D.

All this would seem enough for one boy, but there were the other worlds
of languages and science to conquer. It is almost discouraging merely to
write down the fact that at thirteen he had read a large part of Livy,
Cicero, Ovid, Catullus, and Juvenal, and all of Virgil, Horace, Tacitus,
Sallust, and Suetonius,--to say nothing of Caesar, at seven. Greek was
disposed of in like manner; and then came the modern languages,
--German, Spanish,--in which he kept a diary,--French, Italian, and
Portuguese. Hebrew and Sanskrit were kept for the years of seventeen and
eighteen. In college, Icelandic, Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and
Roumanian were added, with beginnings in Russian. The uses to which he
put these languages were not those to which the weary schoolboy puts his
few scraps of learning in foreign tongues, but the true uses of
literature,--reading for pleasure and mental stimulus.

It is needless to relate the rapid course of Mr. Fiske's first studies
in science; it is no whit less remarkable than that of his other
intellectual enterprises. As mathematics is akin to music, it will be
enough to say that when he was fifteen a friend's piano was left in his
grandmother's house, and, without a master, the boy soon learned its
secrets well enough to play such works as Mozart's Twelfth Mass. Later
in life Mr. Fiske studied the science of music. He has printed many
musical criticisms, and has himself composed a mass and songs.

Few boys can hope to take to college with them, or, for that matter,
even away from it, a mind so well equipped as Mr. Fiske's was when he
went to Cambridge. Three years of stimulating university atmosphere, and
of indefinitely wide opportunities for reading, left him prepared as few
men have been for just the work he has done. He has had the wisdom to
see what he could do, and being possessed of the qualities that lead to
accomplishment, he has done it; and any reader who understands more than
the mere words he reads will be very likely to discover in this small
volume, "The War of Independence," something of the spirit, and some
suggestions of the method which, in this sketch, we have endeavored to
point out as characteristic of one of the foremost living historians.

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTION.

Since the year 1875 we have witnessed, in many parts of the United
States, public processions, meetings, and speeches in commemoration of
the hundredth an