in its characteristic form, costume, and social condition. He, in a manner, sees and feels its peculiar life, and comprehends, with his heart as well as his head, the influences which shaped character, and supplied motives and palliations of conduct. He distinguishes between crimes which result from wickedness of heart, and crimes which result from accredited error, and discerns those intricate operations of the mind by which superstition hallows vices into virtues, and prejudice obliquely justifies inhumanity and persecution. By conceiving character, also, as a whole, his page is filled with men instead of monstrosities. He sees that the progress of opinion has stamped with reprobation many practices which were once commanded by conventional morality and perverted religion; and he discriminates between evil performed from a false idea of duty, and evil performed from selfish passion. At the same time he understands all those unconscious hypocrisies of selfishness by which vice and error are gradually sanctified to the conscience and ennobled to the imagination. He comprehends, likewise, that apparent anomaly in human nature,-the commission of great crimes by persons who are not destitute of elevated sentiment and disinterested action; and in the delineation of men whose lives present a strange medley of folly and wisdom, virtue and wickedness, he presents complete and consistent portraits, recognized at once as harmonizing with the principles of our common nature. History, as often written, is false in the impressions it conveys, from an absence of this vitality, vividness, and picturesqueness. We do not perceive the connection between past and present events; and do not meet the actors in them on the common ground of humanity. Mr. Prescott always recognizes one nature in the different personages of history, however strange may be the combination of its elements, however novel the circumstances among which it is placed.

Connected with this power of pictorial representation and imaginative insight, he possesses a large share of sensibility; and from the combination of these arises, in a great degree, the peculiar charm and interest of his histories. By the readiness with which he himself sympathizes with his incidents and characters, he awakens the sympathies of the reader, and bears him willingly along the stream of narrative. Take, for instance, the histories of the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Almost everything seems presented directly to the imagination,-the physical characteristics of the countries, the character and varying fortunes of the conquerors, the appearance of their followers, the manners, customs, government, religion, of the conquered race. With exquisite artistical effect

our sympathies are made to gather round each in its turn, and to realize each in its peculiar form and life. Scenery, persons, and events, are thus fixed in the imagination in their proper relations, and together make up a comprehensive whole, the contemplation of which exercises almost every faculty and feeling of the mind. The same thing presented simply to the understanding, divested of its coloring and characterization, would certainly lose as much in instruction as attractiveness. Mr. Prescott understands what has made historical novels so much more readable than histories, and he has succeeded in making history as fascinating as romance. In accomplishing this it was not necessary that he should introduce anything fictitious. The nearer his narrative approached the vital truth of the matter, the more complete would be the interest it would awaken. But he had the sagacity to perceive that a mere detail of events however remarkable, and a mere estimate of persons however eminent, did not constitute history until they had been informed again with their original life.

In performing this difficult task Mr. Prescott has avoided another fault scarcely less injurious than its opposite extreme; we mean the fault of producing confusion of objects by the intensity with which each is conceived and expressed. Michelet, a man of splendid talents and accomplishments, is an illustration of this brilliant defect. His histories are as intense as Childe Harold or Manfred. He writes, as old John Dennis would say, in a perfect 'fury and pride of soul." He conceives character and events with such vividness as to adopt the passions of the age he describes, blending them with his own life, and making their expression a matter of personal concern. He is whirled away by the spirits he has evoked. "Thierry," he once remarked, “called history narration; and M. Guizot analysis. I have named it resurrection, and it will retain the name." This remark conveys a fair impression of his historical method. He wakes from the sleep of ages kings, statesmen, warriors, and priests, and they start up into convulsive life. Each individual object glares upon the reader with eyes of fire, distracting his attention from relations. The historian is not upon an eminence surveying the whole field, but amid the noise and dust of the meleé. There are in his histories detached sentences of extraordinary depth, single impersonations of wonderful grandeur, but the calm and comprehensive judgment, unfolding events and characters in their true connection, is generally wanting. Much of his finest narrative is disfigured with bursts of declamation which would be deemed extravagant in a political meeting, with drizzles of mysticism which would puzzle

a transcendentalist. He has whole chapters which display a strange combination of qualities, made up of Lord Byron, Jacob Behmen, and Mr. Jefferson Brick. Mr. Prescott, perhaps, has nothing in his histories equal to Michelet's delineations of Joan of Arc, Charles of Burgundy, Hannibal, or Cæsar. But if he is not so vivid and powerful in detached parts, he excels him in the unity and proportion of his whole matter, and the sustained life and interest of his narrative. The healthy combination and balance of powers in Mr. Prescott's mind are more valuable to him as an accurate historian, than would be the impassioned imagination of Michelet, or the judicial understanding of Mr. Hallam.

