HAD not Bancroft chosen to become the leading American historian of the nineteenth century, he might easily have become celebrated as an essayist. Such essays as he has left, though few in number, have the genuine quality which distinguishes the essay from the mere “paper.” Each of them is controlled by a central idea which is developed by the massing of the facts most necessary to illustrate it. In this method most plainly appears the difference between the essayist and the critic; for the one deals with the facts of nature and human nature, while the mind of the other is engrossed chiefly with his own opinions. Bancroft, a true essayist, is as concrete in his prose as Shakespeare is in his dramas or as the Gospels are in their parables. As literature began in picture writing, so, in another way, it ends in it, for there can be nothing higher in literature than the work which forces on the mind great ideas already embodied in their most fitting images. It is easy to express opinions. Especially is it easy to sit in judgment and give sentence on the work of others. “Literature” begins thus for most authors in their Sophomore years. But before any one can write such essays as those of Bancroft, he must give up the critical for the sake of acquiring the constructive intellect. When Bancroft thinks, it is not of the flaws in nature or in art, but of one after another of the endless variety of different forms in which the essential unity of things expresses itself. And it is from this principle of unity in diversity that his literary method borrows its power and its charm.

  He was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 3d, 1800, and educated at Harvard with post-graduate studies at Göttingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg. After teaching Greek at Harvard and serving as Secretary of the Navy in President Folk’s cabinet, he went in 1846 as Minister to Great Britain, and twenty years later as Minister to Germany. In the meantime he had made his “History of the United States” the serious work of his life. The first volume appeared in 1834, the last in 1882. He died at Washington, January 17th, 1891.