fourth years of the war, respectively.  The final and authoritative history of the struggle has not yet been written, and cannot be written for many years to come.  Many partial and tentative accounts have, however, appeared, among which may be mentioned, on the Northern side, Horace Greeley’s American Conflict, 1864-66; Vice-President Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, and J. W. Draper’s American Civil War, 1868-70; on the Southern side Alexander H. Stephens’s Confederate States of America, Jefferson Davis’s Rise and Fall of the Confederate States of America, and E. A. Pollard’s Lost Cause.  These, with the exception of Dr. Draper’s philosophical narrative, have the advantage of being the work of actors in the political or military events which they describe, and the disadvantage of being, therefore, partisan—­in some instances passionately partisan.  A store-house of materials for the coming historian is also at hand in Frank Moore’s great collection, the Rebellion Record; in numerous regimental histories of special armies, departments, and battles, like W. Swinton’s Army of the Potomac; in the autobiographies and recollections of Grant and Sherman and other military leaders; in the “war papers,” lately published in the Century magazine, and in innumerable sketches and reminiscences by officers and privates on both sides.

The war had its poetry, its humors, and its general literature, some of which have been mentioned in connection with Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, and others, and some of which remain to be mentioned, as the work of new writers, or of writers who had previously made little mark.  There were war-songs on both sides, few of which had much literary value excepting, perhaps, James R. Randall’s Southern ballad, Maryland, My Maryland, sung to the old college air of Lauriger Horatius, and the grand martial chorus of John Brown’s Body, an old Methodist hymn, to which the Northern armies beat time as they went “marching on.”  Randall’s song, though spirited, was marred by its fire-eating absurdities about “vandals” and “minions” and “Northern scum,” the cheap insults of the Southern newspaper press.  To furnish the John Brown chorus with words worthy of the music, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe wrote her Battle-Hymn of the Republic, a noble poem, but rather too fine and literary for a song, and so never fully accepted by the soldiers.  Among the many verses which voiced the anguish and the patriotism of that stern time, which told of partings and home-comings, of women waiting by desolate hearths, in country homes, for tidings of husbands and sons who had gone to the war; or which celebrated individual deeds of heroism or sang the thousand private tragedies and heartbreaks of the great conflict, by far the greater number were of too humble a grade to survive the feeling of the hour.  Among the best or the most popular of