Would we see Parkman in a characteristic rôle we should not go to his literary workshop, but for example to the little town of Utica, Illinois. There one summer night, sitting on the porch of the hotel, Parkman described to a group of farmers gathered about, the location of La Salle’s fort and of the great Indian town. The description was based on what he had learned from books ‘nearly two hundred years old.’ His improvised audience gave hearty assent to its accuracy. Parkman was there to obtain accuracy of another sort. The next day he visited all the localities which formed the background of the historic drama and reconstructed the life of the time. This is but one instance among hundreds which might be brought forward to show the pains he took. Herein lay the distinctive feature of his method. He used imagination not to embroider the facts of history, but to give to dead facts a new life. A faculty of the mind which is supposed to vitiate history becomes in Parkman’s hands a means for arriving at truth. Parkman was a fortunate man. He was happy in his choice of a subject. The theme was a great one, worthy the pen of so profound a scholar and so gifted a literary artist. To this theme he gave his life, working with singleness of purpose and under incredible difficulties. No trace of this suffering can be detected in the temper of his judgments, or in the even flow and bright radiance of his narrative. He was not only happy in his mastery of his subject, he was most happy in his mastery of himself. Parkman’s life is a reproach to the man who, working amid normal conditions of health and fortune, permits himself to complain that there are difficulties in his way. FOOTNOTES: [52] _The Oregon Trail_ was first published serially in ‘The Knickerbocker Magazine.’ [53] Sedgwick’s _Parkman_, p. 217. [54] His _Book of the Roses_ was published in 1866. [55] Later renamed _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_. [56] _A Half-Century of Conflict_ was not published until after the _Montcalm and Wolfe_. The historian became fearful lest some accident should prevent his completing the part of his narrative towards which all his study had tended. XV _Bayard Taylor_ REFERENCES: =Marie Hansen-Taylor and H. E. Scudder=: _Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor_, 1884. =A. H. Smyth=: _Bayard Taylor_, ‘American Men of Letters’ [1896]. I HIS LIFE