The style of Mr. Prescott's works, as might be expected from his character, is manly, perspicuous, picturesque, lucid, equally removed from stateliness and levity, disdaining all tawdry ornaments and simulated energy, and combining clearness and simplicity with glow. In the composition of a long work it is a delicate matter to fix upon a proper form. The style which would delight in an essay might grow intolerably tedious in a volume. When brilliancy or dignity, intensity or melody, become monotonous, they tire nearly as much as dullness or discord. The only safe style for a long history is one without peculiarities which call attention to itself, apart from what it conveys. It must be sufficiently elevated to be on a level with the matter, or its meagre simplicity and plainness would distract attention as much as luxuriant ornament, while it must vigorously resist all temptations to display for the mere sake of display. Mr. Prescott has been compared with Robertson in respect to style. The comparison holds as far as regards luminous arrangement of matter and clearness of narration; but, with the exception, perhaps, of passages in his "America," not in the graces of expression. The manner of Robertson is a fair representation of his patient, passionless, elegant mind. Its simplicity is often too prim, its elegance too nice. The smoothrubbed mind of the Scotchman risks nothing, is fearful of natural, graces, fearful of English verbal criticism, fearful of violating the dignity of history. His diction loses sweetness and raciness in its effort after correctness, and, as a general thing, is colorless, characterless, without glow or pictorial effect. The water is clear and mirrors facts in beautiful distinctness, but it neither sparkles nor flows. His diction, however, has the rare quality of never being tedious, and fixes the pleased attention of the reader when the labored splendor of Gibbon would fatigue from its monotony. Mr. Prescott has the characteristic merits of Robertson with other merits superadded. His style is flowing, plastic, all alive with the

life of his mind. It varies with the objects it describes, and is cautious or vehement, concise or luxuriant, plain or pictorial, as the occasion demands. It glides from object to object with unforced ease, passing from discussion to description, from the council chamber to the battle-field, without any preliminary flourishes, without any break in that unity which declares it the natural action of one mind readily accommodating itself to events as they rise. Such a style is to be judged not from the sparkle or splendor of separate sentences or paragraphs, but from its effect as a whole. A person can only appreciate it by following its windings through a long work. Of course we speak of Mr. Prescott's style, in this connection, in its general character, after his powers of composition had been well trained by exercise. The diction of the earlier chapters of Ferdinand and Isabella displays an effort after elegance, and an occasional timidity of movement, natural to a man who had not learned to dare, and mistook elegant composition for a living style. He soon worked himself free from such shackles, and left off writing sentences. With the exceptions we have mentioned there is no fine writing-of writing for the sake of words instead of things-in Mr. Prescott's works. His mind is too large and healthy for such vanities. Perhaps the perfection of his style, in its plastic movement, is seen in the Conquest of Peru. There are passages in that which seem to have run out of his mind, clear as rills of rock water. They are like beautiful improvisations, where passions and objects so fill the mind, that the words in which they are expressed are at once perfect and unpremeditated. We have thus attempted to pass beneath the surface of Mr. Prescott's works to show out of what combination of elements, inoral and intellectual, they have taken their present form. It is only in this way that we can estimate the amount of industry, candor, intellect, and command of expression, he brought to bear upon his difficult labors. The analysis would have been easier had his mind presented more positive points, or his works displayed more stubborn individual traits. The different powers of his mind interpenetrate each other with such a plastic felicity, that the critic is puzzled to hit the right point which exhibits their relative size and strength. It is needless to say that intellects like that of Mr. Prescott are often underrated from the very harmony of their proportions. It is only by going carefully over their processes, that we appreciate their results.

Mr. Prescott's first work was the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was the labor of ten years, and of ten years well spent. He was as fortunate in the selection of his sub

ject as in its treatment. It was in this reign that the Spanish monarchy may be said to have been organized, and the Spanish character permanently formed. Yet either from the paucity of materials, or from an underestimate of its importance, European writers left to an American the honor of first writing a classic history of the period. Two inconsiderable compilations, one in French by Mignot, the other in German by Becker, were the only records of an attempt to grapple with the subject as a whole. At the time Mr. Prescott selected it, the materials for its proper treatment were more numerous and available than at any preceding period. The researches of Llorente, Marina, Sempere, Capmany, Conde, Navarette, and Clemencin, had cleared up the darkness which previously enveloped some of the most important and interesting features of the subject. Through friends abroad and at home he was able to collect almost everything, both in a printed and MSS. form, which could illustrate the period, comprehending chronicles, memoirs, private correspondence, legal codes, and official documents. Then occurred an untoward circumstance which cannot better be related than in his own words :

"Soon after my arrangements were made early in 1826 for obtaining the necessary materials from Madrid, I was deprived of the use of my eyes for all purposes of reading and writing, and had no prospect of again recovering it. This was a serious obstacle to the prosecution of a work, requiring the perusal of a large mass of authorities in various languages, the contents of which were to be carefully collated and transferred to my own pages, verified by minute reference. Thus shut out from one sense, I was driven to rely exclusively on another, and to make the ear do the work of the eye. With the assistance of a reader, uninitiated, it may be added, in any modern language but his own, I worked my way through several venerable Castilian quartos, until I was satisfied of the practicability of the undertaking. I next procured the services of one more competent to aid me in pursuing my historical inquiries. The process was slow and irksome enough, doubtless, to both parties, at least till my ear was accommodated to foreign sounds and an antiquated, oftentimes barbarous phraseology, when my progress was more sensible, and I was cheered with the prospect of success. It certainly would have been a far more serious misfortune to be led thus blindfold through the pleasant paths of literature; but my track stretched for the most part across dreary wastes, where no beauty lurked to arrest the traveler's eye and charm his After persevering in this course for some years, my eyes, by the blessing of Providence, recovered sufficient strength to allow me to use them with tolerable freedom in the prosecution of my labors, and in the revision of all previously written."

senses.

The range of Mr. Prescott's subject was extensive, and its different portions had to be taken up in their order, and their relative