438 FRANCIS PARKMAN. 



Remarkable as this mere statement of his achievement is, it by no 

 means includes the whole story. The many journeys and researches 

 demanded for the collection of his historical material might be inferred 

 from the results of his historical work. Fie found time and energy 

 also for much other activity. To name only a part of this, he was for 

 thirteen years a Fellow of the Corporation of Harvard College, and 

 for six years an Overseer ; he was an active member and Vice-Pres- 

 ident of the Massachusetts Historical Society ; for its first six years 

 he was President of the St. Botolph Club ; and he wrote not a few 

 articles for newspapers and magazines, on matters of public import. 

 In 1855, he became a Fellow of the American Academy. He was 

 rarely, if ever, able to attend its meetings; but no name on its lists 

 was more cordially honored. 



II. 



Mr. Parkman was the last and in many respects the ripest of the 

 romantic historians who for more than half a century gave distinction to 

 the literary life of New England. Younger than the others, surviving 

 them all in spite of his prolonged years of illness, and doing his best 

 work toward the end of his life, he seems to-day a far more modern 

 ligure than Prescott, or Ticknor, or Motley. More than theirs, too, 

 his work concerned our own country. The chief centre of his interest, 

 from the beginning, was the frontier of that British civilization in 

 America from which has sprung the United States. From the first 

 lines of "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," one may say, his work tended 

 unerringly toward the closing words of "Montcalm and Wolfe": The 

 United States "has tamed the* savage continent, peopled the solitude, 

 gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable ; and 

 now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses 

 is consistent with the highest growth of the individual ; that democracy 

 can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as 

 energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as 

 anv of the systems which it boasts to supplant." 



This constantly national purpose, none the less profoundly patriotic 

 that with the open sincerity which has always been the virtue most 

 cherished by men of Harvard he disdained to neglect or to deny our 

 errors and our dangers, makes his work peculiarly ours. The literary 

 sensitiveness, too, with which his style changed from what now seems 

 the somewhat excessive floridity, or at least the figurative formality, of 

 half a century ago, to the direct, fluent simplicity of the best modern 

 English, makes him above most men of letters steadily contemporary. 



