FRANQOIS XAVIER MARTIN threadbare. His room was festooned with cobwebs and encrusted with dirt. Out of a salary of five thousand dollars he did not spend as many hundred. Just and upright both in public and in private life, he was a hard man, driving hard bargains to add to the painfully accumulated fortune which he must leave when he died to relatives whom he knew but slightly or not at all. "He was so near-sighted," says Gayarre", "that, when he read or wrote, his robust and fully developed nose touched the paper and sometimes was tipped with ink. He walked along the streets of New Orleans with his eyes closed and with tottering and hesitat ing steps, feeling his way like a blind man, absorbed in thought, probably lost in utter darkness, or at best guiding himself only by the twilight of his imperfect vision, running one of his hands abstractedly over the side walls of the houses, mechanically and un consciously twirling round with his index the iron catches intended to hold fast the outside shutters of windows and doors, muttering to himself half-formed sentences, and frequently ejaculating in a dolorous undertone these words : ' Poor me! poor me!'" His sight was always weak, and the un remitting strain to which he subjected it finally brought on utter blindness, a trial which he bore with the utmost fortitude, and without allowing it to interfere with the- regular and exact performance of his duties as a magistrate. But we pause for a moment to mention two of his works in the field of history. The history of North Carolina prior to the Revolution, which he had planned to carry through that period, was interrupted by his removal to Louisiana. Here he soon began collecting materials for the history of Louisiana. In 1827 he was at last able to complete this, and the "History of Louisiana," in two volumes, ap peared in New Orleans in that year. Martin never thoroughly mastered the idioms of his adopted tongue, as may be apparent even in the slight quotations I have given
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from the work. But its chief fault is not merely in the stiffness of the language. There is little more sense of form than in the medieval chronicle; no organization of the extraordinarily rich and varied materi als collected by his tireless industry gives them coherence, combining them to form a picture at once vivid and effective; few generalizations sum up for the reader the substance of a period or of an historical movement; for the most part, a purely chronological arrangement is adopted, the happenings of one year are set down in order of time, often even without grouping* to gether to show their relation to each other or to other events; and the general effect is naturally confusion and dullness. But with all these faults, which one would think serious enough to ruin the book, Martin's "History of Louisiana " is really very valu able. Utterly incapable of, and indeed hostile to, the rather excessive floridity of style that marks the work of Gayarre", he yet surpasses Gayarre' in what is after all the most im portant qualification of an historian, accu racy and soundness of judgment. His facts, though not gathered from such wide sources as were at the command of the later and better known historian, are very full and quite carefully sound, especially for the period with which Martin and his older con temporaries were personally familiar, so that the book is in a double sense a mine of valuable miscellaneous materials for the historian of Louisiana. Two years after the "History of Louisi ana " appeared the long contemplated "Historyof North Carolina," the general character of which is sufficiently indicated by what has been said of its predecessor. By this time the imperfection of his sight was so mani festly on the increase that the lonely old man began to feel more keenly his practical isolation, despite his high honors and host of devoted friends, in the foreign land where none of his own family lived. He had ex pressed to some of these friends his deter mination not to leave his money to relatives
