of the Old World, the divine command: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her." Yet Scharf gives merely the bare details of these, the most vivid scenes in Baltimore's history, and goes little into causes or results, leaving us almost wholly in the dark as to how a civilized city in the most enlightened country on earth could have grafted on its history such anomalous things as these riots. This feature of Baltimore's history seems to us to be the feature most peculiar to itself, and, therefore, like that feature of a human face peculiar to the person we are studying, the most interesting; but our historian gives it no distinctive treatment, puts no emphasis on it, forces the reader to compare, contrast, account for, explain, and draw conclusions for himself. That he should slide over this side of Baltimore's history would be natural enough, but of this he cannot be accused. His treatment of this subject is characteristic of the whole book. As a good example of an even more disappointing type of chronological histories we may take the History of Lynn, including Lynnfield, Saugus, Swampscott, and Nahant, by Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, an octavo of six hundred and twenty pages, published in 1865. The book seems to have been condensed from a series of very poor diaries, and the mass of detail under the year-headings is ridiculous in its minuteness and laughable in its absurdity. Every year has its paragraphic entries, more or less full. The narrative of one year may here be quoted to show the nature of the whole, and, for that matter, the nature of fifty similar town histories. 1758. "Thomas Mansfield, Esquire, was thrown from his horse on Friday, January 6, and died the next Sunday. "A company of soldiers, from Lynn, marched for Canada, on the twenty-third of May. Edmund Ingalls and Samuel Mudge were killed. "In a thunder-shower, on the fourth of August, an ox belonging to Mr. Henry Silsbee was killed by lightning. "A sloop from Lynn, commanded by Captain Ralph Lindsay, was cast away on the fifteenth of August, near Portsmouth." In this pretended "History," the whole of the eighteenth century receives but sixty-two pages, and that part of the nineteenth which had elapsed at the time of publication receives only one hundred and seventeen. In the latter an average entry is the following, under date of 1856:-- "Patrick Buckley, the 'Lynn Buck,' ran five miles in twenty-eight minutes and thirty-eight seconds, at the Trotting Park, for a belt valued at fifty dollars. And on the fourth of December, William Hendley ran the same distance in twenty-eight minutes and thirty seconds." The "Lynn Buck," seems to have been an important personage in those days, for we read under date of 1858:-- "The 'Lynn Buck,' so called, walked a plank at Lowell, in February, a hundred and five consecutive hours and forty-four minutes, and with but twenty-nine minutes' rest. A strict watch was kept on him."