His character sketches of the men who figured in the struggles for American independence are among the best parts of his writing. The patriots and their friends in England and on the Continent are too uniformly creatures of light, but their opponents are not represented as necessarily creatures of darkness. If Bancroft could be more than fair to his own side, he was incapable of being wholly unfair to the other. His tendency is to regard human character as all of a piece, fixed rather than fluctuating. Men (politicians included) have been known to grow in virtue as they grow in years. Bancroft was over complacent in his attitude towards frenzied impromptu Revolutionary gatherings whose motives could not always have been so guiltlessly patriotic and disinterested as he represents them.[18] He was but little versed in the psychology of mobs. Forceful at all points, Bancroft was singularly impressive in dealing with history as it is made in parliaments and conventions, in council chambers, cabinets, and courts of law. He was born to grapple with whole state paper offices. He knew the secret of subordinating a vast amount of detail to his main purpose. An important part of the American Revolution took place in Europe. Bancroft’s capital merit consists in his having brought the event into its largest relations. The story as he told it did not merely concern the uprising of a few petty quarrelsome colonies, it became an important chapter in the history of liberty. Not for an instant did he permit himself to lose sight of that ‘idea of continuity which gives vitality to history.’ It is wonderful how through these seven volumes everything bends to one idea; how it all becomes part of a demonstration, a detail in the history of that spirit which, acting through discontent, led first to local outbreak and resistance, then to concerted action and war, and finally to the birth of a new nation. The crown of Bancroft’s work is the story of how the states parted with so much of their individuality as stood in the way of union, and then united. Two volumes would seem to afford room for full and leisurely treatment. But in fact the historian only accomplished his task by enormous compression. Often the substance of a speech had to be given in a sentence, and the deliberations of days in a few paragraphs. The marshalling of facts, the grasp of the subject in detail and as a whole, are extraordinary. Bancroft notes what forces led to union and what opposed it. He marks the shifting of public sentiment, the trembling of the balance, but he grants himself few privileges of the sort called literary. Seldom dramatic or picturesque in this portion of his narrative, he is at all times logically exact and magisterial. * * * * *