secured the acquisition of California for the United States.  The special abilities he displayed in the Cabinet were such, so Polk thought, as to lead to his appointment as Minister to England in 1846.  He was a diplomat of no mean order.  President Johnson appointed him Minister to Germany in 1867, and Grant retained him at that post until 1874, as long as Bancroft desired it.  During his stay there he concluded just naturalization treaties with Germany, and in a masterly way won from the Emperor, William I., as arbitrator, judgment in favor of the United States’s claim over that of Great Britain in the Northwestern boundary dispute.

Always holding fast his one cherished object,—­that of worthily writing the history of the United States,—­Bancroft did not deny himself the pleasure of roaming in other fields.  He wrote frequently on current topics, on literary, historical, and political subjects.  His eulogies of Jackson and of Lincoln, pronounced before Congress, entitle him to the rank of an orator.  He was very fond of studies in metaphysics, and Trendelenburg, the eminent German philosopher, said of him, “Bancroft knows Kant through and through.”

His home—­whether in Boston, or in New York where he spent the middle portion of his life, or in Washington his abode for the last sixteen years, or during his residence abroad—­was the scene of the occupations and delights which the highest culture craves.  He was gladly welcomed to the inner circle of the finest minds of Germany, and the tribute of the German men of learning was unfeigned and universal when he quitted the country in 1874.  Many of the best men of England and of France were among his warm friends.  At his table were gathered from time to time some of the world’s greatest thinkers,—­men of science, soldiers, statesmen and men of affairs.  Fond as he was of social joys, it was his daily pleasure to mount his horse and alone, or with a single companion, to ride where nature in her shy or in her exuberant mood inspired.  One day, after he was eighty years old, he rode on his young, blooded Kentucky horse along the Virginia bank of the Potomac for more than thirty-six miles.  He could be seen every day among the perfect roses of his garden at “Roseclyffe,” his Newport summer-home, often full of thought, at other times in wellnigh boisterous glee, always giving unstinted care and expense to the queen of flowers.  The books in which he kept the record of the rose garden were almost as elaborate as those in which were entered the facts and fancies out of which his History grew.  His home life was charming.  By a careful use of opportunities and of his means he became an “affluent” man.  He was twice married:  both times a new source of refined domestic happiness long blessed his home, and new means for enlarged comfort and hospitality were added to his own.  Two sons, children of his first wife, survived him.