The Spacious Empire of Lawrence Henry Gipson

Abstract

T TWO noteworthy events make the year i88o distinctive in the annals of American historiography. That patriarch among American historians, George Bancroft, then in his eighty-first year, was busily engaged in preparing his two-volume History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States, which became a part of The Author's Last Revision to appear within a few years. In that same year Lawrence Henry Gipson, the present dean and patriarch of American historians, was born in Greeley, Colorado. I suggest that this is more than coincidence, for something of that quality of timeless energy which Bancroft possessed in full measure seems to have been infused into the bloodstream of our distinguished colleague. One who at the ripe age of eighty-six can demonstrate a capacity, intellectual and physical, to bring to completion a grandiose design might well be compared with that earlier historian, who at the age of eighty-five wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes: On one of the days in which I wrote my little tribute to your Life of Emerson, I was yet strong enough to rise in the night, light my own fire and candles, and labor with close application fully fourteen hours consecutively, that is, from five in the morning till eight in the evening, with but one short hour's interruption for breakfast; and otherwise no repast; not so much as a sip of water. To which the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table made a characteristic response: You must be made of iron and vulcanized india-rubber, or some such compound of resistance and elasticity. Now, synthetic chemistry has invented many more compounds than were known in the late Doctor Holmes's day. If Lawrence H. Gipson has partaken of these new elixirs, for trade reasons he has kept it a secret. But anyone who for some score of years could survive a daily round-trip commutation stint on the Reading Railroad between Rydal and