a roving tribe of Sioux Indians, at a time when to do such a thing was to take their lives in their hands, and they spent a wild summer among the Black Hills of Dakota and in the vast moorland solitudes through which the Platte River winds its interminable length. In the chase and in the wigwam, in watching the sorcery of which their religion chiefly consisted, or in listening to primitive folk tales by the evening camp fire, Parkman learned to understand the red man, to interpret his motives and his moods. With his naturalist's keen and accurate eye and his quick poetic apprehension, that youthful experience formed a safe foundation for all his future work. From that time forth he was fitted to absorb the records and memorials of the early explorers, and to make their strange experiences his own.

The next step was to gather these early records from government archives, and from libraries public and private, on both sides of the Atlantic,—a task, as Parkman himself called it, "abundantly irksome and laborious." It extended over many years and involved several visits to Europe. It was performed with a thoroughness approaching finality. Already in the preface to the "Pioneers" the author was able to say that he had gained access to all the published materials in existence. Of his research among manuscript sources a notable monument exists in a cabinet now standing in the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society, containing nearly two hundred folio volumes of documents copied from the originals by expert copyists. Ability to incur heavy expense is, of course, a prerequisite for all undertakings of this sort, and herein our historian was favoured by fortune. Against this chiefest among advantages 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 had to be read aloud to him. 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 those shining pages.

The progress in working up materials was slow and sure. "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," which forms the sequel and conclusion of Parkman's work, was first published in 1851, only five years after the summer spent with the Indians; fourteen years then elapsed before the "Pioneers" made its appearance in Little, Brown & Co.'s window; and then there were yet seven-and-twenty years more before the final volumes came out in 1892. Altogether, about half a century was required for the building of this grand literary monument. Nowhere can we find a better illustration of the French critic's definition of a great life,—a thought conceived in youth, and realized in later years.

This elaborateness of preparation had its share in producing the intense vividness of Parkman's descriptions. Profusion of detail makes them seem like the accounts of an eye-witness. 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 battle hovering about him and its fierce light glowing in his eyes. Such realism is usually the prerogative of the novelist rather than of the historian, and in one of his prefaces Parkman recognizes that the reader may feel this and suspect him. "If at times," he says, "it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only, since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation."

This kind of personal observation Parkman carried so far as to visit all the important localities, indeed well-nigh all the localities, that form the scenery of his story, and study them with the patience of a surveyor and the discerning eye of a landscape painter. His strong love of nature added keen zest to this sort of work. From boyhood he was a trapper and hunter; in later years he became eminent as a horticulturist, originating new varieties of flowers. To sleep under the open sky was his delight. His books fairly reek with the fragrance of pine woods. I open one of them at random, and my eye falls upon such a sentence as this: "There is softness in the mellow air, the warm sunshine, and the budding leaves of spring; and in the forest flower, which, more delicate than the pampered offspring of gardens, lifts its tender head through the refuse and decay of the wilderness." Looking at the context, I find that this sentence comes in a remarkable passage suggested by Colonel Henry Bouquet's western expedition of 1764, when he compelled the Indians to set free so many French and English prisoners. Some of these captives were unwilling to leave the society of the red men; some positively refused to accept the boon of what was called freedom. In this strange conduct, exclaims Parkman, there was no unaccountable perversity; and he breaks out with two pages of noble dithyrambics in praise of savage life. "To him who has once tasted the reckless independence, the haughty self-reliance, the sense of irresponsible freedom, which the forest life engenders, civilization thenceforth seems flat and stale.... The entrapped wanderer grows fierce and restless, and pants for breathing room. His path, it is true, was choked with difficulties, but his body and soul were hardened to meet them; it was beset with dangers, but these were the very spice of his life, gladdening his heart with exulting self-confidence, and sending the blood through his veins with a livelier current. The wilderness, rough, harsh, and inexorable, has charms more potent in their seductive influence than all the lures of luxury and sloth. And often he on whom it has cast its magic finds no heart to dissolve the spell, and remains a wanderer and an Ishmaelite to the hour of his death."[26]

No one can doubt that the man who could write like this had the kind of temperament that could look into the Indian's mind and portray him correctly. But for this inborn temperament all his microscopic industry would have availed him but little. To use his own words: "Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue." These are golden words for the student of the historical art to ponder. To make a truthful record of a vanished age patient scholarship is needed, and something more. Into the making of a historian there should enter something of the philosopher, something of the naturalist, something of the poet. In Parkman this rare union of qualities was realized in a greater degree than in any other American historian. Indeed, I doubt if the nineteenth century can show in any part of the world another historian quite his equal in respect of such a union.

There is one thing which lends to Parkman's work a peculiar interest, and will be sure to make it grow in fame with the ages. Not only has he left the truthful record of a vanished age so complete and final that the work will never need to be done again, but if any one should in future attempt to do it again he cannot approach the task with quite such equipment as Parkman. In an important sense, the age of Pontiac is far more remote from us than the age of Clovis or the age of Agamemnon. When barbaric society is overwhelmed by advancing waves of civilization, its vanishing is final; the thread of tradition is cut off forever with the shears of Fate. Where are Montezuma's Aztecs? Their physical offspring still dwell on the table-land of Mexico, and their ancient speech is still heard in the streets, but that old society is as extinct as the trilobites, and has to be painfully studied in fossil fragments of custom and tradition. So with the red men of the North: it is not true that they are dying out physically, as many people suppose, but their stage of society is fast disappearing, and soon it will have vanished forever. Soon their race will be swallowed up and forgotten, just as we overlook and ignore to-day the existence of five thousand Iroquois farmers in the state of New York.

Now the study of comparative ethnology has begun to teach us that the red Indian is one of the most interesting of men. He represents a stage of evolution through which civilized men have once passed,—a stage far more ancient and primitive than that which is depicted in the Odyssey or in the Book of Genesis. When Champlain and Frontenac met the feathered chieftains of the St. Lawrence, they talked with men of the Stone Age face to face. Phases of life that had vanished from Europe long before Rome was built survived in America long enough to be seen and studied by modern men. Behind Mr. Parkman's picturesqueness, therefore, there lies a significance far more profound than one at first would suspect. He has portrayed for us a wondrous and forever fascinating stage in the evolution of humanity. We may well thank Heaven for sending us such a scholar, such an artist, such a genius, before it was too late. As we look at the changes wrought in the last fifty years, we realize that already the opportunities by which he profited in youth are in large measure lost. He came not a moment too soon to catch the fleeting light and fix it upon his immortal canvas.

