The further this work proceeds, the more do we feel that it must take its place as an essentially satisfactory history of the United States. Mr. Bancroft is thoroughly American in thought and in feeling, without ceasing to have those larger views and nobler sympathies which result from cosmopolitan rather than from local training. His style is original and national. It breathes of the mountain and the prairie--of the great lakes and wild savannahs of his native land. A strain of wild and forest-like music swells up in almost every line. The story is told richly and vividly. It has hitherto been thought by Americans themselves, even more than by Europeans, that the story of the English colonies presented but a dreary and lifeless succession of petty squabbles between the settlers and the crown officers--of unintelligible persecutions of each other on the ground of differences of opinion in religion. Mr. Bancroft has shown how ill founded has been this impression. In his hands American history is full of fine effects. Steeped in the colors of his imagination, a thousand incidents hitherto thought dull appear animated and pictorial. Between Hildreth and Bancroft the difference is immense. In the treatment of the former, dates, facts, events are duly stated--the criticism is keen, the chronology indisputable,--but the figures do not live, the narrative knows no march. The latter is all movement. His men glow with human purposes,--his story sweeps on with the exulting life of a procession. Yet because Mr. Bancroft contrives to bring out the more romantic aspects of his theme, it is not to be supposed that he fails in that strict regard to truth--truth of character as well as of incident--which is the historian's first duty, and without which all other qualities are useless. Of all American writers who have written on the history of their own country, we would pronounce him to be the most conscientious. His former volumes were remarkable for the amplitude and accuracy of their references. The authorities cited were often recondite and obscure,--yet it was evident that they had been sifted carefully and critically. The same may be said of the volume before us.