At Belshazzar’s feast ‘there came forth fingers as of a man's hand, writing . . .’ The last volume of Charles and Mary’ Beard’s enormous work is scarcely as epigrammatic as the ‘Mane, Thecel, Phares’ of the Book of Daniel; indeed, each of the three volumes contains more than eight hundred pages; but the writing on the wall can clearly be discerned in the vast accumulation of the authors’ erudition.

With patience, unending research, fine organization of material, real eloquence, detachment, culture and an occasional pleasant acerbity, the two authors have traced the cultural history of the United States from before the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers until the day before yesterday. Their first volume covers the whole period from Elizabethan days until the eve of the Civil War; the second from 1860 until the Harding Administration; the third extends to the winter of 1938. Somewhat mysteriously entitled ‘America in Midpassage,’ this last volume was published in the Autumn of 1939, near the beginning of this latest war.