Thus Parkman is to be regarded as first of all the historian of Primitive Society. No other great historian has dealt intelligently and consecutively with such phases of barbarism as he describes with such loving minuteness. To the older historians all races of men very far below the European grade of culture seemed alike; all were ignorantly grouped together as "savages." Mr. Lewis Morgan first showed the wide difference between true savages, such as the Apaches and Bannocks on the one hand, and barbarians with developed village life, like the Five Nations and the Cherokees. The latter tribes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exhibited social phenomena such as were probably witnessed about the shores of the Mediterranean some seven or eight thousand years earlier. If we carry our thoughts back to the time that saw the building of the Great Pyramid, and imagine civilized Egypt looking northward and eastward upon tribes of white men with social and political ideas not much more advanced than those of Frontenac's red men, our picture will be in its most essential features a correct one. What would we not give for a historian who, with a pen like that of Herodotus, could bring before us the scenes of that primeval Greek world before the cyclopean works at Tiryns were built, when the ancestors of Solon and Aristides did not yet dwell in neatly joinered houses and fasten their door-latches with a thong, when the sacred city-state was still unknown, and the countryman had not yet become a bucolic or "tender of cows," and butter and cheese were still in the future! No written records can ever take us back to that time in that place; for there, as everywhere in the eastern hemisphere, the art of writing came many years later than the domestication of animals, and some ages later than the first building of towns. But in spite of the lack of written records, the comparative study of institutions, especially comparative jurisprudence, throws back upon those prehistoric times a light that is often dim, but sometimes wonderfully suggestive and instructive. It is a light that reveals among primeval Greeks ideas and customs essentially similar to those of the Iroquois. It is a light that grows steadier and brighter as it leads us to the conclusion that five or six thousand years before Christ white men around the Ægean Sea had advanced about as far as the red men in the Mohawk Valley two centuries ago. The one phase of this primitive society illuminates the other, though extreme caution is necessary in drawing our inferences. Now Parkman's minute and vivid description of primitive society among red men is full of lessons that may be applied with profit to the study of preclassic antiquity in the Old World. No other historian has brought us into such close and familiar contact with human life in such ancient stages of its progress. In Parkman's great book we have a record of vanished conditions such as hardly exists anywhere else in literature.

I say his great book, using the singular number; for, with the exception of that breezy bit of autobiography, "The Oregon Trail," all Parkman's books are the closely related volumes of a single comprehensive work. From the adventures of "The Pioneers of France" a consecutive story is developed through "The Jesuits in North America" and "The Discovery of the Great West." In "The Old RÉgime in Canada" it is continued with a masterly analysis of French methods of colonization in this their greatest colony, and then from "Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV." we are led through "A Half-Century of Conflict" to the grand climax in the volumes on "Montcalm and Wolfe," after which "The Conspiracy of Pontiac" brings the long narrative to a noble and brilliant close. In the first volume we see the men of the Stone Age at that brief moment when they were disposed to adore the bearded newcomers as Children of the Sun; in the last we read the bloody story of their last and most desperate concerted effort to loosen the iron grasp with which these palefaces had seized and were holding the continent. It is a well-rounded tale, and as complete as anything in real history, where completeness and finality are things unknown.

Between the beginning and the end of this well-rounded tale a mighty drama is wrought out in all its scenes. The struggle between France and England for the soil of North America was one of the great critical moments in the career of mankind,—no less important than the struggle between Greece and Persia, or between Rome and Carthage. Out of the long and complicated interaction between Roman and Teutonic institutions which made up the history of the Middle Ages, two strongly contrasted forms of political society had grown up and acquired aggressive strength when in the course of the sixteenth century a New World beyond the sea was laid open for colonization. The maritime nations of Europe were naturally the ones to be attracted to this new arena of enterprise; and Spain, Portugal, France, England, and Holland each played its interesting and characteristic part. Spain at first claimed the whole, excepting only that Brazilian coast which Borgia's decree gave to Portugal. But Spain's methods, as well as her early failure of strength, prevented her from making good her claim. Spain's methods were limited to stepping into the place formerly occupied by the conquering races of half-civilized Indians. She made aboriginal tribes work for her, just as the Aztec Confederacy and the Inca dynasty had done. Where she was brought into direct contact with American barbarism without the intermediation of half-civilized native races, she made little or no headway. Her early failure of strength, on the other hand, was due to her total absorption in the fight against civil and religious liberty in Europe. The failure became apparent as soon as the absorption had begun to be complete. Spain's last aggressive effort in the New World was the destruction of the little Huguenot colony in Florida in 1565, and it is at that point that Parkman's great work appropriately begins. From that moment Spain simply beat her strength to pieces against the rocks of Netherland courage and resourcefulness. As for the Netherlands, their energies were so far absorbed in taking over and managing the great Eastern empire of the Portuguese that their work in the New World was confined to seizing upon the most imperial geographical position, and planting a cosmopolitan colony there that, in the absence of adequate support, was sure to fall into the hands of one or the other of the competitors more actively engaged upon the scene.

The two competitors thus more actively engaged were France and England, and from an early period it was felt between the two to be a combat in which no quarter was to be given or accepted. These two strongly contrasted forms of political society had each its distinct ideal, and that ideal was to be made to prevail, to the utter exclusion and destruction of the other. Probably the French perceived this somewhat earlier than the English; they felt it to be necessary to stamp out the English before the latter had more than realized the necessity of defending themselves against the French. For the type of political society represented by Louis XIV. was preËminently militant, as the English type was preËminently industrial. The aggressiveness of the former was more distinctly conscious of its own narrower aims, and was more deliberately set at work to attain them, while the English, on the other hand, rather drifted into a tremendous world fight without distinct consciousness of their purpose. Yet after the final issue had been joined, the refrain Carthago delenda est was heard from the English side, and it came fraught with impending doom from the lips of Pitt as in days of old from the lips of Cato.

The French idea, had it prevailed in the strife, would not have been capable of building up a pacific union of partially independent states, covering this vast continent from ocean to ocean. Within that rigid and rigorous bureaucratic system there was no room for spontaneous individuality, no room for local self-government, and no chance for a flexible federalism to grow up. A well-known phrase of Louis XIV. was, "The state is myself." That phrase represented his ideal. It was approximately true in Old France, realized as far as sundry adverse conditions would allow. The Grand Monarch intended that in New France it should be absolutely true. Upon that fresh soil was to be built up a pure monarchy without concession to human weaknesses and limitations. It was a pet scheme of Louis XIV., and never did a philanthropic world-mender contemplate his grotesque phalanstery or pantarchy with greater pleasure than this master of kingcraft looked forward to the construction of a perfect Christian state in America.

The pages of our great historian are full of examples which prove that if the French idea failed of realization, and the state it founded was overwhelmed, it was not from any lack of lofty qualities in individual Frenchmen. In all the history of the American continent no names stand higher than some of the French names. For courage, for fortitude and high resolve, for sagacious leadership, statesmanlike wisdom, unswerving integrity, devoted loyalty, for all the qualities which make life heroic, we may learn lessons innumerable from the noble Frenchmen who throng in Parkman's pages. The difficulty was not in the individuals, but in the system; not in the units, but in the way they were put together. For while it is true—though many people do not know it—that by no imaginable artifice can you make a society that is better than the human units you put into it, it is also true that nothing is easier than to make a society that is worse than its units. So it was with the colony of New France.

Nowhere can we find a description of despotic government more careful and thoughtful, or more graphic and lifelike, than Parkman has given us in his volume on "The Old RÉgime in Canada." Seldom, too, will one find a book fuller of political wisdom. The author never preaches like Carlyle, nor does he hurl huge generalizations at our heads like Buckle; he simply describes a state of society that has been. But I hardly need say that his description is not—like the Dryasdust descriptions we are sometimes asked to accept as history—a mere mass of pigments flung at random upon a canvas. It is a picture painted with consummate art; and in this instance the art consists in so handling the relations of cause and effect as to make them speak for themselves. These pages are alive with political philosophy, and teem with object lessons of extraordinary value. It would be hard to point to any book where History more fully discharges her high function of gathering friendly lessons of caution from the errors of the past.

