The method which Mr. Motley has adopted is admirably calculated to insure accuracy as well as reality to his representation of events and persons.  His plan is always to allow the statesmen and soldiers who appear in his work to express themselves in their own way, and convey their opinions and purposes in their own words.  This mode is opposed to compression, but favorable to truth.  Macaulay’s method is to re-state everything in his own language, and according to his own logical forms.  He never allows the Whigs and Tories, whose opinions and policy he exhibits, to say anything for themselves.  He detests quotation-marks.  His summaries are so clear and compact that, we are tempted to forget that they leave out the modifications which opinions receive from individual character.  The reason that his statements are so often questioned is due to the fact that he insists on his readers viewing everything through the medium of his own mind.  Mr. Motley is more objective in his representations; and his readers can dispute his summaries of character and expositions of policy by the abundant materials for differing judgment which the historian himself supplies.

Life of Andrew Jackson.  By JAMES PARTON, Author of the “Life of Aaron Burr,” etc., etc. 3 vols. 8vo.  New York:  Mason Brothers. 1860.

We criticized Mr. Parton’s “Life of Aaron Burr” with considerable severity at the time of its appearance; and we are the more glad to meet with a book of his which we can as sincerely and heartily commend.  The same quality of sympathy with his subject, which led him in his former work to palliate the moral obliquity and overlook the baseness of his hero, in consideration of brilliant gifts of intellect and person, gives vigor and spirit to his delineation of a character in most respects so different as that of Jackson.  This man, who filled so large a place in our history, and left perhaps a stronger impress of himself on our politics than any other of our public men except Jefferson, was well worthy to be made a subject of careful study and elucidation.  Mr. Parton has given us the means of understanding a character hitherto a puzzle, and deserves our hearty thanks for the manner in which he has done it.

We think the book remarkably fair in its tone, though perhaps Mr. Parton is now and then led to exaggerate the positive greatness of Jackson, who, as it appears to us, was rather eminent by comparison and contrast with the men around him.  But there were many strong, if not great qualities in his composition, and so much that was picturesque and strange in the incidents of his career and the state of society which formed his character, that we have found this biography one of the most instructive and entertaining we ever read.  If Mr. Parton sometimes exaggerates his hero’s merits, he is also outspoken in regard to his faults.  If here and there a little Carlylish, his style has the merit of great liveliness, and his pictures of frontier-life are full of interest and vivacity.