Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/694

 684 Reviezus of Books also, and in the same way, is the chapter on the disputed election of 1876. Some minuter criticisms suggest themselves. I think, for instance, that in the account of the final break between Grant and President Johnson, in 1867, Mr. Rhodes is far too lenient to Grant. Perhaps he has not seen a revival of that controversy in the Nciv York Herald (May 27, 1878), and a contribution then made to it from the diary of Gideon Welles. But to mention such instances in which one dis- sents from Mr. Rhodes's views would be misleading. In a far greater number of instances, I feel sure, intelligent readers, particularly if they have some familiarity with his material, will find themselves sur- rendering preconceptions to accept his judgments. There is nothing about these new volumes to suggest any fresh dis- cussion of Mr. Rhodes's way of writing history. In style, they are uniform with their predecessors. It is true that I have twice, greatly to my surprise, detected Mr. Rhodes in something that looks decidedly like phrase-making. Grant, while President, accepts the gift of a horse and buggy " with oriental nonchalance ". The city of Geneva is the " staid chamberlain of mighty issues " (VI. 375). But in general what has been said of the earlier volumes is as true of these. They have the same quality of heavy, awkward strength. There is the same absence of fine writing, and the same freedom from any striving after it; the same apparent disregard of form in paragraphs; rather more sentences than usual, perhaps, that are clumsy with a clumsiness which one perfectly understands, instead of being skilful with the kind of elabo- rate cleverness which one frequently fails to understand; and there is, if anything, an even heightened contempt for punctuation marks, par- ticularly for the comma. The index is by Mr. David M. Matteson. William G.rrott Brown. Four Centuries of the Paiiaiiia Canal. By Willis Fletcher John- son. (New York: Henry Holt and Company. 1906. Pp. xxi, 461.) A journalist's history; so attested by the contents, the style, and even by the preface. Years of service as a newspaper correspondent have given Mr. Johnson much familiarity with the Isthmian Canal pro- ject during the past decade. It was a simple task to recast, recapitu- late, " read up " the past, and make a history. If the book had been named according to its emphasis rather than according to the extreme limit of dates covered, it had better been called " Four Years of the Panama Canal." The first 396 years are treated in the first third of the book, and the events of really less than four full years fill the re- maining two-thirds. Mr. Johnson made a book of what he knew, and in some cases of what he thought he knew. The mature, thorough, patient, scholarly historian has not yet busied himself with the Canal, or for that matter,