446 
GEORGE BANCROFT. 
with Prussia in which that government recognized the right 
of emigrants to the United States to throw off allegiance to 
their mother country. 
Mr. Bancroft was recalled from Germany, upon his own 
request, in 1874, and upon returning to this country he estab¬ 
lished his winter residence in Washington and his summer 
residence in Newport, Rhode Island. In the same year he 
completed the tenth volume of his history, and in 1876 he 
published a revised edition of the work in six volumes. He 
subsequently added two volumes on “ The Formation of the 
Constitution.” 
His great work, as completed, covers the period of our 
history from the discovery of America by Columbus to the 
inauguration of President Washington. 
Mr. Bancroft was undoubtedly fully entitled to the com¬ 
mendation and great fame which he achieved by reason of 
his historical work. As a student his researches were ex¬ 
haustive, and as a writer he was both graphic and picturesque. 
He was not only an industrious student and an able writer, 
but he was a philosopher and statesman as well, and his work 
abounds with maxims lucidly stated and of the profoundest 
import. 
Later critics have pointed out what seem to them notable 
defects in his work. They have maintained that his graphic 
style was secured at the expense of accuracy; that his quota¬ 
tions were sometimes paraphrases rather than exact tran¬ 
scripts; that he gave undue prominence to rumors and 
manuscript records, and that in his revisions he failed to 
profit by the researches of later historical students. They 
have even gone so far as to forbode from these causes a 
future diminution of his fame; but I do not find that any 
one has predicted a more satisfactory performance of the 
work, as a whole, than he has achieved. 
In 1886 Mr. Bancroft published a monograph entitled, 
“A plea for the Constitution wounded in the house of its 
friends,” in which he protested, in an elaborate disquisition 
on the Constitution of the United States, against the opinion 
