Some of Bancroft’s characteristics were not unlike those of Jefferson.  A constant tendency to idealize called up in him at times a feeling verging on impatience with the facts or the men that stood in the way of a theory or the accomplishment of a personal desire.  He had a keen perception of an underlying or a final truth and professed warm love for it, whether in the large range of history or in the nexus of current politics:  any one taking a different point of view at times was led to think that his facts, as he stated them, lay crosswise, and might therefore find the perspective out of drawing, but could not rightly impugn his good faith.

Although a genuine lover of his race and a believer in Democracy, he was not always ready to put implicit trust in the individual as being capable of exercising a wise judgment and the power of true self-direction.  For man he avowed a perfect respect; among men his bearing showed now and then a trace of condescension.  In controversies over disputed points of history—­and he had many such—­he meant to be fair and to anticipate the final verdict of truth, but overwhelming evidence was necessary to convince him that his judgment, formed after painstaking research, could be wrong.  His ample love of justice, however, is proved by his passionate appreciation of the character of Washington, by his unswerving devotion to the conception of our national unity, both in its historical development and at the moment when it was imperiled by civil war, and by his hatred of slavery and of false financial policies.  He took pleasure in giving generously, but always judiciously and without ostentation.  On one occasion he, with a few of his friends, paid off the debt from the house of an eminent scholar; on another, he helped to rebuild for a great thinker the home which had been burned.  At Harvard, more than fifty years after his graduation, he founded a traveling scholarship and named it in honor of the president of his college days.

As to the manner of his work, Bancroft laid large plans and gave to the details of their execution unwearied zeal.  The scope of the ’History of the United States’ as he planned it was admirable.  In carrying it out he was persistent in acquiring materials, sparing no pains in his research at home and abroad, and no cost in securing original papers or exact copies and transcripts from the archives of England and France, Spain and Holland and Germany, from public libraries and from individuals; he fished in all waters and drew fish of all sorts into his net.  He took great pains, and the secretaries whom he employed to aid him in his work were instructed likewise to take great pains, not only to enter facts in the reference books in their chronological order, but to make all possible cross-references to related facts.  The books of his library, which was large and rich in treasures, he used as tools, and many of them were filled with cross references.  In the fly-leaves of the books he read he made note with a word and the cited page of what the printed pages contained of interest to him or of value in his work.