still held the elaborate formalism of such orators as Webster and Everett, and, also, more to their advantage, by their own admiration for the picturesqueness of Irving, whose example encouraged them to treat by preference of foreign subjects. Still they stood firmly upon their native soil. Born among a people whose temperament, though shot through with a strain of idealism and even dashed at times with a touch of imagination, was still fundamentally sober, they were predisposed to honest care in inquiry and, save when the temptations of rhetoric seduced them, to accuracy of statement. Thus even those historians of the New England School who had not enjoyed the advantage of European study preserved most of the traits of those who had. If Jared Sparks, a home-bred scholar who successfully conducted _The North American Review_ in its earlier days (1817-18, 1823-30) and lived to become professor of history (1839-49) and president (1849-53) of Harvard University, had better understood the standards of Ranke and the “Monumenta Germaniæ Historica,” he might, indeed, have allowed himself less latitude than he actually took in editing the “Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution” (1829-30, 12 volumes), the “Works of Benjamin Franklin” (1836-40, 10 volumes), and especially the “Life and Writings of George Washington” (1834-37, 12 volumes). But the extent of his fault was greatly exaggerated by certain of his critics, and not even the most rigorous training could have enhanced the diligence with which he preserved these and other less important sources of our Revolutionary history. Mention of Sparks naturally suggests the name of Peter Force (1790-1868), another diligent compiler of facts. Force’s “American Archives ... a Documentary History” etc. (1837-53, 9 volumes, left incomplete) was published by Congress. When we pass to the more illustrious writers of what has been called the classical period of historical writing in America, we discover two tolerably distinct tendencies. The one tendency appears in those men who were led to write by the spirit of the time and the place, and who wrote of America out of an ardent interest and a profound belief in the country and its political and social institutions. Foremost among these men stands George Bancroft. The other tendency appears in Prescott, Motley, and Parkman, who, though trained in the same atmosphere, were first men of letters and afterward Americans. They sought, not national and political, but picturesque and dramatic subjects, and these subjects lay, in large part, outside the history of their own country.