A drawback quite as serious is to be found in this, that Mr. Bancroft’s extraordinary labors in old age were not usually devoted to revising the grounds of his own earlier judgments, but to perfecting his own style of expression, and to weaving in additional facts at those points which especially interested him. Professor Agassiz used to say that the greatest labor of the student of biology came from the enormous difficulty of keeping up with current publications and the proceedings of societies; a man could carry on his own observations, but he could not venture to publish them without knowing all the latest statements made by other observers. Mr. Bancroft had to encounter the same obstacle in his historical work, and it must be owned that he sometimes ignored it. Absorbed in his own great stores of material, he often let the work of others go unobserved. It would be easy to multiply instances. Thus, the controversies about Verrazzano’s explorations were conveniently settled by omitting his name altogether; there was no revision of the brief early statement that the Norse sagas were “mythological,” certainly one of the least appropriate adjectives that could have been selected; Mr. Bancroft never even read—up to within a few years of his death, at any rate—the important monographs of Varnhagen in respect to Amerigo Vespucci; he did not keep up with the publications of the historical societies. Laboriously revising his whole history in 1876, and almost rewriting it for the edition of 1884, he allowed the labors of younger investigators to go on around him unobserved. The consequence is that much light has been let in upon American history in directions where he has not so much as a window; and there are points where his knowledge, vast as it is, will be found to have been already superseded. In this view, that cannot be asserted of him which the late English historian, Mr. J. R. Green, proudly and justly claimed for himself: “I know what men will say of me—he died learning.” But Mr. Bancroft at least died laboring, and in the harness. Mr. Bancroft was twice married, first to Miss Sarah H. Dwight, who died June 26, 1837, and in the following year to Mrs. Elizabeth (Davis) Bliss. By the first marriage he had several children, of whom John Chandler (Harvard, 1854) died in Europe, and George (Harvard, 1856) has spent most of his life in foreign countries. X CHARLES ELIOT NORTON CHARLES ELIOT NORTON