contract required them to take. As a punishment for their refusal to comply with the demands of the publisher, their biographies were stricken from their place in the footnotes after the volume was set up, and other matter was substituted. (The original sheets with marginal annotations as to amounts paid and biographies to be omitted are in the possession of Mr. E. H. Kilham of Portland, Oregon.) In view of these facts, we are forced to conclude that the business man in Mr. Bancroft, developed by the experiences and associations of a lifetime, sometimes got the better of the historical editor of scarcely fifteen years' standing.
A second factor to be considered in Mr. Bancroft's writing was sometimes expressed by his acquaintances as a mistaking of contrariness for originality. As already indicated, his tendency is toward a form of writing such as will attract the reader's attention. This tendency frequently asserts itself in sweeping statements and striking characterizations, many of them apparently impelled by a desire to give a turn to an incident or an estimate of a character different from that given by any previous writer. Thus Bancroft wrote an estimate of General Grant, which was startling because of the general hostility of its tone, and was considered so unjust by Mrs. Victor and Oak that they persuaded him to leave it out. (Letter of Mrs. Victor of July 25, 1892. The paragraph which was originally intended as a footnote in the History of Oregon, II, 246, is printed on page 18 of the Pamphlet of the Society of California Pioneers, which gives their proceedings with reference to Bancroft's histories.)
Again, in making an effort to avoid following Washington Irving, he has given in the part of the Northwest Coast which he wrote a treatment of the Astor enterprise, and an estimate of the character of Captain Bonne-
