was absent, a favour which he said he had never accorded to an
investigator before. It was an inspiring place for a student, the
shelves burdened with treasures in manuscript as well as print. The
most interesting portrait of Bancroft presents him as a nonagenarian,
against this impressive background, at work to the last. The critics
of our day minimise Bancroft and his school. History in that time
walked in garments quite too flowing, it is said, and with an
overdisplay of the Horatian purple patch. Our grandsons may feel that
the history of our time walks in garments too sad-coloured and scant.
Research and accuracy are, of course, primary requisites in this
field, but there should be some employment of the picturesque. The
world was beautiful in the old days and human life was vivid. Ought
we to deny to all this a warm and graphic setting forth? If we do we
shall do it to our cost. Is it the proper attitude of the historian
simply to write, without thought of anything so irrelevant as a
reader? Bancroft was a pioneer, breaking the way ponderously perhaps,
but he delved faithfully. If the orotund rolls too sonorously in his
periods it was an excess in which his age upheld him. He was a good
path-breaker and ought not to be lightly esteemed by those who now go
to and fro with ease through the roads he opened.

My first touch with Justin Winsor was in my Freshman year at
Cambridge. We both had rooms under the roof of an uncle of mine. His
room was afterwards occupied, I believe, by Theodore Roosevelt. It had
been rubbed into me by many snubs that a vast gulf interposed between
the Freshman and upper-class man. I used to pass his door with
reverence, for the story went that, even as a boy, he had written a
history of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Once during his temporary absence,
his door standing open, I dared to step into the apartment and
surveyed with awe the well-filled shelves and scribbled papers; but in