Leake, not only made no such claim, in their behalf, but expressly and in unmistakable words, gave that honor to the Committee of Correspondence which had been appointed by the body of the inhabitants, at the Coffee-house. {Memoir of the Life and limes of General John Lamb, Albany : 1857, 88.) In the same author's centenary edition of that History of the United States, Boston: 1876, iv., 326, the same statement was made, without the slightest change ; and Lodge's History of the English Colonies, New York: 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, perpetuated the error.

Such are the guides which American 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 untruBtworthiness of the greater number of those who, satisfied with that " discipline " to which the Classics have subjected them and without having otherwise qualified themselves for the proper discharge of theirhonorable duties as historians of their own Country, have contented themselves, instead, by repeating what others, also fettered by similar obsolete prejudices and equally indolent, have written, and by willingly propagating the errors which local prejudices or indolence or a faulty education or ignorance have produced, while, with greater usefulness to the world and greater honor to themselves, they might rather have attempted to extirpate them.