Home / Scharf, J. Thomas, ed. History of Westchester County, New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I. Philadelphia: L.E. Preston & Co., 1886. / Passage

History of Westchester County, New York, Vol. I

Scharf, J. Thomas, ed. History of Westchester County, New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I. Philadelphia: L.E. Preston & Co., 1886. 266 words

Leake, not only made no such claim, in their behalf, but expressly and in unmistakable words, gave that honor to the Committee of Corresiwndence w liich had been appointed by the body of the inhabitants, at the Coffee-house. (Meinoir of the Life and Times of General John Lamb, Albany: 1857, 88.) In the same author's centenary edition of that History of the United iitates, Boston: 1876, iv., 326, the same statement was made, without the slightest change ; and Lodge's //istori/ o/ (/le English Colonial, New Y'ork : 1881, 489, without Bancroft's airy rhetoric, in a far more historical style than that historian employs, in some of his words, and without the slightest change in its substance, perpet\iated the error.

Such are the guides which .\merican scholarship, generally fettered with bonds of Roman and Grecian Literature, has given to the world, for the direction of those who shall aspire to the knowledge of a history of America. Such are some of the evidences of the entire untrustworthiness of the greater number of those who, Siitisfied w ith that " discipline " to which the Classics have subjected them and without having otherwise qualified themselves for the proper discharge of their honorable duties as historians of their own Country, have contented themselves, instead, by repeating what othei-s, also fettered by similar obsolete prejudices and equally indolent, have written, and by willingly propagating the errore which local prejudices or indolence or a faulty education or ignorance have produced, while, Willi greater usefulness to the world and greater honor to themselves, they might rather have attempted to extirpate them.