f large historical knowledge, and the best abilities for its
judicious use. The contents of the volume were made to do service,
first, as a series of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute,
addressed to a large and mixed audience, possessing generally a high
average of intelligence, and exhibiting, by their voluntary presence, an
interest on which a lecturer may largely rely. The second object of the
author, in the present publication of his Lectures, was to contribute to
the best form of our popular literature a volume which may be regarded
either as introductory to, or as a substitute for, an extended course of
reading on its subject-matter, according to the leisure and capacity of
those who may possess themselves of it. We must congratulate alike the
lecturer and the author for very marked success in the adaptation of his
materials and in the treatment of his subject so as to answer equally
well the wants of good listeners and of sympathetic readers.

The great perplexity of a lecturer, who has given him an hour on twelve
evenings, two in a week, for dealing before a mixed audience with such a
subject as the American War of Independence, must be in deciding for
himself, without consultation with his hearers, how much previous
knowledge he may take for granted in them. He cannot name his
authorities, much less quote them to any great extent. On some vexed
points the simple fact that sharp and dividing issues of controverted
opinions have been agitated about them must virtually compel him almost
to pass them wholly by, seeing that he cannot adequately discuss them,
and that any brief and positive utterance upon them would seem to be
lacking in judicial fairness. The exigencies and temptations of a
lecture-room are also sadly provocative of that rhetorical bombast and
exaggeration which, having been so lavishly and offensively indulged on
our Fourth of July and other commemorative occasions in the supposed
interests of popular patriotism, have brought our whole national
literature under a reproach hardly deserved. Mr. Greene, from his long
residence abroad, has heard and known too much of this reproach to have
risked getting even under the shadow of it.

We believe it is a well-established fact, that both in oral and in
literary dealings with historical subjects, the more thorough and
comprehensive the knowledge possessed by any one who proposes to
instruct others, the more concisely as well as the more correctly w