72 FISHER— MYTH-MAKING PROCESS IX [April is, 



or great individuals, while undoubtedly valuable, are more apt to be 

 the results and outcome of political movements than the causes of 

 them. The Revolution was a world movement forced on by the 

 thought of millions of people. Its beginnings extend far back of 

 1764, and George III. merely swam in the current. In the face of 

 all the accumulated evidence of its workings, to assign the responsi- 

 bility for it to one man may do well enough for eulogistic biography 

 or oratory ; but is hardly admissible in history, if history is to be any- 

 thing more serious than the latest novel. 



In recent years another history of the Revolution, not yet com- 

 pleted, but very voluminous, by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, has been 

 appearing in England, a volume at a time. Mr. Trevelyan is remem- 

 bered for his admirable " Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay," pub- 

 lished nearly forty years ago and for his subsecjuent life of his rela- 

 tive, Charles James Fox, the brilliant whig orator in Parliament at 

 the time of our Revolution. The life of Fox treated only of that 

 statesman's early years; and in his preface to the history Mr. Treve- 

 lyan explains that he finds he can write the rest of Fox's life only 

 by writing a history of the American Revolution about which Fox 

 so often spoke in Parliament. 



It hardly accords with an American's idea of the dignity of that 

 event to see it regarded as mere illustrative material for the biogra- 

 phy of a very reckless and insolvent gambler, who, however able 

 he may have been as a minority speaker in Parliament, and however 

 interesting he may still be to his family, was by no means the most 

 efifective statesman England has produced. Our sense of proportion 

 is somewhat outraged by the exaltation of the gambler through six 

 volumes of the American Revolution, with more to come. 



At the same time it must be confessed that from a literary point 

 of view, and in Mr. Trevelyan's skilful hands, the sacrifice of his- 

 tory to an overestimate of a picturesque relative keeps his readers 

 interested and amused. The volumes are full of anecdote, remi- 

 niscence, political and literary gossip of the intellectual sort; and the 

 best parts of the work are the descriptions of English life and con- 

 ditions in that age. The diffuseness of the style seems to an Amer- 

 ican less suitable to history than Fiske's matchless brevity and ease. 



