the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any other passage of our history.” “The Oregon Trail”--an account of his adventures on the great plains and beyond--began to appear in _The Knickerbocker Magazine_ in 1847, and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” came out in 1851. Later, the plan widened to include the whole course of the conflict in America between France and England. The result was a series of books unexcelled in western historiography: “The Pioneers of France in the New World” (1865), “The Jesuits in North America” (1867), “La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West” (1869), “The Old Régime” (1874), “Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV” (1877), “Montcalm and Wolfe” (1884), and, finally, “A Half-Century of Conflict” (1892). The series received the general title, “France and England in North America.” In his “Montcalm and Wolfe,” Parkman reached the height of his fame. Wretched health turned the author’s attention to horticultural diversions. In 1871 he was appointed professor of horticulture in Harvard University; in 1866 he published his famous “Book of Roses.” His intimate knowledge of the scenes and peoples of whom he wrote and an engaging and finished manner impart to his historical books an unusual vivacity and charm. His work, while it is, as he intended, “a history of the American forest,” is also the history of two powerful and opposing systems of civilisation--“feudal, militant, and Catholic France in conflict with democratic, industrial, and Protestant England.” Less impulsive than Motley and less serene than Prescott, Parkman possessed at once the ardour and the restraint necessary to the vivid and impartial rendering of a glowing theme vastly important in the history of the New World. Himself cast in an heroic mould and exhibiting a fine type of the Puritan spirit, he was at home among chivalrous men and bold and impressive deeds. Jameson, writing of him shortly before his work was finished (see “The History of Historical Writing in America,” 1891), declares him to be, “next after one or two who survived from the preceding period, the most conspicuous figure in the American historiography of the last twenty-five years, the only historian who can fairly be called classical.”