two men--the Missouri Senator of the first half of the nineteenth
century, and the New York financier of the last half of the
eighteenth--afforded him scope for treating two very diverse
subjects. He was himself rooted in the old New York soil and he
had come, through his life in the West, to divine the conditions
of Benton's days. Once again, many years later (1900) he tried
his hand at biography, taking Oliver Cromwell for his hero, and
making a summary, impressionistic sketch of him. Besides the
interest this biography has for students of Cromwell, it has also
interest for students of Roosevelt, for it is a specimen of the
sort of by-products he threw off in moments of relaxation.

More characteristic than such excursions into history and
biography, however, are his many books describing ranch-life and
hunting. In the former, he gives you truthful descriptions of the
men of the West as he saw them, and in the latter he recounts his
adventures with elk and buffalo, wolves and bears. The mere
trailing and killing of these creatures do not satisfy him. He
studies with equal zest their haunts and their habits. The
naturalist in him, which we recognized in his youth, found this
vent in his maturity. And long years afterward, on his
expeditions to Africa and to Brazil he dealt even more
exuberantly with the natural history of the countries which he
visited.

Two other classes of writings make up Roosevelt's astonishing
output. He gathered his essays and addresses into half a dozen
volumes, remarkable alike for the wide variety of their subjects,
and for the vigor with which he seized on each subject as if it
was the one above all others which most absorbed him. Finally,