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by the democratic party. He was not elected, although receiving a larger vote than had ever before been polled upon the purely democratic issue. Party spirit did not spare any prominent man, and plenty of hard things were said during the contest. But in the excited moments of political difference, although great talent is often conceded to opponents, integrity and kindliness of heart are as often denied. Throughout a canvass of great acerbity of feeling, the democratic nominee was in New-York, engaged in examining, often for more than the twelve hours of day, the documents illustrative of our early history, which Mr. Brodhead had then just brought from Holland for the Historical Society of his State.

In 1844 Mr. Polk was elected President, and summoned Mr. Bancroft to Washington as Secretary of the Navy, and in the autumn of 1846, he crossed the ocean as Minister to England. When Rubens, the painter, resided in England as Dutch Ambassador, a company of diplomats one day called upon him and found him, pallette in hand, at work before his easel.

"Ah!" said they, "Monsieur the Ambassador is playing painter."

"No, gentlemen," responded the artist, "the painter is playing Ambassador."

So our historian played Ambassador, and played it well. Upon leaving Washington he said to the President that he should devote his energies to the modification of the Navigation Act, and his success in the effort is one of the chief triumphs of Mr. Bancroft's political career. He did not arrive as a stranger in London, but the scholars

there, and the learned representatives of other countries, were already correspondents of the American scholar and loyal to the fame of the American historian. We have had no foreign representative more genuinely American. Still devoted to the aim of his life,-by personal intercourse with eminent men and close examination of all material accessible in England, by constant correspondence with other parts of Europe, especially France, and frequent visits to Paris to explore its libraries and search its archives, the History of the United States went on. In 1849 Mr. Bancroft returned to the United States, and took up his residence in New-York. The fourth volume of the history, comprising the French war and the beginnings of our revolution, was immediately prepared for the press and published by his old publishers, in Boston, in the spring of 1852. Its success, after so long and highly-wrought expectation, was entire, and confirmed the satisfaction that the history of our country was to be recorded by a mind so sagacious, so cognizant of the national ideas, so receptive of the national spirit, so affluent in historic lore, so moulded by intercourse and attrition with great times and their greatest men, so capable of expression at once rich, vigorous, and characteristic.

Mr. Bancroft's time is now divided between the city and the seaside. Early in the summer he repairs to Newport, and were the date of our book somewhat later, we might enrich our pages with an engraving of the house he is now building there. It will be a simple, summer retreat, lying upon the seaward slope of the cliff. From his windows he will look down upon the ocean, and as he breathes its air,

impart its freshness and vigor to his pages. The fifth volume of the history is now printing. It will comprise the first events of the greatest epoch of modern times. Nor is it possible to say to how late a date the work will be continued. The great result of independence once achieved, the consequent organization of details can hardly be properly or copiously treated, until the mind can clearly trace the characteristic operation of principles through a somewhat longer course of years.

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