The Century Magazine, in commemoration of the event, published a "Note on the Completion of Mr. Parkman's Work," by Edward Eggleston, and an Essay, "Francis Parkman," by James Russell Lowell, undertaken by him at the request of the Editor of the Magazine, and left unfinished at his death. It was the last piece of writing prepared by Mr. Lowell for publication. "It is a great merit in Mr. Parkman," wrote Lowell, "that he has sedulously culled from his ample store of documents every warranted piece of evidence that could fortify or enliven his narrative, so that we at least come to know the actors in his various dramas as well as the events in which they shared. And thus the curiosity of the imagination and that of the understanding are altogether satisfied. We follow the casualties of battle with the intense interest of one who has friends or acquaintance there. Mr. Parkman's familiarity also with the scenery of his narratives is so intimate, his memory of the eye is so vivid, as almost to persuade us that ourselves have seen what he describes. We forget ourselves, to swim in the canoe down rivers that flow out of one primeval silence to lose themselves in another, or to thread those expectant solitudes of forest (insuetum nemus) that seem listening with stayed breath for the inevitable axe, and then launch our birchen egg-shells again on lakes that stretch beyond vision into the fairyland of conjecture. The world into which we are led touches the imagination with pathetic interest. It is mainly a world of silence and of expectation, awaiting the masters who are to subdue it and to fill it with the tumult of human life, and of almost more than human energy." Mr. Eggleston, in his Century Magazine article, said: "It is possible that the historian of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in America will find few events more notable than the completion of the work of Mr. Francis Parkman,--that series of historical narratives, now at last grown to one whole, in which the romantic story of the rise, the marvellous expansion, and the ill-fated ending of the French power in North America is for the first time adequately told. Since its charms have been set before us in Mr. Parkman's picturesque pages, it is easy to understand that it is one of the finest themes that ever engaged the pen of a historian. But before a creative spirit had brooded upon it, while it yet lay formless and void, none but a man of original genius could have discovered a theme fit for a master in the history of a remote and provincial failure. And yet in no episode of human history is the nature of man seen in more varied action than in this story of the struggles of France and England in the new world.... I do not believe that the literature of America can show any historical composition at once so valuable and so delightful as the two volumes entitled 'Montcalm and Wolfe,' with which the whole work culminates."