Of all the societies that have been composed of European men, probably none was ever so despotically organized as New France, unless it may have been the later Byzantine Empire, which it resembled in the minuteness of elaborate supervision over all the pettiest details of life. In Canada the protective, paternal, socialistic, or nationalistic theory of government—it is the same old cloven hoof, under whatever specious name you introduce it—was more fully carried into operation than in any other community known to history except ancient Peru. No room was left for individual initiative or enterprise. All undertakings were nationalized. Government looked after every man's interests in this world and the next: baptized and schooled him; married him and paid the bride's dowry; gave him a bounty with every child that was born to him; stocked his cupboard with garden seeds and compelled him to plant them; prescribed the size of his house and the number of horses and cattle he might keep, and the exact percentages of profit he might be allowed to make, and how his chimneys should be swept, and how many servants he might employ, and what theological doctrine he might believe, and what sort of bread the bakers might bake, and where goods might be bought and how much might be paid for them; and if in a society so well cared for it were possible to find indigent persons, such paupers were duly relieved, from a fund established by government. Unmitigated benevolence was the theory of Louis XIV.'s Canadian colony, and heartless political economy had no place there. Nor was there any room for free thinkers; when the King after 1685 sent out word that no mercy must be shown to heretics, the governor, Denonville, with a pious ejaculation, replied that not so much as a single heretic could be found in all Canada.

Such was the community whose career our historian has delineated with perfect soundness of judgment and wealth of knowledge. The fate of this nationalistic experiment, set on foot by one of the most absolute of monarchs and fostered by one of the most devoted and powerful of religious organizations, is traced to the operation of causes inherent in its very nature. The hopeless paralysis, the woeful corruption, the moral torpor, resulting from the suppression of individualism, are vividly portrayed; yet there is no discursive generalizing, and from moment to moment the development of the story proceeds from within itself. It is the whole national life of New France that is displayed before us. Historians of ordinary calibre exhibit their subject in fragments, or they show us some phases of life and neglect others. Some have no eyes save for events that are startling, such as battles and sieges; or decorative, such as coronations and court balls. Others give abundant details of manners and customs; others have their attention absorbed by economics; others again feel such interest in the history of ideas as to lose sight of mere material incidents. Parkman, on the other hand, conceives and presents his subject as a whole. He forgets nothing, overlooks nothing; but whether it is a bloody battle, or a theological pamphlet, or an exploring journey though the forest, or a code for the discipline of nunneries, each event grows out of its context as a feature in the total development that is going on before our eyes. It is only the historian who is also philosopher and artist that can thus deal in block with the great and complex life of a whole society. The requisite combination is realized only in certain rare and high types of mind, and there has been no more brilliant illustration of it than Parkman's volumes afford.

The struggle between the machine-like socialistic despotism of New France and the free and spontaneous political vitality of New England is one of the most instructive object lessons with which the experience of mankind has furnished us. The depth of its significance is equalled by the vastness of its consequences. Never did Destiny preside over a more fateful contest; for it determined which kind of political seed should be sown all over the widest and richest political garden plot left untilled in the world. Free industrial England pitted against despotic militant France for the possession of an ancient continent reserved for this decisive struggle, and dragging into the conflict the belated barbarism of the Stone Age,—such is the wonderful theme which Parkman has treated. When the vividly contrasted modern ideas and personages are set off against the romantic though lurid background of Indian life, the artistic effect becomes simply magnificent. Never has historian grappled with another such epic theme, save when Herodotus told the story of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the solemn tread of marshalled hosts through a thousand years of change.

The story of Mr. Parkman's life can be briefly told. He was born in Boston, in what is now known as Allston Street, September 16, 1823. His ancestors had for several generations been honourably known in Massachusetts. His great-grandfather, Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1741, was minister of the Congregational church in Westborough for nearly sixty years; he was a man of learning and eloquence, whose attention was not all given to Calvinistic theology, for he devoted much of it to the study of history. A son of this clergyman, at the age of seventeen, served as private in a Massachusetts regiment in that greatest of modern wars which was decided on the Heights of Abraham. How little did this gallant youth dream of the glory that was by and by to be shed on the scenes and characters passing before his eyes by the genius of one of his own race and name! Another son of Ebenezer Parkman returned to Boston and became a successful merchant, engaged in that foreign traffic which played so important and liberalizing a part in American life in the days before the Enemy of mankind had invented forty per cent tariffs. The home of this merchant, Samuel Parkman, on the corner of Green and Chardon streets, was long famous for its beautiful flower garden, indicating perhaps the kind of taste and skill so conspicuous afterwards in his grandson. In Samuel the clerical profession skipped one generation, to be taken up again by his son, Rev. Francis Parkman, a graduate of Harvard in 1807, and for many years after 1813 the eminent and beloved pastor of the New North Church. Dr. Parkman was noted for his public spirit and benevolence. Bishop Huntington, who knew him well, says of him: "Every aspect of suffering touched him tenderly. There was no hard spot in his breast. His house was the centre of countless mercies to various forms of want; and there were few solicitors of alms, local or itinerant, and whether for private necessity or public benefactions, that his doors did not welcome and send away satisfied.... For many years he was widely known and esteemed for his efficient interest in some of our most conspicuous and useful institutions of philanthropy. Among these may be especially mentioned the Massachusetts Bible Society, the Society for Propagating the Gospel, the Orphan Asylum, the Humane Society, the Medical Dispensary, the Society for the Relief of Aged and Destitute Clergymen, and the Congregational Charitable Society." He also took an active interest in Harvard University, of which he was an Overseer. In 1829 he founded there the professorship of "Pulpit Eloquence and the Pastoral Care," familiarly known as the Parkman Professorship. A pupil and friend of Channing, he was noted among Unitarians for a broadly tolerant disposition. His wealth of practical wisdom was enlivened by touches of mirth, so that it was said that you could not "meet Dr. Parkman in the street, and stop a minute to exchange words with him, without carrying away with you some phrase or turn of thought so exquisite in its mingled sagacity and humour that it touched the inmost sense of the ludicrous, and made the heart smile as well as the lips." Such was the father of our historian.

Mr. Parkman's mother was a descendant of Rev. John Cotton, one of the most eminent of the leaders in the great Puritan exodus of the seventeenth century. She was the daughter of Nathaniel Hall, of Medford, member of a family which was represented in the convention that framed the Constitution of Massachusetts in 1780. Caroline Hall was a lady of remarkable character, and many of her fine qualities were noticeable in her distinguished son. Of her the late Octavius Frothingham says: "Humility, charity, truthfulness, were her prime characteristics. Her conscience was firm and lofty, though never austere. She had a strong sense of right, coupled with perfect charity toward other people; inflexible in principle, she was gentle in practice. Intellectually she could hardly be called brilliant or accomplished, but she had a strong vein of common sense and practical wisdom, great penetration into character, and a good deal of quiet humour."

Of her six children, the historian, Francis Parkman, was the eldest. As a boy his health was delicate. In a fragment of autobiography, written in the third person, he tells us that "his childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant," and "his boyhood, though for a time active, was not robust." There was a nervous irritability and impulsiveness which kept driving him into activity more intense than his physical strength was well able to bear. At the same time an inborn instinct of self-control, accompanied, doubtless, by a refined unwillingness to intrude his personal feelings upon the notice of other people, led him into such habits of self-repression that his friends sometimes felicitated him on "having no nerves." There was something rudely stoical in his discipline. As he says: "It was impossible that conditions of the nervous system abnormal as his had been from infancy should be without their effects on the mind, and some of these were of a nature highly to exasperate him. Unconscious of their character and origin, and ignorant that with time and confirmed health they would have disappeared, he had no other thought than that of crushing them by force, and accordingly applied himself to the work. Hence resulted a state of mental tension, habitual for several years, and abundantly mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a body overtasked, he was burning his candle at both ends."

