But none the less, as I have said, are the
forces (fighting in and through these few representatives of civilization)
age-old and world-important. Never has historian had such fascinating
theme--such "epic theme," says Fiske--"save when Herodotus told the story
of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the marshalled
hosts through a thousand years of change." And Parkman met one of what
Lowell calls "the convincing tests of genius" in the choice of this
subject.
When John Fiske said at the Harvard exercises in memory of Parkman that he
was one of the world's greatest historians, I subtracted something because
of the occasion and the nearness of view. But a year later he is saying of
Parkman's work, in a critical review: "Strong in its individuality and
like to nothing besides, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's
few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Gibbon." [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_, 73:674; "A Century
of Science and Other Essays," p.
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