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The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe by James Kendall Hosmer
page 125 of 258 (48%)
last time he heard the shout then so long familiar but forever after
unheard, "Vive l'Empereur!" Humiliation now after half a century had
overwhelmed in turn his unhappy successor.




CHAPTER VI


AMERICAN HISTORIANS

As a Harvard undergraduate I roomed for a time in Hollis 8, a room
occupied in turn by William H. Prescott and James Schouler,
and perhaps I may attribute to some contagion caught as a
_transmittendum_ in that apartment, an itch for writing history
which has brought some trouble to me and to the rather limited circle
of readers whom I have reached. I remember debating, as a boy, whether
the more desirable fame fell to the hero in a conflict or to the
scribe who told the story. Whose place would one rather have? That of
Timoleon and Nicias or of Plutarch and Thucydides their celebrants?
But the celebrants, no doubt, seemed to their contemporaries very
insignificant figures compared to the champions whose fame they
perpetuated. The historians of America are a goodly company, scarcely
less worthy than the champions whose deeds they have chronicled. With
most men who, during the last seventy-five years, have written history
in America, I have had contact, sometimes a mere glimpse, sometimes
intimacy. Washington Irving and Prescott I never saw, though as to the
latter I have just been making him responsible to some extent for my
own little proclivity, Parkman, I only saw sitting with his handsome
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