The conditions which were provided for the sensitive and highly strung boy during a part of his childhood were surely very delightful, and there can be little doubt that they served to determine his career. His grandfather Hall's home in Medford was situated on the border of the Middlesex Fells, a rough and rocky woodland, four thousand acres in extent, as wild and savage in many places as any primeval forest. The place is within eight miles of Boston, and it may be doubted if anywhere else can be found another such magnificent piece of wilderness so near to a great city. It needs only a stray Indian or two, with a few bears and wolves, to bring back for us the days when Winthrop's company landed on the shores of the neighbouring bay. In the heart of this shaggy woodland is Spot Pond, a lake of glorious beauty, with a surface of three hundred acres, and a homely name which it is to be hoped it may always keep,—a name bestowed in the good old times before the national vice of magniloquence had begun to deface our maps. Among the pleasure drives in the neighbourhood of Boston, the drive around Spot Pond is perhaps foremost in beauty. A few fine houses have been built upon its borders, and well-kept roads have given to some parts of the forest the aspect of a park, but the greater part of the territory is undisturbed, and will probably remain so. Seventy years ago the pruning hand of civilization has scarcely touched it. To his grandfather's farm, on the outskirts of this enchanting spot, the boy Parkman was sent in his eighth year. There, he tells us, "I walked twice a day to a school of high but undeserved reputation, about a mile distant, in the town of Medford. Here I learned very little, and spent the intervals of schooling more profitably in collecting eggs, insects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows. After four years of this rustication I was brought back to Boston, when I was unhappily seized with a mania for experiments in chemistry, involving a lonely, confined, unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind." No doubt the experience of four years of plastic boyhood in Middlesex Fells gave to Parkman's mind the bent which directed him toward the history of the wilderness. This fact he recognized of himself in after life, while he recalled those boyish days as the brightest in his memory.

At the age of fifteen or so the retorts and crucibles were thrown away forever, and a reaction in favor of woodland life began; "a fancy," he says, "which soon gained full control over the course of the literary pursuits to which he was also addicted." Here we come upon the first mention of the combination of interests which determined his career. A million boys might be turned loose in Middlesex Fells, one after another, there to roam in solitude until our globe should have entered upon a new geological period, and the chances are against any one of them becoming a great historian, or anything else above mediocrity. But in Parkman, as in all men of genius, the dominant motive power was something within him, something which science has not data enough to explain. The divine spark of genius is something which we know only through the acts which it excites. In Parkman the strong literary instinct showed itself at Chauncy Hall School, where we find him, at fourteen years of age, eagerly and busily engaged in the study and practice of English composition. It was natural that tales of heroes should be especially charming at that time of life, and among Parkman's efforts were paraphrasing parts of the Æneid, and turning into rhymed verse the scene of the tournament in "Ivanhoe." From the artificial stupidity which is too often superinduced in boys by their early schooling he was saved by native genius and breezy woodland life, and his progress was rapid. In 1840, having nearly completed his seventeenth year, he entered Harvard College. His reputation there for scholarship was good, but he was much more absorbed in his own pursuits than in the regular college studies. In the summer vacation of 1841 he made a rough journey of exploration in the woods of northern New Hampshire, accompanied by one classmate and a native guide, and there he had a taste of adventure slightly spiced with hardship.

How much importance this ramble may have had one cannot say, but he tells us that "before the end of the Sophomore year my various schemes had crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the 'Old French War,'—that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada; for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring, and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors, than in any other passage of our history. It was not until some years later that I enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest; for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night." The way in which true genius works could not be more happily described.

When the great scheme first took shape in Mr. Parkman's mind, he reckoned that it would take about twenty years to complete the task. How he entered upon it may best be told in his own words:—

"The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal error, entering on this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one starting on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on such personal experience as should in some sense identify him with his theme. His natural inclinations urged him in the same direction, for his thoughts were always in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with softer images, possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy. As fond of hardships as he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect, deceived moreover by a rapid development of frame and sinews which flattered him with the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth without a blanket." In other words, "a highly irritable organism spurred the writer to excess in a course which, with one of different temperament, would have produced a free and hardy development of such faculties and forces as he possessed." Along with the irritable organism perhaps a heritage of fierce ancestral Puritanism may have prompted him to the stoical discipline which sought to ignore the just claims of the physical body. He tells us of his undoubting faith that "to tame the Devil, it is best to take him by the horns;" but more mature experiences made him feel less sure "of the advantages of this method of dealing with that subtle personage."

Under these conditions, perhaps the college vacations which he spent in the woods of Canada and New England may have done more to exhaust than to recruit his strength. In his Junior year, some physical injury, the nature of which does not seem to be known, caused it to be thought necessary to send him to Europe for his health. He went first to Gibraltar in a sailing ship, and a passage from his diary may serve to throw light upon the voyage and the man: "It was a noble sight when at intervals the sun broke out over the savage waves, changing their blackness to a rich blue almost as dark; while the foam that flew over it seemed like whirling snow wreaths on the mountain.... As soon as it was daybreak I went on deck. Two or three sails were set. The vessel was scouring along, leaning over so that her lee gunwale scooped up the water; the water in a foam, and clouds of spray flying over us, frequently as high as the main yard. The spray was driven with such force that it pricked the cheek like needles. I stayed on deck two or three hours, when, being thoroughly salted, I went down, changed my clothes, and read 'Don Quixote' till Mr. Snow appeared at the door with 'You are the man that wants to see a gale, are ye? Now is your chance; only just come up on deck.' Accordingly I went. The wind was yelling and howling in the rigging in a fashion that reminded me of a storm in a Canadian forest.... The sailors clung, half drowned, to whatever they could lay hold of, for the vessel was at times half inverted, and tons of water washed from side to side of her deck."

Mr. Parkman's route was from Gibraltar by way of Malta, to Sicily, where he travelled over the whole island, and thence to Naples, where he fell in with the great preacher Theodore Parker. Together they climbed Vesuvius and peered into its crater, and afterwards in and about Rome they renewed their comradeship. Here Mr. Parkman wished to spend a few weeks in a monastery, in order to study with his own eyes the priests and their way of life. More than once he met with a prompt and uncompromising refusal, but at length the coveted privilege was granted him; and, curiously enough, it was by the strictest of all the monastic orders, the Passionists, brethren addicted to wearing hair shirts and scourging themselves without mercy. When these worthy monks learned that their visitor was not merely a Protestant, but a Unitarian, their horror was intense; but they were ready for the occasion, poor souls! and tried their best to convert him, thereby doubtless enhancing their value in the historian's eyes as living and breathing historic material. This visit was surely of inestimable service to the pen which was to be so largely occupied with the Jesuits and Franciscans of the New World.

