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FRANCIS PARKMAN 287

and poetic beauty. On the continent, however, owing, no doubt, to the remoteness of his theme, and to the fact that Frenchmen could hardly be expected to find in the story of failure and loss the same interest that the story of triumph inspires in the Englishman, Parkman has never attained the popularity which came to Irving, Prescott, Bancroft, and Motley. Only The Pioneers and The Jesuits have been translated into French, and only these two and The Old Regime into German.

It is perhaps too soon to attempt an estimate of the prob- able permanence of Parkman's fame, yet one or two factoids in the problem may be indicated. The breadth of his prepa- ration, his occasional preservation of oral tradition, his per- sonal knowledge of wild life and of the American Indian such as no successor can ever obtain will always give his narra- tives in some measure the character of sources. The de- velopment of the science of ethnology, for example, has antiquated Prescott's Mexico and Peru except as a charm- ing reproduction of the impressions and exaggeration of the Spanish historians of the Conquest; but Parkman grew up with the scientific study of American Ethnology, was one of its promoters, and in a large measure embodied its results in his work. Making as conscientious an effort as ever his- torian did by means of documents to understand and reclothe the past with the habiliments of life, his success will prove of a more permanent kind than that of Motley or Prescott, because of his completer equipment for a realistic grasp of that past which he was so near and which he caught as it faded away forever. Finally, with the growth of Canada and of the West, the number of people for whom Parkman's histories are the epic of the founders of the State is ever in- creasing. It is hardly rash, then, in view of these considera- tions and of the rare and varied charm of his narrative to conclude that for a far longer period than is likely to be the fortune of Prescott, Motley, or Bancroft, the work of Francis Parkman will be proof

" ' gainst the tooth of time And razure of oblivion."