George Bancroft

I'm currently slowly working my way through the Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, which was published in the very late 19th century. This series eventually consisted of 45 volumes, although so far Project Gutenberg only has 1 through 16 (excepting 10). As a whole it's interesting, but some authors are more prosaic in their writings than current modern taste would appreciate. An example is George Bancroft from volume 4, and American, who wrote a HIstory of the United States. In one excerpt from a chapter on Lexington (as in the first shots fired of the American Revolution), he gets quite carried away with himself as he describes the first martyrs at Lexington:

"They fulfilled their duty not from the accidental impulse of the moment; their action was the slowly ripened fruit of Providence and of time. The light that led them on was combined of rays from the whole history of the race; from the traditions of the Hebrews in the gray of the world's morning; from the heroes and sages of republican Greece and Rome; from the example of Him who died on the cross for the life of humanity; from the religious creed which proclaimed the divine presence in man, and on this truth, as in a life-boat, floated the liberties of nations over the dark flood of the Middle Ages; from the customs of the Germans transmitted out of their forests to the councils of Saxon England; from the burning faith and courage of Martin Luther; from trust in the inevitable universality of God's sovereignty as taught by Paul of Tarsus and Augustine, through Calvin and the divines of New England; from the avenging fierceness of the Puritans, who dashed the mitre on the ruins of the throne; from the bold dissent and creative self-assertion of the earliest emigrants to Massachusetts; from the statesmen who made, and the philosophers who expounded, the revolution of England; from the liberal spirit and analyzing inquisitiveness of the eighteenth century; from the cloud of witnesses of all the ages to the reality and the rightfulness of human freedom."

Fortunately, one can easily skim such interludes and authors.