es
literary criticism was evolved by social contact in clubs and other
gatherings. We had nothing of the sort in Cleveland, where a writer of
books walking down Euclid Avenue would have been stared at as a
somewhat remarkable personage. The literary columns of _The Nation_ were
therefore our most important link between our practical life and the
literary world. I used to copy into my _Index Rerum_ long extracts from
important reviews, in which the writers appeared to have a thorough
grasp of their subjects; and these I read and re-read as I would a
significant passage in a favorite book. In the days when many of us were
profoundly influenced by Herbert Spencer's "Sociology," I was somewhat
astonished to read one week in _The Nation_, in a review of Pollock's
"Introduction to the Science of Politics," these words: "Herbert
Spencer's contributions to political and historical science seem to us
mere commonplaces, sometimes false, sometimes true, but in both cases
trying to disguise their essential flatness and commonness in a garb of
dogmatic formalism."[212] Such an opinion, evidencing a conflict between
two intellectual guides, staggered me, and it was with some curiosity
that I looked subsequently, when the _Index to Periodicals_ came out, to
see who had the temerity thus to belittle Spencer--the greatest
political philosopher, so some of his disciples thought, since
Aristotle. I ascertained that the writer of the review was James Bryce,
and whatever else might be thought, it could not be denied that the
controversy was one between giants. I can, I think, date the beginning
of my emancipation from Spencer from that review in 1891.

In the same year I read a discriminating eulogy of George Bancroft,
ending with an intelligent criticism of his history, which produced on
me a marked impression. The reviewer wrote: Bancroft falls into "that
error so common with the graphic school of historians--the exaggerated
estimate of manuscripts or fragmentary material at the expense of what
is printed and permanent.... But a fault far more serious than this is
one which Mr. Bancroft shared with his historical contemporaries, but in
which he far exceeded any of them--an utter ignoring of the very meaning
and significance of a quotation mark."[213] Sound and scientific
doctrine is this; and the whole article exhibited a thorough knowledge
of our colonial and revolutionary history which inspired confidence in
the conclusions of the write