1884.]
��Town and City Histories.
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��in the sensational stories of the day, than like the cold, dispassionate record of history. And this, mind you, is the record of a city famed far more for monuments, pleasure - grounds, and beautiful women, than for lawlessness and sans-culottism, a city proud of its families and its culture, a city one of the oldest and richest in the land. However unpleasant it may be to look at the black side of such a city's history, yet the study must be profitable if by it we Americans, proud of our tolerance and our humanity, jealous of aught past or present that may blot our escutcheon, wondering at and scornfully pitying nations that could have had Lord George Gordon riots and blood- thirsty land-leagues, a reign of terror and a commune, — if we may learn not to be quite so arrogant in our right- eousness, quite so boastful in our Pharisaism : if we mav learn how much reason we of the New World have to bear in mind, when we read about the past and present of the Old World, the divine command : " He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."
Yet Scharf gives merely the bare de- tails of these, the most vivid scenes in Baltimore's history, and goes little into causes or results, leaving us almost wholly in the dark as to how a civilized city in the most enlightened country on earth could have grafted on its history such anomalous things as these riots. This feature of Baltimore's history seems to us to be the feature most peculiar to itself, and, therefore, like that feature of a human face peculiar to the person we are studying, the most interesting ; but our historian gives it no distinctive treatment, puts no emphasis on it, forces the reader to compare, contrast, account for, explain,
��and draw conclusions for himself. That he should slide over this side of Baltimore's history would be natural enough, but of this he cannot be ac- cused. His treatment of this subject is characteristic of the whole book.
As a good example of an even more disappointing type of chronological histories we may take the History of Lynn, including Lynnfield, Saugus, Swampscott, and Nahant, by Alonzo Lewis and James R. Newhall, an octavo of six hundred and twenty pages, pub- lished in 1865. The book seems to have been condensed from a series of very poor diaries, and the mass of de- tail under the year-headings is ridicu- lous in its minuteness and laughable in its absurdity. Every year has its par- agraphic entries, more or less full. The narrative of one year may here be quoted to show the nature of the whole, and, for that matter, the nature of fifty similar town histories.
1758. "Thomas Mansfield, Esquire, was thrown from his horse on Friday, January 6, and died the next Sunday.
" A company of soldiers, from Lynn, marched for Canada, on the twenty- third of May. Edmund Ingalls and Samuel Mudge were killed.
" In a thunder-shower, on the fourth of August, an ox belonging to Mr. Henry Silsbee was killed by lightning
" A sloop from Lynn, commanded by Captain Ralph Lindsay, was cast away on the fifteenth of August, near Ports- mouth."
In this pretended " History," the whole of the eighteenth century re- ceives but sixty-two pages, and that part of the nineteenth which had elapsed at the time of publication re- ceives only one hundred and seventeen. In the latter an average entry is the following, under date of 1856: —
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