We welcome, therefore, with infinite satisfaction, the two admirable volumes whose titles we have set down.  For reasons which will appear before we conclude our remarks upon them, we find it convenient to unite their titles and to write about them together; but for distinctness of subject and marked individuality in the mode of treatment, no two books can stand more widely apart.  Abilities and culture and aptitudes of the very highest order have been brought to the composition of each of them.  An exhaustive use of abundant materials, and a most conscientious fidelity in digesting them into high-toned philosophical narrations, are marked features of both the volumes, and we will not venture upon the ungracious office of instituting comparisons, in these respects, between their authors.  We must make a slight report of the story of each of them, and of the method and spirit in which it is told, and then confront them for mutual cross-examination.

Our historians have learned to write their books with full as much reference to their being read abroad as at home.  The problem with which they first have to deal, therefore, is, how to make the men and the incidents and the cardinal points of our annals look as large to foreigners as they do to us.  Many of our town-histories are written in the tone and style of Mr. Poole’s “Little Pedlington,”—­the epithet Little being suppressed in the title, but obtruded on every page.  The intensity and emphasis of our historic strain appear to foreigners to be disproportionate to the subject-matter of the story.  Mr. Punch always represents a Yankee as larger than his garments.  His trousers never cover his ankles; his cuffs stop far short of his wrists; his long neck extends beyond the reach of even his capacious collar; and the bone in him lacks amplitude of muscle.  But Mr. Punch, with all his wisdom, does not fully understand the composition of a Yankee, as the greatest common multiple of a Teuton, Dane, Norman, Frank, Kelt, and Englishman.  Dr. Palfrey’s volume will largely conciliate our cousins beyond the water to our own conceit of our annals, because, more distinctly and cogently than any previous record in pamphlet or folio, it identifies the springs and purposes of our heroic age with an era and a type of men which English historians now exalt on their own noblest pages.

Dr. Palfrey has had precisely that natural endowment, training, experience, mental discipline, and intercourse with the world in public and private relations, to furnish him with the best qualifications for the work to which he has devoted the autumn of an eminently useful and honored life.  The sinewy fibre of his theme is religion.  And he is a religious man of the highest pattern, deeply skilled in its scholarly lore, erudite in its Scriptural and controversial elements, and practised in the sagacity which it imparts for understanding and interpreting human nature.  Religion enters into the subject-matter of his narrative,