It was no accident that Sparks and Ticknor,
Bancroft and Prescott, Motley and Parkman, were Massachusetts
men.
Jared Sparks, it is true, inherited neither wealth nor leisure.
He was a furious, unwearied toiler in the field of our national
history. Born in 1789, by profession a Unitarian minister, he
began collecting the papers of George Washington by 1825. John
Marshall, the great jurist, had published his five-volume life of
his fellow Virginian a score of years earlier. But Sparks
proceeded to write another biography of Washington and to edit
his writings. He also edited a "Library of American Biography,"
wrote lives of Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, was professor of
history and President of Harvard, and lived to be seventy-seven.
As editor of the writings of Franklin and Washington, he took
what we now consider unpardonable liberties in altering the text,
and this error of judgment has somewhat clouded his just
reputation as a pioneer in historical research.
George Bancroft, who was born in 1800, and died, a
horseback-riding sage, at ninety-one, inherited from his
clergyman father a taste for history.
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