If History may be properly defined, as I think it should be--a narrative of national life, claiming the utmost comprehension of fact, date, description, biography, annals, and chronicle, woven together with brilliant analysis and wholesome philosophy,--I hope I may not be considered unjust in the opinion that, as yet, our country has but one writer who will be classed with Hume and Gibbon. This is certainly no disparagement of others, for it is, probably, the result of extent of aim rather than of quality or power. No American, of acknowledged superiority, has yet equalled George Bancroft in the breadth of his theme, the extent of time and place covered, the variety of character, circumstance, and nationality concerned, the corresponding research, the sparkling story, and the philosophic analysis of his National History. Prescott, the prince of scholars and gentlemen, matchless in the department he chose, was rather a biographer than a historian. He selected stirring epochs and their prominent men, the pivots of certain times, upon whom the affairs of two worlds turned at critical periods,--the great warders who stood at the portals of America and Europe in the sixteenth century. Thus, Ferdinand and Isabella, Cortez, Pizarro, Charles V., and Philip II., wonderfully as they revive in the books of Prescott, exquisite in accuracy, harmonious style, and enamelled finish, are but beautiful cabinet-pictures of the princes and heroes of the age. The Life of a Nation requires a taller and wider canvas, a bolder and broader brush. And, so it is with the historical labors of Irving and Motley, though the latter has closely approached the true grandeur of History in his narrative of the Rise of the Dutch Republic. Yet, it must ever remain as the highest praise of our late colleague, that, in the field of national _biographies_, national in all their elements, he stands beside the masters on the platform of acknowledged success. He was the real pioneer in the unexplored wilderness of our historical literature. "Indeed," says one familiar with his works, "it requires considerable knowledge on the part of a reader, _a knowledge of the state of things, of the obstacles and perplexities, in the way of effort, and of the hard conditions of success, at the time when Mr. Sparks gave himself to his large and costly enterprise_, in order that his eminent devotion and success may be, even in degree, appreciated." But he brought together the dispersed fragments of colonial and revolutionary days, and made the writing of history untroublesome for authors who, in "slippered ease" and comfortable libraries, availed themselves of his labor, and patronizingly patted him on the head. These are the silk-worms of literature, whose glory is spun from the digested leaves of other men's culture. It was his habit, when allusions were made to such appropriations, to find sufficient reward in his own diligence, and to