’The New Jerusalem, the ancient seer
  Of Patmos saw.’

“All hail! mistress of nations and beautiful queen of civilization!  I view thee in the light of thy destiny.  Thou art transfigured before me from thy present state to one infinitely more grand, and which overshadows and dwarfs all civic forms in history.

“The influence of thy empire will pervade the world with invisible and electric force.  Yet, vivifying and benignant capital,—­emporium of trade and industry, seat of learning and best-applied labor, pivotal point in history, supreme and superb city of all lands,—­I behold thy majesty from afar, and salute thee reverently as the consummation of all that the best human energies can accomplish for the elevation and happiness of our race.

“All hail!  Future Great City of the World, and ’Glory to God in the Highest and on Earth Peace, Goodwill toward Men.’”

This reminds one equally of Walt Whitman and Artemas Ward.  Yet it is not burlesque.  It appears to have been written in good faith, and for this reason the incongruity of such a grandiloquent rhapsody on such a prosaic subject is all the more noticeable.  As an example of “fine writing” it has seldom been surpassed, and for sheer nonsense it is unequaled in American literature.

These books on St. Louis call to mind a history of Milwaukee of a somewhat similar nature—­similar in its magnificent pretensions to the last-described work, and in its biographical characteristics to Edwards’s Great West.  The book referred to was published in Chicago, in 1881, by the Western Historical Company, A.T.  Andreas, proprietor.  Holy Herodotus!  To think of history becoming a thing of “companies”—­on a par with life insurance, railroads, gas-works, and cotton factories!  And an “historical company” with a proprietor, too!

But let us look into this monumental tome. (Do not think that adjective hyperbolical, for surely monumental is not too strong a word to describe a book which would just about balance in weight an unabridged dictionary.) Some idea of the immensity of the undertaking can be obtained when, as the preface says, “it is known that nearly one year’s time was consumed and an average force of twenty-five men employed in the labor of obtaining information and preparing the manuscript for the printer’s hands.  The result of this vast effort is the presentation of a History which stands unparalleled in the experience of publishers.”  The book is a quarto and contains sixteen hundred and sixty-three pages.  The letter-press is unexceptionable; each page is surrounded by a neat border; the paper is good; the binding is excellent.

And yet the actual history of this city dates back little more than half a century—­not a lifetime.  Here is history with a vengeance!  The riddle, however, is solved the instant we glance over the pages, for we find the mass of the book made up of biographies,—­biographies in front, biographies to the right, biographies to the left, everywhere biographies,—­to the grand sum total of nearly four thousand.  A book much like this would have been made had the Crown published the Giant Petition trundled into Parliament on a wheelbarrow in the times of George the Third, when Lord George Gordon was the hero of the day.  About as valuable, about as readable, about as bulky, about as good for kindling fires!