researches amount in sum and in importance to an actual necessity for their digest and incorporation into a new history.  Dr. Palfrey has used these with a most patient fidelity, and his references to them and his extracts from them convey to his readers the results of an amount of labor which the most grateful of them will not be likely to overestimate.  While he speaks to us in his text, he allows those whom we most wish to hear to speak to us in his rich and well-chosen excerpts from a mountain-heap of authorities.

The Dedication of the volume to Dr. Sparks has in it a rare felicity, which is to be referred to two facts:  first, that the writer had some peculiarly touching and grateful things to say; and, second, that he knew how to say them in language fitted to the sentiment.  In his Preface, he announces his purpose with its plan, refers us to his authorities and sources, and recognizes his obligations to individual friends.  Some of the choicest matters in his Notes are the results of his own personal research in England.

The limit which he sets for himself will carry forward his History to the time of the English Revolution, thus embracing our annals during the vitality of our first Charter.  That Charter, its origin, transfer, and subsequent service as the basis of government, the reiterated efforts to wrest it, and the persistent resolution to hold it, give to it a symbolic significance which warrants the dating of an epoch by it.  Dr. Palfrey regards our local political existence as commencing from the hour in which that document, with its official representatives, reached these shores.  We have seen criticisms disputing this position, but, as we think, not even plausible, still less effective to discredit it.  We must have an incident, besides a punctum temporis, for our start in government; and where could we find a better one than that on which the whole subsequent course and character of the government depended?  We go, then, for the old Charter, and for the setting up of a jurisdiction under it here.  It was an admirable and every way convenient document; good for securing rights, impotent as impairing liberties.  It comforted the “Magistrates” to have it to fall back upon, when its provisions harmonized with their purposes; nor did they allow themselves to be embarrassed by it, when it appeared that some of their purposes were not fully provided for in it.  That Charter got wonderfully aired and invigorated on its ocean-passage.  The salt water agreed with its constitution.  In a single instance, at least, it falsified the old maxim,—­Coeium, nun animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt.  That was a marvellous piece of parchment.  So far as Massachusetts was concerned, the Declaration of Independence was interlined upon it in sympathetic ink.