The North American Review Author:Edith Wharton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. IV. — The Library of American Biography. Conducted by Jared Sparks. Second Series. Volume I. Boston : Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1844. 12mo. pp. 400... more ». We several times expressed our views respecting the plan of this work, and the manner in which particular portions of it were executed, while the first series was in the course of publication ; and we regretted its suspension at a time when the lives of many of the most eminent of our countrymen had found no place in its pages. Some work of the kind seems indispensably necessary in order to render the general reader familiar with the history of those whose honor is identified with the honor of his country, and tends, perhaps, in his estimation, to enhance his own. The notices of them contained in biographical dictionaries are too meagre to afford much instruction ; and the more elaborate biographies are in general quite too voluminous for the purpose of such a reader ; while the sketches in a work like this are too short to inspire much weariness, and at the same time long enough to serve to point a moral. Nor is there any want of rich material, much of it yet unwrought. There are the discoverers, who may fairly claim to belong to the country which they brought to light ; the explorers, who penetrated its recesses and laid them open to civilization, as the hardy settler opens the forest-sheltered soil to the sweet influences of the sun ; the pioneers, always a bold and resolute, and sometimes a noble race, wrestling with privation, with savage enemies, and the sharp evils of solitude and sickness, on the spot where, a few years after, their children " sing the merry songs of peace." Then comes the long and stately procession of those who established all that constitutes a state ; the warrior, the lawgiver, the statesm...« less