[After ten years as editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, Mr. Aldrich resigned his position, and has since that time been living in Boston. In 1893 he published “An Old Town by the Sea,” and two years later “Unguarded Gates, and Other Poems.”--EDITORS.] GEORGE BANCROFT GEORGE BANCROFT AT WASHINGTON Mr. Bancroft, the historian, was “at home” beneath every roof-tree, beside every fireside, where books are household gods. Mr. Bancroft, the octogenarian, who came into the world hand in hand with the Nineteenth Century, was especially at home at the capital of the country whose history was to him a labor of love and the absorbing occupation of a lifetime. For although his career was one of active participation in public affairs, his pursuits ran parallel with his literary work. He was contributing to the making of one period of a United States history while his pen was engaged in writing of other periods. If self-gratulation is ever permitted to authors, Mr. Bancroft must have more than once exclaimed, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places!” as he availed himself of opportunities which only an ambassador could secure and a scholar improve. It is the prose-Homer of our Republic whom it is my privilege to present to the readers of this sketch. Picture to yourself a venerable man, of medium height, slender figure, erect bearing; with lofty brow thinned, but not stripped, of its silvery locks; a full, snowy beard adding to his patriarchal appearance; bluish gray eyes, which neither use nor time has deprived of brightness; a large nose of Roman type, such as I have somewhere read or heard that the first Napoleon regarded as the sign of latent force; “small white hands,” which Ali Pasha assured Byron were the marks by which he recognized the poet to be “a man of birth”;--let your imagination combine these details, and you have a sketch for the historian’s portrait. The frame is a medium-sized room of good, high pitch. In the center is a rectangular table covered with books, pamphlets and other indications of a literary life. Shelving reaches to the ceiling, and every fraction of space is occupied by volumes of all sizes, from folio to duodecimo; a door on the left opens into a room which is also full to overflowing with the valuable collections of a lifetime; and further on is yet another apartment equally crowded with the historian’s dumb servants, companions, and friends; while rooms and nooks elsewhere have yielded to Literature’s rights of squatter sovereignty. In the Republic of Letters, all books are citizens, and one is as good as another in the eyes of the maid-servant who kindles the breakfast-room fire, save perhaps the vellum Plautus or illuminated missal. But men are known not only by the society they keep, but by the books which surround them. Just as there are “books which are no books,” so are there libraries which are no libraries.