Mr. Parkman did not leave Rome until he had seen temples, churches, and catacombs, and had been presented to the Pope. He stopped at Florence, Bologna, Modena, Parma, and Milan, and admired the Lake of Como, to which, however, he preferred the savage wildness of Lake George. He saw something of Switzerland, went to Paris and London, and did a bit of sight-seeing in Edinburgh and its neighbourhood. From Liverpool he sailed for America; and in spite of the time consumed in this trip we find him taking his degree at Cambridge, along with his class, in 1844. Probably his name stood high in the rank list, for he was at once elected a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. After this he entered the Law School, but stayed not long, for his life's work was already claiming him. In his brief vacation journeys he had seen tiny remnants of wilderness here and there in Canada or in lonely corners of New England; now he wished to see the wilderness itself in all its gloom and vastness, and to meet face to face with the dusky warriors of the Stone Age. At this end of the nineteenth century, as already observed, such a thing can no longer be done. Nowhere now, within the United States, does the primitive wilderness exist, save here and there in shreds and patches. In the middle of the century it covered the western half of the continent, and could be reached by a journey of sixteen or seventeen hundred miles, from Boston to the plains of Nebraska. Parkman had become an adept in woodcraft and a dead shot with the rifle, and could do such things with horses, tame or wild, as civilized people never see done except in a circus. There was little doubt as to his ability to win the respect of Indians by outshining them in such deeds as they could appreciate. Early in 1846 he started for the wilderness with Mr. Quincy Shaw. A passage from the preface to the fourth edition of "The Oregon Trail," published in 1872, will here be of interest:—

"I remember, as we rode by the foot of Pike's Peak, when for a fortnight we met no face of man, my companion remarked, in a tone anything but complacent, that a time would come when those plains would be a grazing country, the buffalo give place to tame cattle, houses be scattered along the watercourses, and wolves, bears, and Indians be numbered among the things that were. We condoled with each other on so melancholy a prospect, but with little thought what the future had in store. We knew that there was more or less gold in the seams of those untrodden mountains; but we did not foresee that it would build cities in the West, and plant hotels and gambling houses among the haunts of the grizzly bear. We knew that a few fanatical outcasts were groping their way across the plains to seek an asylum from Gentile persecution; but we did not imagine that the polygamous hordes of Mormons would rear a swarming Jerusalem in the bosom of solitude itself. We knew that more and more, year after year, the trains of emigrant wagons would creep in slow procession towards barbarous Oregon or wild and distant California; but we did not dream how Commerce and Gold would breed nations along the Pacific, the disenchanting screech of the locomotive break the spell of weird, mysterious mountains, woman's rights invade the fastnesses of the Arapahoes, and despairing savagery, assailed in front and rear, veil its scalp locks and feathers before triumphant commonplace. We were no prophets to foresee all this; and had we foreseen it, perhaps some perverse regret might have tempered the ardour of our rejoicing.

"The wild tribe that defiled with me down the gorges of the Black Hills, with its paint and war plumes, fluttering trophies and savage embroidery, bows, arrows, lances, and shields, will never be seen again. Those who formed it have found bloody graves, or a ghastlier burial in the maws of wolves. The Indian of to-day, armed with a revolver and crowned with an old hat, cased possibly in trousers or muffled in a tawdry shirt, is an Indian still, but an Indian shorn of the picturesqueness which was his most conspicuous merit. The mountain trapper is no more, and the grim romance of his wild, hard life is a memory of the past."

This first of Parkman's books, "The Oregon Trail," was published in 1847, as a series of articles in the "Knickerbocker Magazine." Its pages reveal such supreme courage, such physical hardiness, such rapturous enjoyment of life, that one finds it hard to realize that even in setting out upon this bold expedition the writer was something of an invalid. A weakness of sight—whether caused by some direct injury, or a result of widespread nervous disturbance, is not quite clear—had already become serious and somewhat alarming. On arriving at the Indian camp, near the Medicine Bow range of the Rocky Mountains, he was suffering from a complication of disorders. "I was so reduced by illness," he says, "that I could seldom walk without reeling like a drunken man; and when I rose from my seat upon the ground the landscape suddenly grew dim before my eyes, the trees and lodges seemed to sway to and fro, and the prairie to rise and fall like the swells of the ocean. Such a state of things is not enviable anywhere. In a country where a man's life may at any moment depend on the strength of his arm, or it may be on the activity of his legs, it is more particularly inconvenient. Nor is sleeping on damp ground, with an occasional drenching from a shower, very beneficial in such cases. I sometimes suffered the extremity of exhaustion, and was in a tolerably fair way of atoning for my love of the prairie by resting there forever. I tried repose and a very sparing diet. For a long time, with exemplary patience, I lounged about the camp, or at the utmost staggered over to the Indian village, and walked faint and dizzy among the lodges. It would not do, and I bethought me of starvation. During five days I sustained life on one small biscuit a day. At the end of that time I was weaker than before, but the disorder seemed shaken in its stronghold, and very gradually I began to resume a less rigid diet." It did not seem prudent to Parkman to let the signs of physical ailment become conspicuous, "since in that case a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." Therefore, in order that his prestige with the red men might not suffer diminution, he would "hunt buffalo on horseback over a broken country, when without the tonic of the chase he could scarcely sit upright in the saddle."

The maintenance of prestige was certainly desirable. The Ogillalah band of Sioux, among whom he found himself, were barbarians of a low type. "Neither their manners nor their ideas were in the slightest degree modified by contact with civilization. They knew nothing of the power and real character of the white men, and their children would scream in terror when they saw me. Their religion, superstitions, and prejudices were the same handed down to them from immemorial time. They fought with the weapons that their fathers fought with, and wore the same garments of skins. They were living representatives of the Stone Age; for, though their lances and arrows were tipped with iron procured from the traders, they still used the rude stone mallet of the primeval world." These savages welcomed Parkman and one of his white guides with cordial hospitality, and they were entertained by the chieftain Big Crow, whose lodge in the evening presented a picturesque spectacle. "A score or more of Indians were seated around it in a circle, their dark, naked forms just visible by the dull light of the smouldering fire in the middle. The pipe glowed brightly in the gloom as it passed from hand to hand. Then a squaw would drop a piece of buffalo fat on the dull embers. Instantly a bright flame would leap up, darting its light to the very apex of the tall conical structure, where the tops of the slender poles that supported the covering of hide were gathered together. It gilded the features of the Indians, as with animated gestures they sat around it, telling their endless stories of war and hunting, and displayed rude garments of skins that hung around the lodge; the bow, quiver, and lance suspended over the resting place of the chief, and the rifles and powderhorns of the two white guests. For a moment all would be bright as day; then the flames would die out; fitful flashes from the embers would illumine the lodge, and then leave it in darkness. Then the light would wholly fade, and the lodge and all within it be involved again in obscurity." From stories of war and the chase the conversation was now and then diverted to philosophic themes. When Parkman asked what makes the thunder, various opinions were expressed; but one old wrinkled fellow, named Red Water, asseverated that he had always known what it was. "It was a great black bird; and once he had seen it in a dream swooping down from the Black Hills, with its loud roaring wings; and when it flapped them over a lake, they struck lightning from the water." Another old man said that the wicked thunder had killed his brother last summer, but doggedly refused to give any particulars. It was afterwards learned that this brother was a member of a thunder-fighting fraternity of priests or medicine men. On the approach of a storm they would "take their bows and arrows, their magic drum, and a sort of whistle made out of the wing bone of the war eagle, and, thus equipped, run out and fire at the rising cloud, whopping, yelling, whistling, and beating their drum, to frighten it down again. One afternoon a heavy black cloud was coming up, and they repaired to the top of a hill, where they brought all their magic artillery into play against it. But the undaunted thunder, refusing to be terrified, darted out a bright flash, which struck [the aforesaid brother] dead as he was in the very act of shaking his long iron-pointed lance against it. The rest scattered, and ran yelling in an ecstasy of superstitious terror back to their lodges."

