This is a very specious attempt to throw a glamour of respectability over a very unpleasant and repugnant fact, namely:  that a mass of “biographical sketches of comparatively obscure men” has been given to the public under the guise of a history of a city, with the sole object of making money.  It is indeed consoling to know that “none but citizens have been represented,” but why this statement should be coupled with the platitude that follows it would be hard to say.  And then the utter ridiculousness of the nonsense about the publisher exercising a power higher than the law and erecting a caste distinction!  “What fools these mortals be!”

But whatever may be said of the historical value of such books as the above, there can be little doubt that they are remunerative business enterprises, for the country has of late years been flooded with them.  Perhaps we ought to be thankful for any history at all of these new Western cities, even though the wheat therein be so scarce and the chaff so plenty.  The prevalence of this same affliction—­the biographical history—­in literary New England seems more anomalous than it does in the West, but it is even more widespread.  A fair type of the Eastern species is the Quarter-Centennial History of Lawrence, Massachusetts, compiled by H.A.  Wadsworth, in 1878.  It contained seventy-five very poor wood-engravings, called portraits by courtesy, which, with the accompanying biographies, were inserted to represent the leading (?) men of the city at an entrance fee of five or ten dollars apiece.

Next in number below the biographical histories, but far above them in value, come what may be called the chronological histories, that is, those which make little or no attempt to group the important facts of a city’s history in homogeneous chapters, but which, diary-like, give all facts, important as well as insignificant, in the order of their occurrence.  Fortunately most local historians of this sect have made more or less attempt at bringing like to like, although they have generally preserved the purely chronological order within their groups, whether these be of subjects or periods.  Among the histories of the larger cities, Scharf’s Chronicles of Baltimore comes to mind as typical of this class.  This work, published in 1874, is an octavo of seven hundred and fifty-six pages.  The author tells the truth when he says in his preface:  “The only plan in the work that has been followed has been to chronicle events through the years in their order; beginning with the earliest in which any knowledge on the subject is embraced, and running on down to the present.”  The book is printed “solid,” with not a single chapter-heading from one end to the other, so it is not strange that it contains such an immense amount of material.