comment. Most varied of all is The Half Century of Conflict, in which the reader ranges from Maine to Louisiana, and follows the exploration of the western prairies. It is in these last volumes, in those on Montcalm and Wolfe and in Frontenac that the history of the English Colonies comes in for special consideration.
Parkman belonged to the narrative school of historians, and chose to picture the past rather than to reason about it. In his conception of the great drama of two rival and diverse civilizations contending for the mastery of the New World, in his nearness to the action and his personal exploration of the scene, and not least in the varied charm of his story, Parkman is the Herodotus of our Western World.
Yet he does not altogether refrain from drawing the lesson for the politician or renounce philosophizing, and in one of his volumes, The Old Regime in Canada, he has produced an admirable piece of institutional or social history, an examination, as he called it, of "the political and social machine," which is a fit counterpart and supplement to De Tocqueville's Ancien Régime en France.
The most distinctive quality of Parkman's narratives is picturesqueness. The action is set in a scene artistically reproduced from the author's careful observation. Knowing his human agents from personal study of the type as well as of their literary memorials, sensitive to all the varied aspects of nature, and familiar with each locality, he visualizes the whole action with extraordinary vividness. It passes his eyes like a panorama. The natural scene plays no such part in the work of any other historical writer, and the search for such exquisite pictures of wild nature in America as abound in his pages would not be an easy one even in our voluminous literature of outdoor life and nature study. In illustration of this artistic gift his descriptions of such widely diverse scenes as a southern swamp, a Canadian winter, or a prairie river in summer-time may be given. The first two are from The Pioneers, the last from La Salle. "The deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise
