Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Carlyle's laugh and other surprises

[115] Mr. Bancroft's last and perhaps most valuable book, “The history of the Constitution.” The most important part of this book consists, by concession of all, in the vast mass of selections from the private correspondence of the period: for instance, of M. Otto, the French Ambassador. We do not hesitate to say that, if tried by the standard of Mr. Bancroft's previous literary methods, this mass of correspondence, though valuable as suggestion, is worthless as authority. Until it has been carefully collated and compared with the originals, we do not know that a paragraph or a sentence of it is left as the author wrote it; the system of paraphrase previously exhibited throws the shadow of doubt over all. No person can safely cite one of these letters in testimony; no person knows whether any particular statement contained in it comes to us in the words of its supposed author or of Mr. Bancroft. It is no answer to say that this loose method was the method of certain Greek historians; if Thucydides composed speeches for his heroes, it was at least known that he prepared them, and there was not the standing falsehood of a quotation-mark.

A drawback quite as serious is to be found in this, that Mr. Bancroft's extraordinary labors in old age were not usually devoted to revising the grounds of his own earlier judgments, but