Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography. Edited by James Grant Wilson
and John Fiske. Vol. I. Aaron—Crandall ; Vol. II. Crane—Gritushaw. (D. Appleton and Co., New York.)—American Biography is intended to contain an account of all persons who have found a place in the history of literature of the New World, the continents of both North and South America being included. European persons who have been brought into connection with America, also come under the scheme. Thus, we have memoirs of Jerome Bonaparte—whose tie to the New World is the not vary
creditable one of having married there a wife whom, under the con- straint of threats and bribes, he afterwards repudiated—and of Joseph, who resided in the States for several years after Waterloo. More honourable memories connect the name of Bishop Berkeley, of Cloyne, with the United States. Berkeley was one of the early benefactors of Yale, to which he gave a farm and a valuable collection of books. The plan of the book takes in both the living and the dead. One valuable feature is to be found in the portraits. The volumes contain ten and eleven respectively, elaborately executed on steel, and a great number in wood-engraving. We cannot pretend to check the vast amount of facts, most of them in an unfamiliar sphere, which these volumes contain, but we may say that the articles which we have examined with any amount of previous knowledge, seem satisfactory. But is there not an error in the last article of Vol. L ? Could Prudence Crandall have been "born about 1818," and opened "a female boarding- school at Canterbury, Conn., in 1831," i.e., when she was thirteen? The two volumes, each numbering 768 pp., are a third of the estimated whole. We may roughly estimate the two as about equal to six of our own " Dictionary of National Biography." It seems likely that it will be finished far sooner.
Previous page