One should read Mr. Parkman's detailed narrative of the strange life of these people, and the manner of his taking part in it: how he called the villagers together and regaled them sumptuously with boiled dog, and made them a skilful speech, in which he quite satisfied them as to his reasons for coming to dwell among them; how a warm friendship grew up between himself and the venerable Red Water, who was the custodian of an immense fund of folk lore, but was apt to be superstitiously afraid of imparting any of it to strangers; how war parties were projected and abandoned; how buffalo and antelope were hunted, and how life was carried on in the dull intervals between such occupations. If one were to keep on quoting what is of especial interest in the book, one would have to quote the whole of it. But one characteristic portrait contains so much insight into Indian life that I cannot forbear giving it. It is the sketch of a young fellow called the Hail-Storm, as Parkman found him one evening on his return from the chase: "his light graceful figure reclining on the ground in an easy attitude, while ... near him lay the fresh skin of a female elk which he had just killed among the mountains, only a mile or two from camp. No doubt the boy's heart was elated with triumph, but he betrayed no sign of it. He even seemed totally unconscious of our approach, and his handsome face had all the tranquillity of Indian self-control,—a self-control which prevents the exhibition of emotion without restraining the emotion itself. It was about two months since I had known the Hail-Storm, and within that time his character had remarkably developed. When I first saw him, he was just emerging from the habits and feelings of the boy into the ambition of the hunter and warrior. He had lately killed his first deer, and this had excited his aspirations for distinction. Since that time he had been continually in search for game, and no young hunter in the village had been so active or so fortunate as he. All this success had produced a marked change in his character. As I first remembered him, he always shunned the society of the young squaws, and was extremely bashful and sheepish in their presence; but now, in the confidence of his new reputation, he began to assume the airs and arts of a man of gallantry. He wore his red blanket dashingly over his left shoulder, painted his cheeks every day with vermilion, and hung pendants of shells in his ears. If I observed aright, he met with very good success in his new pursuits; still the Hail-Storm had much to accomplish before he attained the full standing of a warrior. Gallantly as he began to bear himself before the women and girls, he was still timid and abashed in the presence of the chiefs and old men; for he had never yet killed a man, or stricken the dead body of an enemy in battle. I have no doubt that the handsome smooth-faced boy burned with desire to flesh his maiden scalping knife, and I would not have encamped alone with him without watching his movements with a suspicious eye." Mr. Parkman once told me that it was rare for a young brave to obtain full favour with the women without having at least one scalp to show; and this fact was one of the secret sources of danger which the ordinary white visitor would never think of. Peril is also liable to lurk in allowing one's self to be placed in a ludicrous light among these people; accordingly, whenever such occasions arose, Parkman knew enough to "maintain a rigid, inflexible countenance, and [thus] wholly escaped their sallies." He understood that his rifle and pistols were the only friends on whom he could invariably rely when alone among Indians. His own observation taught him "the extreme folly of confidence, and the utter impossibility of foreseeing to what sudden acts the strange, unbridled impulses of an Indian may urge him. When among this people, danger is never so near as when you are unprepared for it, never so remote as when you are armed and on the alert to meet it at any moment. Nothing offers so strong a temptation to their ferocious instincts as the appearance of timidity, weakness, or security."

The immense importance of this sojourn in the wilderness, in its relation to Parkman's life work, is obvious. Knowledge, intrepidity, and tact carried him through it unscathed, and good luck kept him clear of encounters with hostile Indians, in which these qualities might not have sufficed to avert destruction. It was rare good fortune that kept his party from meeting with an enemy during five months of travel through a dangerous region. Scarcely three weeks after he had reached the confines of civilization, the Pawnees and Comanches began a systematized series of hostilities, and "attacked ... every party, large or small, that passed during the next six months."

During this adventurous experience, says Parkman, "my business was observation, and I was willing to pay dearly for the opportunity of exercising it." A heavy price was exacted of him, not by red men, but by that "subtle personage" whom he had tried to take by the horns, and who seems to have resented such presumption. Toward the end of the journey Parkman found himself ill in much the same way as at the beginning, and craved medical advice. It was in mid-September, on a broad meadow in the wild valley of the Arkansas, where his party had fallen in with a huge Santa FÉ caravan of white-topped wagons, with great droves of mules and horses; and we may let Parkman tell the story in his own words, in the last of our extracts from his fascinating book. One of the guides had told him that in this caravan was a physician from St. Louis, by the name of Dobbs, of the very highest standing in his profession. "Without at all believing him, I resolved to consult this eminent practitioner. Walking over to the camp, I found him lying sound asleep under one of the wagons. He offered in his own person but indifferent evidence of his skill; for it was five months since I had seen so cadaverous a face. His hat had fallen off, and his yellow hair was all in disorder; one of his arms supplied the place of a pillow; his trousers were wrinkled halfway up to his knees, and he was covered with little bits of grass and straw upon which he had rolled in his uneasy slumber. A Mexican stood near, and I made him a sign to touch the doctor. Up sprang the learned Dobbs, and sitting upright rubbed his eyes and looked about him in bewilderment. I regretted the necessity of disturbing him, and said I had come to ask professional advice.

"'Your system, sir, is in a disordered state,' said he solemnly, after a short examination. I inquired what might be the particular species of disorder. 'Evidently a morbid action of the liver,' replied the medical man. 'I will give you a prescription.'

"Repairing to the back of one of the covered wagons, he scrambled in; for a moment I could see nothing of him but his boots. At length he produced a box which he had extracted from some dark recess within, and opening it presented me with a folded paper. 'What is it?' said I. 'Calomel,' said the doctor.

"Under the circumstances I would have taken almost anything. There was not enough to do me much harm, and it might possibly do good; so at camp that night I took the poison instead of supper."

After the return from the wilderness Parkman found his physical condition rather worse than better. The trouble with the eyes continued, and we begin to find mention of a lameness which was sometimes serious enough to confine him to the house, and which evidently lasted a long time; but from this he seems to have recovered. My personal acquaintance with him began in 1872, and I never noticed any symptoms of lameness, though I remember taking several pleasant walks with him. Perhaps the source of lameness may be indicated in the following account of his condition in 1848, cited from the fragment of autobiography in which he uses the third person: "To the maladies of the prairie succeeded a suite of exhausting disorders, so reducing him that circulation of the extremities ceased, the light of the sun became insupportable, and a wild whirl possessed his brain, joined to a universal turmoil of the nervous system which put his philosophy to the sharpest test it had hitherto known. All collapsed, in short, but the tenacious strength of muscles hardened by long activity." In 1851, whether due or not to disordered circulation, there came an effusion of water on the left knee, which for the next two years prevented walking.

It was between 1848 and 1851 that Parkman was engaged in writing "The Conspiracy of Pontiac." He felt that no regimen could be worse for him than idleness, and that no tonic could be more bracing than work in pursuance of the lofty purpose which had now attained maturity in his mind. He had to contend with a "triple-headed monster:" first, the weakness of the eyes, which had come to be such that he could not keep them open to the light while writing his own name; secondly, the incapacity for sustained attention; and thirdly, the indisposition to putting forth mental effort. Evidently, the true name of this triple-headed monster was nervous exhaustion; there was too much soul for the body to which it was yoked.

