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 later years when I had won some small title to notice I found him most kind and approachable.  The abundance of the Harvard Library and still better the rich accumulations in the cells of his own memory he held for general use.  He loaned me once for months at St. Louis a rarely precious seventeenth-century book, which had belonged to Carlyle, and whose margins were sometimes filled with Carlyle’s notes.  He imparted freely from his own vast information and it was pleasant indeed to hold a chair for an hour or two in his hospitable home.  In our last interview the prose and the solemn romance of life were strangely blended.  We had just heard the burial service in Appleton Chapel read by Phillips Brooks over the coffin of James Russell Lowell; then we rode together on the crowded platform of a street-car to the grave at Mount Auburn; a rough and jostling company on the platform, and in my mind a throng of deep and melancholy thoughts.  I never saw him again.  In his calling he was a master of research extracting with unlimited toil the last fragment of evidence from the blindest scribblings of earlier times.  These results, painfully accumulated, he set down with absolute faithfulness; his bibliographies supplementing his own contributions and also those of the many writers whom he inspired and guided in like labours are exhaustive.  Rarely is there a wisp to be gleaned where Winsor has garnered.  If he was deficient in the power of vivid and picturesque presentment, it is only that like all men he had his limitations.