remote, which had marked the history of a foreign race in Europe. Even as late as Motley's time, in short, the historical imagination of New England was apt to seek its material abroad.

The latest and most mature of our New England his- Parkman, torians was more national. FRANCIS PARKMAN (18231893), the son of a Unitarian minister, was born at Boston. He graduated at Harvard in 1844. By that time his health had already shown signs of infirmity; and this was so aggravated by imprudent physical exposure during a journey* across the continent shortly after graduation that he was a lifelong invalid. Threatened for a full half-century with ruinous malady of both brain and body, he persisted, by sheer force of will, with literary plans which he had formed almost in boyhood. His imagination was first kindled by the forests of our ancestral continent. These excited his interest in the native races of America; and this, in turn, obviously brought him to the frequent alliances between the French and the Indians during the first two centuries of our American history. His lifelong work finally resulted in those volumest which record from beginning to end the struggles for the possession of North America between the French, with their Indian allies, and that English-speaking race whose final victory determined the course of our national history.

Parkman's works really possess great philosophic in

* Recorded in The California and Oregon Trail, 1849.

†The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, 1851; The Pioneers of France in the New World, 1865; The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, 1867; The Discovery of the Great West, 1869; The Old Régime in Canada, 1874; Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV, 1877; Montcalm and Wolfe, 1884; A Half-Century of Conflict, 1892.

Summary.

terest. With full sympathy for both sides, with untiring industry in the accumulation of material, with good sense so judicial as to forbid him the vagaries of preconception, and with a literary sensitiveness which made his later style a model of sound prose, he set forth the struggles which decided the political future of America. Moved to this task by an impulse rather romantic than scien

Francis Parkmas

tific, to be sure, gifted with a singularly vivid imagination, too careful a scholar to risk undue generalization, and throughout life so hampered by illness that he could very rarely permit himself prolonged mental effort, Parkman sometimes appeared chiefly a writer of romantic narrative. As you grow familiar with his work, however, you feel it so true that you can infuse it with philosophy for yourself. It

is hardly too much to say that his writings afford as sound a basis for historical philosophizing as does great fiction for philosophizing about human nature.

Parkman brings the story of renascent scholarship in New England almost to our own day. When the nineteenth century began, our scholarship was merely a traditional memory of classical learning, generally treated as the handmaiden either of professional theology or of professional law. When the spirit of a new life began to declare itself here, and people grew aware of contemporary foreign achievement, there came first a little group of men who studied in Europe and brought home the full spirit

of that continental scholarship which during the present century has so dominated learning in America. As this spirit began to express itself in literary form, it united with our ancestral fondness for historic records to produce, just after the moment when formal oratory most flourished here, an eminent school of historical literature. Most of this history, however, deals with foreign subjects. The historians of New England were generally at their best when stirred by matters remote from their native inexperience.

In

Considering the relation of this school of history to the historical literature of England, one is inevitably reminded that the greatest English history, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, first appeared in the very year of our Declaration of Independence. In one aspect, of course, the temper of Gibbon is as far from romantic as Gibbon. possible. He is the first, and in certain aspects the greatest, of modern philosophical historians; and his style has all the formality of the century during which he wrote. another aspect the relation of Gibbon's history to the England which bred him seems very like that of our New England histories to the country and the life which bred their writers. Gibbon and our own historians alike turned to a larger and more splendid field than was afforded by their national annals. Both alike were distinctly affected by an alert consciousness of what excellent work had been done in contemporary foreign countries. Both carefully expressed themselves with conscientious devotion to what they believed the highest literary canons. Both produced work which has lasted not only as history but as literature too. Gibbon wrote in the very year when America declared her independence of England; Prescott began his

work in Boston nearly sixty years later. So there is an aspect in which our historical literature seems to lag behind that of the mother country much as Irving's prose— contemporary with the full outburst of nineteenth-century romanticism in England-lags behind the prose of Goldsmith.

Very cursory, all this; and there can be no doubt that the historians of New England, like the New England orators, might profitably be made the subject of minute and interesting separate study. Our own concern, howBefore we can deal with

ever, is chiefly with pure letters. them intelligently we must glance at still other aspects of renascent New England. We have glanced at its oratory and at its scholarship. We must now turn to its religion and its philosophy.

IV

UNITARIANISM

REFERENCES

GENERAL REFERENCES: G. W. Cooke, Unitarianism in America, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1902; *A. P. Peabody, "The Unitarians in Boston,' "Winsor's Memorial History of Boston, III, Chapter xi; James Freeman Clarke's Autobiography, Boston: Houghton, 1891; G. E. Ellis, Half-Century of the Unitarian Controversy, Boston: Crosby, Nichols & Co., 1857.

CHANNING

WORKS: Complete Works, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1886.

BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM: W. H. Channing, The Life of William Ellery Channing, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1880; J. W. Chadwick, William Ellery Channing, Boston: Houghton, 1903.

SELECTIONS: Duyckinck, II, 22–24; Griswold's Prose, 162-168; Stedman, 85-87; *Stedman and Hutchinson, V, 3-19.

RIPLEY

The life of George Ripley, whose works are no longer in print, has been written for the American Men of Letters Series by O. B. Frothingham (Boston: Houghton, 1883). There are selections from Ripley in Stedman and Hutchinson, VI, 100-106.

from

Calvinism.

MARKED as was the change in the oratory and the schol- Reaction arship of New England during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the change in the dominant religious views of a community which had always been dominated by religion was more marked still. From the beginning till after the Revolution, the creed of New England had been the Calvinism of the Puritans. In 1809, William Ellery