"To be made with impunity, the attempt must be made with the most watchful caution. He caused a wooden frame to be constructed of the size and shape of a sheet of letter paper. Stout wires were fixed horizontally across it, half an inch apart, and a movable back of thick pasteboard fitted behind them. The paper for writing was placed between the pasteboard and the wires, guided by which, and using a black lead crayon, he could write not illegibly with closed eyes. He was at the time absent from home, on Staten Island, where, and in the neighbouring city of New York, he had friends who willingly offered their aid. It is needless to say to which half of humanity nearly all these kind assistants belonged. He chose for a beginning that part of the work which offered fewest difficulties and with the subject of which he was most familiar; namely, the Siege of Detroit. The books and documents, already partially arranged, were procured from Boston, and read to him at such times as he could listen to them; the length of each reading never without injury much exceeding half an hour, and periods of several days frequently occurring during which he could not listen at all. Notes were made by him with closed eyes, and afterwards deciphered and read to him till he had mastered them. For the first half-year the rate of composition averaged about six lines a day. The portion of the book thus composed was afterwards partially rewritten.

"His health improved under the process, and the remainder of the volume—in other words, nearly the whole of it—was composed in Boston, while pacing in the twilight of a large garret, the only exercise which the sensitive condition of his sight permitted him in an unclouded day while the sun was above the horizon. It was afterwards written down from dictation by relatives under the same roof, to whom he was also indebted for the preparatory readings. His progress was much less tedious than at the outset, and the history was complete in about two years and a half."

The book composed under such formidable difficulties was published in 1851. It did not at once meet with the reception which it deserved. The reading public did not expect to find entertainment in American history. In the New England of those days the general reader had heard a good deal about the Pilgrim Fathers and Salem Witchcraft, and remembered hazily the stories of Hannah Dustin and of Putnam and the wolf, but could not be counted on for much else before the Revolution. I remember once hearing it said that the story of the "Old French War" was something of no more interest or value for Americans of to-day than the cuneiform records of an insurrection in ancient Nineveh; and so slow are people in gaining a correct historical perspective that within the last ten years the mighty world struggle in which Pitt and Frederick were allied is treated in a book entitled "Minor Wars of the United States"! In 1851 the soil was not yet ready for the seed sown by Parkman, and he did not quickly or suddenly become popular. But after the publication of the "Pioneers of France" in 1865 his fame grew rapidly. In those days I took especial pleasure in praising his books, from the feeling that they were not so generally known as they ought to be, particularly in England, where he has since come to be recognized as foremost among American writers of history. In 1879 I had been giving a course of lectures at University College, London, on "America's Place in History," and shortly afterwards repeated this course at the little Hawthorne Hall, on Park Street, in Boston. One evening, having occasion to allude briefly to Pontiac and his conspiracy, I said, among other things, that it was memorable as "the theme of one of the most brilliant and fascinating books that have ever been written by any historian since the days of Herodotus." The words were scarcely out of my mouth when I happened to catch sight of Mr. Parkman in my audience. I had not observed him before, though he was seated quite near me. I shall never forget the sudden start which he gave, and the heightened colour of his noble face, with its curious look of surprise and pleasure,—an expression as honest and simple as one might witness in a rather shy schoolboy suddenly singled out for praise. I was so glad that I had said what I did without thinking of his hearing me.

In May, 1850, while at work upon this great book, Mr. Parkman married Catherine, daughter of Jacob Bigelow, an eminent physician of Boston. Of this marriage there were three children,—a son, who died while an infant, and two daughters, who still survive. Mrs. Parkman died in 1858, and her husband never married again.

During these years, when his complicated ailments for a time made historical work impossible even to this man of Titanic will, he assuaged his cravings for spiritual creation by writing a novel, "Vassall Morton." Of his books it is the only one that I have never seen, and I can speak of it only from hearsay. It is said to be not without signal merits, but it did not find a great many readers, and its author seems not to have cared much for it. The main current of his interest in life was too strong to allow of much diversion into side channels.

"Meanwhile," to cite his own words, "the Faculty of Medicine were not idle, displaying that exuberance of resource for which that remarkable profession is justly famed. The wisest, indeed, did nothing, commending his patient to time and faith; but the activity of his brethren made full amends for this masterly inaction. One was for tonics, another for a diet of milk; one counselled galvanism, another hydropathy; one scarred him behind the neck with nitric acid, another drew red-hot irons along his spine with a view of enlivening that organ. Opinion was divergent as practice. One assured him of recovery in six years; another thought that he would never recover. Another, with grave circumlocution, lest the patient should take fright, informed him that he was the victim of an organic disease of the brain which must needs dispatch him to another world within a twelvemonth; and he stood amazed at the smile of an auditor who neither cared for the announcement nor believed it. Another, an eminent physiologist of Paris, after an acquaintance of three months, one day told him that from the nature of the disorder he had at first supposed that it must, in accordance with precedent, be attended with insanity, and had ever since been studying him to discover under what form the supposed aberration declared itself; adding, with a somewhat humorous look, that his researches had not been rewarded with the smallest success."

Soon after his marriage Mr. Parkman became possessor of a small estate of three acres or so in Jamaica Plain, on the steep shore of the beautiful pond. It was a charming place, thoroughly English in its homelike simplicity and refined comfort. The house stood near the entrance, and on not far from the same level as the roadway; but from the side and rear the ground fell off rapidly, so that it was quite a sharp descent to the pretty little wharf or dock, where one might sit and gaze on the placid, dreamy water. It is with that lovely home that Parkman is chiefly associated in my mind. Twenty years ago, while I was acting as librarian at Harvard University, he was a member of the corporation, and I had frequent occasion to consult with him on matters of business. At such times I would drive over from Cambridge or take a street car to Jamaica Plain, sure of a cordial greeting and a pleasant chat, in which business always received its full measure of justice, and was then thrust aside for more inspiring themes. The memory of one day in particular will go with me through life,—an enchanted day in the season of apple blossoms, when I went in the morning for a brief errand, taking with me one of my little sons. The brief errand ended in spending the whole day and staying until late in the evening, while the world of thought was ransacked and some of its weightiest questions provisionally settled! Nor was either greenhouse or garden or pond neglected. At such times there was nothing in Parkman's looks or manner to suggest the invalid. He and I were members of a small club of a dozen or more congenial spirits who now for nearly thirty years have met once a month to dine together. When he came to the dinner he was always one of the most charming companions at the table; but ill health often prevented his coming, and in the latter years of his life he never came. I knew nothing of the serious nature of his troubles; and when I heard the cause of his absence alleged, I used to suppose that it was merely some need for taking care of digestion or avoiding late hours that kept him at home. What most impressed one, in talking with him, was the combination of power and alertness with extreme gentleness. Nervous irritability was the last thing of which I should have suspected him. He never made the slightest allusion to his ill health; he would probably have deemed it inconsistent with good breeding to intrude upon his friends with such topics; and his appearance as always most cheerful. His friend (our common friend), the late Octavius Frothingham, says of him: "Again and again he had to restrain the impulse to say vehement things, or to do violent deeds without the least provocation; but he maintained so absolutely his moral self-control that none but the closest observer would notice any deviation from the most perfect calm and serenity." I can testify that until after Mr. Parkman's death I had never dreamed of the existence of any such deviation.

