George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 8

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Chapter 48:

The question between Britain and America.

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August, 1775.

The chronicler of manners and events can alone

Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug.

measure his own fairness, for no one else knows so well what he throws aside. The greatest poet of action has brought upon the stage the panorama of mortal being, without once finding occasion to delineate a faultless hero. No man that lives has not sinned. The gentlest of historians, recounting in the spirit of love the mighty deeds which divide the new civilization from the old, tells how one of his fellow messengers, thrice in the same night, denied the master by whom he had been called. Indiscriminate praise neither paints to the life, nor teaches by example, nor advances social science; history is no mosaic of funeral eulogies and family epitaphs, nor can the hand of truth sketch character without shadows as well as light. The crimes and the follies which stand in the line of causes of revolution, or modify the development of a state, or color the morals of an age,