=The New England School.=--When the events of 1814, which promised a prolonged peace to Europe, had put an end likewise to the second war between Great Britain and her former colonists, the people of the United States, freed at last from their long subserviency to the inherited animosities of Europe, turned with confident elation to face the future problems of America. For the next half-century, while the frontier was advancing from the Ohio to the Mississippi, to the Missouri, to the “Great Stony Mountains,” and beyond them to the shores of the Pacific, the Western man was too much engrossed in the bustling business of making an empire to find time for writing its annals. It was, therefore, only in New England, in the section of the country farthest removed from the course of that breathless rush across the continent, that there existed the leisure as well as the wealth necessary for the study of historical books and documents. To wealth and leisure we must add, moreover,--as important conditions underlying the historical productiveness of New England--literary and political traditions, the possession of documents and other instruments of research, and, finally, the general intellectual tone of the extreme Eastern States--that part of the country most strongly affected by the civilisation of Europe. As Tyler points out, the earliest development of New England letters had taken place in those fields of half-literary effort which seek to provide the instruments or to record the acts of statesmen, in oratory and in history. And when, at the close of the Napoleonic wars, the intellectual influence of Europe upon America began to revive, and those forces which were to produce upon the Continent the Revolution of 1830 helped, on this side of the Atlantic, to excite the democratic turmoil of the Jacksonian era, it is not surprising that the new literary strivings, which manifested themselves somewhat widely in fiction and poetry, should take on in New England the form of historical narrative. The manner of this new historical movement was, in large measure, determined by the influence of German scholarship. It was from Göttingen that George Ticknor, afterward the historian of Spanish literature, wrote to his father in 1815, lamenting the “mortifying distance there is between an European and an American scholar. We do not know,” said he, “what a Greek scholar is; we do not even know the process by which a man is to be made one.” And it was in those bare halls of the old Georgia Augusta, at the feet of Heeren and Eichhorn and Dissen and Blumenbach, that other grateful New Englanders--among them George Bancroft and Edward Everett in Ticknor’s time, and Longfellow and Motley at a later day--learned something of the spirit of Continental scholarship. In this spirit the New England School of historians attempted, on the whole, to work. They were somewhat swerved, no doubt, by the esteem in which their countrymen