about twenty-one years before the Declaration of Independence. The chief literary disadvantages of New England were, that her writers lived far from the great repositories of books, and far from the central currents of the world’s best thinking; that the lines of their own literary activity were few; and that, though they nourished their minds upon the Hebrew Scriptures and upon the classics of the Roman and Greek literatures, they stood aloof, with a sort of horror, from the richest and most exhilarating types of classic writing in their own tongue. In many ways their literary development was stunted and stiffened by the narrowness of Puritanism. Nevertheless, what they lacked in symmetry of culture and in range of literary movement, was something which the very integrity of their natures was sure to compel them, either in themselves or in their posterity, to acquire. _William Bradford._--William Bradford, of the _Mayflower_ and Plymouth Rock, deserves the pre-eminence of being called the father of American history. After he had been in America ten years and had seen proof of the permanent success of the heroic movement in which he was a leader, his mind seems to have been possessed by the historic significance of that movement; and thenceforward for twenty years he gave his leisure to the composition of a work in which the story of the settlement of New England should be told in a calm, just, and authentic manner. The result was his _History of Plymouth Plantation_. There is no other document upon New England history that can take precedence of this either in time or in authority. Governor Bradford wrote of events that had passed under his own eye, and that had been shaped by his own hand; and he had every qualification of a trustworthy narrator. His mind was placid, grave, well-poised; he was a student of many books and of many languages; and being thus developed both by letters and by experience, he was able to tell well the truth of history as it had unfolded itself during his own strenuous and benignant career. His history is an orderly, lucid, and most instructive work; it contains many tokens of its author’s appreciation of the nature and requirements of historical writing; and though so recently--1855--published in a perfect form, it must henceforth take its true place at the head of American historical literature, and win for its author the patristic dignity that we have ascribed to him.