hen the lookout on the Pinta called out "Land ho!" he really uttered
the first word of American history, and Bancroft's narrative begins
almost at this point. The first volume embraces the early French
and Spanish voyages; the settlement of the Colonies; descriptions of
colonial life in New England and Virginia; the fall and restoration of
the house of Stuart in England, which led to such important results
in American history, and Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, which was the
first note of warning to England that the American Colonies would not
tolerate English injustice without a protest. To the reader who loves
to find in history facts more marvellous than any imaginations of
fairy lore, the first volume of Bancroft's history must ever be
a region of delight. The picturesque figure of Columbus fronting
undismayed the terrors of that unknown sea, which the geographers of
the period peopled with demons and monsters; the adventures of
the French and Spanish courtiers in search of fabled rivers and
life-giving fountains; the trials of the gold-seekers, De Soto,
Navarez, Cabeca de Vaca, and others, who sought for the riches of the
romantic East; and the heroic suffering of those innumerable bands who
first looked upon the wonders of the New World, and opened the way to
its great career, are such stories as are found in the sober history
of no other country. To the Old World, whose beginnings of history
were lost in the mists of the past, this vision of the New World, with
its beauty of mountains, river, and forest, with its inexhaustible
wealth and its races yet living in the primitive conditions of remote
antiquity, was indeed a wonder hardly to be believed. It is something
to be present at the birth of a new world, and Bancroft has followed
the voyagers and settlers in their own spirit, made their adventures
his own, and given to the reader a brilliant as well as faithful
picture of the historic beginning of the American continent.

In his second volume Bancroft takes up the history of the Dutch in
America; of the occupations of the Valley of the Mississippi by the
French; of the expulsion of the French from Canada by the English,
and the minor events which went toward the accomplishment of these
objects. Here are introduced the romantic story of Acadia and the
picturesque side of Indian life. "The Indian mother places her child,
as spring does its blossoms, upon the boughs of the trees while she
works," says Bancroft in