as I say, was his intimate friend. Now, it was to me a matter of the utmost personal surprise when I found, gradually growing up in this country, the impression that Mr. Webster was often, not to say generally, overcome with liquor, in the latter years of his life. I should say that a third part of the anecdotes of him which you find afloat now have reference to occasions when it was supposed that, under the influence of whiskey, he did not know what he was doing. I like to say, therefore, that in the course of twenty-six years, running from the time I was four years old to the time when I was thirty, I never had a dream or thought that he cared anything about wine or liquor certainly I never supposed that he used it to excess. What is more, I know that my own father, who lived to the year 1864, heard such stories as these with perfect disgust and indignation. This is a good place to print my opinion that this class of stories has been nourished, partly carelessly and partly from worse motives; and that they are not to be taken as real indications of the habit or life of the man.

THE HISTORIANS

IT

CHAPTER II

THE HISTORIANS

T was by rather a curious chance, as I believe, that a little coterie of historians was brought up in Boston, in the first half of the century. Dr. Palfrey, the oldest of the company, called my attention to the circumstances which seem to have led the earlier studies of these men.

He himself was born in Boston, in 1795. He was the successor of Edward Everett as the minister of Brattle Square Church, the fourth in age of the Boston Congregational churches. He afterward became Professor of Sacred Literature at Cambridge, and a member of Congress. He devoted his later years to his history of New England.

He said to me that, from two or three causes, it happened that the Public Libraries of Boston and of the College were especially strong in the line of history. He said that on this account alone Prescott, Motley, and he himself were drawn, almost without knowing it, into histori

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cal research. You might almost say that there was nothing else they could read, except the Latin and Greek classics. Bancroft was born in Worcester, studied at Cambridge and Göttingen, and after some years at the Round Hill School, Northampton, removed to Boston. Jared Sparks, who took to historical research as a duck takes to water, lived in Boston or Cambridge after he left the active ministry of the Unitarian Church. And what built up these historical libraries, so strong in "Americana even to this day? In 1787 Jeremy Belknap, who had published his "History of New Hampshire" as early as 1784, came back to Boston, where he was born. With several Boston scholars, whose names are not wholly forgotten there, he established the Massachusetts Historical Society. The society made the first considerable public library, which was of course a historical library. It is now one of the most prosperous Historical Societies in the world, and its elegant library is one of the finest buildings in Boston. I am apt to say that the Dowse room is the most elegant room in Boston. It is, unless the Latin School parlor shares that distinction.