Garden and greenhouse formed a very important part of the home by Jamaica Pond. Mr. Parkman's love for Nature was in no way more conspicuously shown than in his diligence and skill in cultivating flowers. It is often observed that plants will grow for some persons, but not for others; one man's conservatory will be heavy with verdure, gorgeous in its colours, and redolent of sweet odours, while his neighbour's can show nothing but a forlorn assemblage of pots and sticks. The difference is due to the loving care which learns and humours the idiosyncrasies of each individual thing that grows, the keen observation of the naturalist supplemented by the watchful solicitude of the nurse. Among the indications of rare love and knowledge of Nature is marked success in inducing her to bring forth her most exquisite creations, the flowers. As an expert in horticulture Parkman achieved celebrity. His garden and greenhouse had extraordinary things to show. As he pointed out to me on my first visit to them, he followed Darwinian methods and originated new varieties of plants. The Lilium Parkmani has long been famous among florists. He was also eminent in the culture of roses, and author of a work entitled "The Book of Roses," which was published in 1866. He was President of the Horticultural Society, and at one time Professor of Horticulture in Harvard University. There can be no doubt as to the beneficial effects of these pursuits. It is wholesome to be out of doors with spade and trowel and sprinkler; there is something tonic in the aroma of fresh damp loam; and nothing is more restful to the soul than daily sympathetic intercourse with flowering plants. It was surely here that Parkman found his best medicine.

When he entered, in 1851, upon his great work on "France and England in the New World," he had before him the task "of tracing out, collecting, indexing, arranging, and digesting a great mass of incongruous material scattered on both sides of the Atlantic." A considerable portion of this material was in manuscript, and involved much tedious exploration and the employment of trained copyists. It was necessary to study carefully the catalogues of many European libraries, and to open correspondence with such scholars and public officials in both hemispheres as might be able to point to the whereabouts of fresh sources of information. Work of this sort, as one bit of clue leads to another, is capable of arousing the emotion of pursuit to a very high degree; and I believe the effect of it upon Parkman's health must have been good, in spite of, or rather because of, its difficulties. The chase was carried on until his manuscript treasures had been brought to an extraordinary degree of completeness. These made his library quite remarkable. In printed books it was far less rich. He had not the tastes of a bibliophile, and did not feel it necessary, as Freeman did, to own all the books he used. His library of printed books, which at his death went to Harvard University, was a very small one for a scholar,—about twenty-five hundred volumes, including more or less of Greek and Latin literature and theology inherited from his father. His manuscripts, as I have already mentioned, went to the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

When the manuscripts had come into his hands, an arduous labour was begun. All had to be read to him and taken in slowly, bit by bit. The incapacity to keep steadily at work made it impossible to employ regular assistants profitably; and for readers he either depended upon members of his own family or called in pupils from the public schools. Once he speaks of having had a well-trained young man, who was an excellent linguist; on another occasion it was a schoolgirl "ignorant of any tongue but her own," and "the effect, though highly amusing to bystanders, was far from being so to the person endeavouring to follow the meaning of this singular jargon." The larger part of the documents used in preparing the earlier volumes were in seventeenth-century French, which, though far from being Old French, is enough unlike the nineteenth-century speech to have troubled Parkman's readers, and thus to have worried his ears.

As Frothingham describes his method, when the manuscripts were slowly read to him, "first the chief points were considered, then the details of the story were gone over carefully and minutely. As the reading went on he made notes, first of essential matters, then of non-essential. After this he welded everything together, made the narrative completely his own, infused into it his own fire, quickened it by his own imagination, and made it, as it were, a living experience, so that his books read like personal reminiscences. It was certainly a slow and painful process, but the result more than justified the labour."

In the fragment of autobiography already quoted, which Mr. Parkman left with Dr. Ellis in 1868, but which was apparently written in 1865, he says: "One year, four years, and numerous short intervals lasting from a day to a month represent the literary interruptions since the work in hand was begun. Under the most favourable conditions it was a slow and doubtful navigation, beset with reefs and breakers, demanding a constant lookout and a constant throwing of the lead. Of late years, however, the condition of the sight has so far improved as to permit reading, not exceeding on the average five minutes at one time. This modicum of power, though apparently trifling, proves of the greatest service, since by a cautious management its application may be extended. By reading for one minute, and then resting for an equal time, this alternate process may generally be continued for about half an hour. Then after a sufficient interval it may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day. By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered ["Pioneers"] has been composed.... How far, by a process combining the slowness of the tortoise with the uncertainty of the hare, an undertaking of close and extended research can be advanced, is a question to solve which there is no aid from precedent, since it does not appear that an attempt under similar circumstances has hitherto been made. The writer looks, however, for a fair degree of success."

After 1865 the progress was certainly much more rapid than before. The next fourteen years witnessed the publication of "The Jesuits," "La Salle," "The Old RÉgime," and "Frontenac," and saw "Montcalm and Wolfe" well under way; while the "Half-Century of Conflict," intervening between "Frontenac" and "Montcalm and Wolfe," was reserved until the last-mentioned work should be done, for the same reason that led Herbert Spencer to postpone the completing of his "Sociology" until he should have finished his "Principles of Ethics." In view of life's vicissitudes, it was prudent to make sure of the crowning work, at all events leaving some connecting links to be inserted afterwards. As one obstacle after another was surmounted, as one grand division of the work after another became an accomplished fact, the effect upon Parkman's condition must have been bracing, and he seems to have acquired fresh impetus as he approached the goal.

For desultory work in the shape of magazine articles he had little leisure; but two essays of his, on "The Failure of Universal Suffrage" and on "The Reasons against Woman Suffrage," are very thoughtful, and worthy of serious consideration. In questions of political philosophy, his conclusions, which were reached from a very wide and impartial survey of essential facts, always seemed to me of the highest value.

When I look back upon Parkman's noble life, I think of Mendelssohn's chorus, "He that shall endure to the end," with its chaste and severely beautiful melody, and the calm, invincible faith which it expresses. After all the harrowing years of doubt and distress, the victory was such in its magnitude as has been granted to but few mortals to win. He lived to see his life's work done; the thought of his eighteenth year was realized in his sixty-ninth; and its greatness had come to be admitted throughout the civilized world. In September, 1893, his seventieth year was completed, and his autumn in the lovely home at Jamaica Plain was a pleasant one. On the first Sunday afternoon in November he rowed on the pond in his boat, but felt ill as he returned to the house, and on the next Wednesday, the 8th, he passed quietly away. Thus he departed from a world which will evermore be the richer and better for having once had him as its denizen. The memory of a life so strong and beautiful is a precious possession for us all.

As for the book on which he laboured with such marvellous heroism, a word may be said in conclusion. Great in his natural powers and great in the use he made of them, Parkman was no less great in his occasion and in his theme. Of all American historians he is the most deeply and peculiarly American, yet he is at the same time the broadest and most cosmopolitan. The book which depicts at once the social life of the Stone Age, and the victory of the English political ideal over the ideal which France inherited from imperial Rome, is a book for all mankind and for all time. The more adequately men's historic perspective gets adjusted, the greater will it seem. Strong in its individuality, and like to nothing else, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon.

February, 1897.