His mind was one of quick perceptions within a wide range, and always alert to grasp an idea in its manifold relations.  It is remarkable, therefore, that he was very laborious in his method of work.  He often struggled long with a thought for intellectual mastery.  In giving it expression, his habit was to dictate rapidly and with enthusiasm and at great length, but he usually selected the final form after repeated efforts.  His first draft of a chapter was revised again and again and condensed.  One of his early volumes in its first manuscript form was eight times as long as when finally published.  He had another striking habit, that of writing by topics rather than in strict chronological order, so that a chapter which was to find its place late in the volume was often completed before one which was to precede it.  Partly by nature and perhaps partly by this practice, he had the power to carry on simultaneously several trains of thought.  When preparing one of his public orations, it was remarked by one of his household that after an evening spent over a trifling game of bezique, the next morning found him well advanced beyond the point where the work had been seemingly laid down.  He had the faculty of buoying a thought, knowing just where to take it up after an interruption and deftly splicing it in continuous line, sometimes after a long interval.  When about to begin the preparation of the argument which was to sustain triumphantly the claim of the United States in the boundary question, he wrote from Berlin for copies of documents filed in the office of the Navy Department, which he remembered were there five-and-twenty years before.

The ’History of the United States from the Discovery of America to the Inauguration of Washington’ is treated by Bancroft in three parts.  The first, Colonial History from 1492 to 1748, occupies more than one fourth of his pages.  The second part, the American Revolution, 1748 to 1782, claims more than one half of the entire work, and is divided into four epochs:—­the first, 1748-1763, is entitled ’The Overthrow of the European Colonial System’; the second, 1763-1774, ’How Great Britain Estranged America’; the third, 1774-1776, ’America Declares Itself Independent’; the fourth, 1776-1782, ’The Independence of America is Acknowledged.’  The last part, ’The History of the Formation of the Constitution,’ 1782-1789, though published as a separate work, is essentially a continuation of the History proper, of which it forms in bulk rather more than one tenth.

If his services as a historian are to be judged by any one portion of his work rather than by another, the history of the formation of the Constitution affords the best test.  In that the preceding work comes to fruition; the time of its writing, after the Civil War and the consequent settling of the one vexing question by the abolition of sectionalism, and when he was in the fullness of the experience of his own ripe years, was most opportune.  Bancroft was equal