The Middle Group of American Historians. By J. S. Bassett.
(Mac- millan and Co. 8s. 6d. net.)—This is a readable account of the " pre- scientific " historians, as the author calls them, who made history popular with the American public and profitable for themselves. Jared Sparks, Washington's biographer ; George Bancroft, who wrote a voluminous and uncritical history of the United States ; Prescott ; Motley ; and Peter Force, who compiled a documentary history of the Revolution, are described and assessed in a distinctly critical spirit. Mr. Bassett., in dealing with Prescott and Motley, cannot forbear, however, to praise their " careful mastery of the arts of narration," and to hint that modern American historians, scholarly and conscientious as they are, ought to write better. Dulness is a fatal sin, for an historian or for any other writer.
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