William Hickling Prescott

powers, in some respects an apprenticeship to the profession which he had decided to adopt. When he began its composition he had published nothing but a few casual revie

serious investigator and a maker of literature, he did not know. Therefore, the Ferdinand and Isabella shows here and there an uncertainty of t

in a style which reflected his own individual nature, Cooper was producing stories equally exciting, but told in phraseology almost as stilted as that which we find in Rasselas. This was no less true in poetry. The great romantic movement which in England found expression in Byron and Shelley and the exquisitely irregular metres of Coleridge had as yet awakened no true responsive echo on this side of the Atlantic. Among the essay-writers and historians of America none had

him to write in an unstudied style, all the more did he feel it necessary to repress his natural inclination. Therefore, in the text of his history, we find continual evidence of the eighteenth century literary manner,-the balanced sentence, the inevitable adjective, the studied antithesis, and the elaborate parallel. Women are invariably "females

he advancement of the faith all means are lawful,' which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from

e foll

s of the highest rank devoted themselves to letters; the latter contending publicly for the prizes, not merely

nd. The particular chapter from which the last quotation has been taken was, in fact, originally prepared by Prescott

elentlessly-Isabella and Elizabeth in their private lives, Isabella and Elizabeth in their characters, Isabella and Elizabeth in the selection of their ministers of State, Isabella and Elizabeth in their intellectual power, Isabella

somewhat in the vein of his private letters from Pepperell and Nahant. The contrast, therefore, between text and notes was often thoroughly incongruous because so violent. This led his English reviewer, Mr. Richard Ford,[28

s, independently of the deteriorating influence of their institutions, can of all people the least afford to be negligent. Far severed from the original spring of English undefiled, they always run the risk of sinking into provincialisms, into Patavinity,-both positive, in the use of obsolete words, and the adoption of conventional village significations, which differ from those retained by us,-as well as negative, in the omission of those happy expressions which bear the fire-new stamp of the only authorised mint. Instances occur constantly in these volumes where the word is English, but English returned after many years' transportation. We do not wish to be hypercritical, nor to strain at gnats. If, however, the authors of the United States aspire to be admitted ad eundem, they must write the English of the 'old country,' which they will find it is much easier to forget and corrupt than to improve. We cannot, however, afford space here for a florilegium Yankyense. A professor from New York, newly imported into England and introduced into real good society, of which previously he can only have formed an abstract idea, is no bad illustration of Mr. Presco

and these harmlessly trite political pedantries had rasped the nerves of his British reviewer. To speak of "the empty decorations, the stars and garters of an order of nobility," to mention "royal perfidy," "royal dissimulation," "royal recompense of ingratitude," and generally to intimate t

able William Prescott, LL.D.' We really are ignorant of the exact value of this titular potpourri in a soi-disant

which at the time he mistakenly regarded as essential to the dignity of historical writing. In fact, as the work progressed, the author gained something of that ease which comes from practice, and wrote more and more simply and more after his own natural manner. What is really lacking is sharpness of outline. The narrative is somewhat too flowing. One misses, now and then, crispness of phrase and force of characterisation. Pre

im to consider the question of his own style in the light of Ford's very slashing strictures. In making this self-e

; 'crown descended' better than 'devolved'; 'guns fired' than 'guns discharged'; 'to name,' or 'call,' than 'to nominate'; 'to read' than 'peruse'; 'the term,' or 'name,' than 'appellation,' and so forth. It is better also not to encumber the sentence with long, lumbering nouns; as,'the relinquishment of,' instead of 'relinquishing'; 'the embellis

ible decision which very materiall

y be made worse in this respect by extra solicitude. It is not the defect to which I am predisposed. The best security against it is to write with less elaboration-a pleasant recip

ough they really amount to nothing more than the d

ch can give full force to his thoughts. Franklin's style would have borne more ornament-Washington Irving could have done with less-Johnson and Gibbon might have had much less formality, and Hume and Goldsmith have occasionally pointed their sentences with more effect. But, if they had abandoned the natural suggestions o

ion, asked his friends to read and criticise what he had written, and he used also to employ readers to go over his pages with great

ot most of his information at second hand from Cardonne and Marmol. Hence, Prescott's chapters on the Arabs in Spain, although they appear to the general reader to represent exact and solid knowledge, are in fact inaccurate in parts. In other respects, however, the most modern historical scholarship has detected no serious flaws in Ferdinand and Isabella. Such defects as the book possesses are negative rather than positive, and they are really due to the author's cast of mind. Prescott, was not, and he never became, a philosophical historian. His gift was for synthesis rather than for analysis. He was an industrious gatherer of facts, an impartial judge of evidence, a sympathetic and accurate narrator of events. He could not, however, firmly grasp the underlying causes of what he superficially, observed, nor penetrate the very heart of things. His power of generalisation was never strong. There is a certain lack also, especially in this first one of his historical compositions, of a due appreciation of character. He describes the great actors in his drama,-Ferdinand, Isabella, Columbus, Ximenes, and Gonsalvo de Cordova,-and what he says of them is eminently true; yet, somehow or other, he fails to make them live. They are stately figures that move in a majestic way across one's field of vision; yet it is their outward bearing and their visible acts that he makes us know, rather than the interplay of motive and temperament which impelled them. His taste, indeed, is decidedly for the splendid and the spectacular. Kings, princes, nobles, warriors, and statesmen crowd his pages. Perhaps they satisfied the starved imagination of the New Englander, whose own

d under two far-seeing sovereigns, and wherein the power of Spanish feudalism was broken, the prestige of France and Portugal brought low, the Moors expelled, and Spain consolidated into one united kingdom from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, while a new and unk