he greatest common
multiple of a Teuton, Dane, Norman, Frank, Kelt, and Englishman. Dr.
Palfrey's volume will largely conciliate our cousins beyond the water
to our own conceit of our annals, because, more distinctly and cogently
than any previous record in pamphlet or folio, it identifies the springs
and purposes of our heroic age with an era and a type of men which
English historians now exalt on their own noblest pages.

Dr. Palfrey has had precisely that natural endowment, training,
experience, mental discipline, and intercourse with the world in public
and private relations, to furnish him with the best qualifications for
the work to which he has devoted the autumn of an eminently useful and
honored life. The sinewy fibre of his theme is religion. And he is a
religious man of the highest pattern, deeply skilled in its scholarly
lore, erudite in its Scriptural and controversial elements, and
practised in the sagacity which it imparts for understanding and
interpreting human nature. Religion enters into the subject-matter of
his narrative, not so much in its philosophical bearings as in its
civico-ecclesiastical and institutional relations; where it becomes the
spine of the social fabric, traversed and perforated with the nervous
life-chords for all the members of the organism. His education has
been that of the highest ideal of New England,--through books and men,
through professional duties and public services, bringing him into
relations with youth, with men and women, and with the forms and the
routine work of civil and political administrations. He has at his
command the language of devotion, the rhetoric and logic of philosophy,
and the technicalities of jurisprudence. To his personal friends, and
they are very many in every walk of life, it is a matter of grateful
recognition that he escaped from a political arena whose conflicts were
not congenial with his delicacy of taste or of conscience, in season to
give the vigor of his best years to the composition of a work which will
spread his fame to other lands and identify it forever with what is of
most reverent and honored remembrance on his native soil.

The historian's work, when done after the best pattern, involves a duty
to his readers and a privilege for himself. To them he is bound to
present all the essential facts, authenticated, illustrated, and
carefully disposed in their natural relations. For himself, having done
this, he is at liberty to construc