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 374 Reviezus of Books. allowance for the influence that strong personalities exert upon the popu- lar mind — of which they are at once the expression and the guide. He writes, as has already been observed, with especial attention to affairs in New York and Pennsylvania, and yet this volume, which covers the time of the final triumphs and vicissitudes of DeVVitt Clinton, contains no adequate study of that once-potent leader, of his influence upon national politics, or of the political affiliations of his enthusiastic following. In fact the history of our people in their political life between 1824 and 1830 is little more than a study of the power of rival personalities, an vmequaled group of contemporary leaders, Jackson, Van Buren, Craw- ford, Randolph, Clay, Adams, Clinton, Webster and Calhoun. It is still true that no one will turn to Professor McMaster's book in order to find an adequate estimate of the influence that these men exerted during this period among our people and upon the development of political ideas and parties. Perhaps, too, it would have been well to shorten some of the abstracts of magazine articles, pamphlets and Congressional debates and to enlarge more upon the extraordinary results of the tem- perance agitation which spread rapidly in New England after 1824. This volume contains five maps. The most interesting is a reproduc- tion of a map of Texas made in Cincinnati in 1836, which shows the territorial grants made by the Mexican government up to that time. On page 417, line 19, it is evident that some word has been omitted. The title-page now announces that the whole work will occupy seven, instead of six volumes, a welcome change, and it would seem that eight would be none too many, if the present rate of progress is retained. The development of the people during the decades 1830 to 1850 is a more fruitful topic than any that Professor McMaster has yet discussed, and it is to be hoped that he will not hurry over it. Charles H. Levermore. Theodore Parker, Preacher and Reformer. By John White Ch.d- wiCK. (Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co. 1900. Pp. XX, 422.) In a notice of Weiss' s Life of Parker, written for the Atlantic Monthly in 1864, I said that for the then existing generation Parker must be interpreted by one of the family — by one spiritually related to him, if not bound by the feebler tie of blood. While the accents of the great preacher yet lingered in the Boston Music Hall, he was no subject for complacent literary speculation or calm judicial discourse. More than the thirty years allotted to a generation have passed, and there reaches us a life of Parker by one spiritually related to him indeed, yet capable of a valuation of the man and his work that leaves little to be desired. This new life takes its place, not only as an admirable introduction to the fuller biographies of Weiss and Frothingham, but as a generally satisfac- tory estimate of what its subject was and was not — of his immense ac- complishment and of the defects that limited his gigantic manhood.