orth America._ A Series of Historical
Narratives. By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of "History of the
Conspiracy of Pontiac," "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," etc. Part
First. Pioneers of France in the New World. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.

It has been known for nearly a score of years within our literary
circles, that one of the richest and least wrought themes of our
American history had been appropriated by the zeal and research of a
student eminently qualified by nature, culture, and personal experience
to develop its wealth of interest. While very many among us may have
been aware that Mr. Parkman had devoted himself to the task of which we
have before us some of the results, only a narrower circle of friends
have known under what severe physical embarrassments and disabilities he
has been restrained from maturing those results. He has fully and sadly
realized, within his own different range, the experience which he so
aptly phrases as endured by his hero, the adventurous and dauntless
Champlain. When that great pioneer, midway in his splendid career, was
planning one of his almost annual voyages hitherward, at one of the most
emergent periods of his enterprise, he was seized on board his vessel in
France with a violent illness, and reduced, as Mr. Parkman says, to that
"most miserable of all conflicts, the battle of the eager spirit against
the treacherous and failing flesh." Mr. Parkman has known well what
these words mean. In his case, as in that of Champlain, it was not from
the burden of years and natural decay, but from the touch of disease in
the period of life's full vigor in its midway course, that mental
activity was restrained. When, besides the inflictions of a racked
nervous system, the author suffered in addition a malady of the eyes,
which limited him, as he says, to intervals of five minutes for reading
or writing, when it did not wholly preclude them, we may well marvel at
what he has accomplished. And the reader will marvel all the more that
the hindrances and pains under which the matter of these pages has been
wrought have left no traces or transfer of themselves here. It may be
possible that an occasional twinge or pang may have concentrated the
terse narrative, or pointed the sharp and shrewd moralizings of these
pages; for there is an amazing conciseness and a keen epigrammatic
sagacity in them. But there is no languor, no feebleness, no sleepy
prosiness, to indicate where vivacity flagged, and