So4 Reviews of Books with which he deals, until he understands not only bare facts hut also how those facts made the living men feel who knew them in the flesh. In the second place, such an historian, availing himself of the perspec- tive of time, must slowly grow to perceive the mutual relations of his facts not only to one another but also to so much of general history as comes within his vision. To take a casual example from our own times, a writer of three hundred years hence who should touch on the dancing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might draw surprising inferences, or leave such inferences to be drawn, from an accurate description of the waltz as the fashionable successor of the minuet. And no amount of de- tailed erudition, uncorrected by imaginative sympathy, and by general knowledge of social development, could easily avoid the conclusion that our own times have been deplorably less respectable than those of our great-grandparents, — which is far from what most of us believe to be the case. How remote Dr. Eggleston is from imaginative sympathy with the past which he tries to revive may be inferred from that phrase of his preface which tells how the God of the seventeenth century ' ' governed this one little world with mock majesty." Perhaps so; anthropomor- phism is doubtless out of credence as well as out of fashion. But the God of our emigrant fathers was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of the Psalmists and the Prophets ; the God of the four Gospels which for ages were accepted as His living Word ; the God of the Crusades and of the Reformation; the God to whose throne Foxe's Martyrs rose ecstatic from the flames of Smithfield ; the God whose Spirit sustained amid all the horrors of a savage wilderness the indomitable courage of the Pilgrims and of the Puritans ; the God to whose service Cromwell gave himself; the God for whom the Ironside soldiery laid down their lives. They had their errors, — -saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs, and the rest ; but their widest error seems less than that of a modern historian who finds in the majesty of their Divinity even a tinge of mockery. Only those who can thrill with devout fervor as the words of the elder centuries begin to glow again with the life which once was in them can understand the spiritual truth wherein their formal miscon- ceptions fade at last, like misty clouds in the fathomless blue of sunny skies. Just such misleading lack of sympathy as that ' ' mock majesty ' ' seems to imply appears throughout Dr. Eggleston's six abaters. The titles of these chapters incidentally indicate his second great fault — confused per- ception of the relations which the separate parts of his subject bear to one another. Here then are titles in turn : I. " Mental Outfit of the Early Colonists ; " II. " Digression Concerning Medical Notions at the Period of Settlement" — though why this is any more digressive than the chapters which follow is not evident; III. "Mother English, Folk- Speech, Folk-Lore, and Literature;" IV. "Weights and Measures of Conduct ; " V. "The Tradition of Education ; " VI. " Land and Labor in the Early Colonies." Again it may seem unfair to base criticism on
