of history seems to have escaped his terrible vigilance. With all his taste for large views, which comprehend years in sentences, the most mole-eyed annalist has not a keener sight for the small curiosities of history. From his quiet room in Boston he sends forth directions across the Atlantic which are felt at Madrid, Naples, and London; and rare MSS., buried in libraries or private collections, are stirred unwillingly up from the sleep and dust of centuries to serve his purpose. No chronicle or personal history, happy in the consciousness of its insignificance, can hide itself from his quick eye if it chance to contain a single fact which he needs. He has shown more industry and acuteness than almost any other contemporary resurrectionist in the grave-yards of deceased books. Yet he has not one of the faults which cling so obstinately to most antiquaries. He does not estimate the importance of a fact or date by the trouble he experienced in hunting it out. He does not plume himself on the acquisition of what has baffled others. None of the dust of antiquity creeps into his soul. His style glides along with the same unassuming ease in the narration of discoveries as of common facts.

Indeed, it is not so much in the collection as in the use of his materials that Mr. Prescott claims our regard as an historical artist. These materials are, it is true, original and valuable beyond any which have fallen into the hands of any contemporary historian; but to analyze them, and to compose accurate histories from their conflicting statements, required judgment in its most comprehensive sense. They are the productions of men who looked at persons and events from different points of view. They are vitiated with the worst faults of bad historians. They all reflect their age in its common passions and prejudices, and each is disfigured by some unconscious or willful misrepresentations, springing from personal bias or imperfect comprehension. They are full of credulity and bigotry, of individual and national prejudices,-sometimes the mere vehicles of private malice, almost always characterized by a bad arrangement of facts and confusion of principles. Together they present so strange a medley of shrewdness and fanaticism, of fact and fiction, and throw over the subject they are intended to illustrate such a variety of cross lights, and entangle it in such perplexing contradictions, that to sift out the truth requires the most cautious consideration and comparison of authorities; an obstinate resistance of evidence honestly put in; the utmost sagacity, penetration, and knowledge of the subtler movements of the human heart. The testimony of kings, statesmen, scholars, priests, soldiers, philanthropists, each inaccurate after a fashion of his own,

Mr. Prescott was compelled to estimate at its exact worth, disregarding all the exaggerations of pride, interest, and sensibility. To do this he was necessarily obliged to study the personal history of his authorities, to examine the construction of their minds, and to consider all inducements to false coloring which would result from their position and character. Those who have carefully read the critical notices of his authorities, subjoined to each division of his histories, must admit that Mr. Prescott has shown himself abundantly capable of performing this difficult and delicate task. He analyzes the mental and moral constitution of his veterans with singular acuteness, laying open to the eye their subtlest excellences and defects, and showing in every sentence that in receiving their statements of facts, he has allowed much for the medium through which they have passed. This portion of his duty, as an historian, demanded a judgment as nice in its tact as it was broad in its grasp. The scales must have been large enough to take in the weightiest masses of details, and perfect enough to show the slightest variation of the balance.

Mr. Prescott's understanding is thus judicial in its character, uniting to a love for truth diligence in its search and judgment in its detection. But this does not comprehend all his merits as an historian of the past; and, indeed, might be compatible with an absence of life in his narrative, and vitality in his conceptions. Among those historians who combine rectitude of purpose with strength of understanding, Mr. Hallam stands pre-eminent. All his histories have a judicial character. He is almost unexcelled in sifting testimony, in detecting inaccuracies, in reducing swollen reputations to their proper dimensions, in placing facts and principles in their natural order. He has no prepossessions, no preferences, no prejudices, no theories. He passes over a tract of history sacred to partisan fraud and theological rancor, where every event and character is considered in relation to some system still acrimoniously debated, without adopting any of the passions with which he comes in contact. No sophistical apology for convenient crime, no hypocrite or oppressor pranked out in the colors of religion. or loyalty, can deceive his cold, calm, austere, remorseless intellect. He sums up each case which comes before him for judgment with a surly impartiality, applying to external events or acts two or three rigid rules, and then fixing on them the brand of his condemnation. The shrieks of their partisans he deems but the last tribute to the justice of his judgment. This method of writing history has, doubtless, its advantages; and, in regard to Mr. Hallam, it must be admitted that he has corrected many pernicious

errors of fact, and overthrown many absurd estimates of character. But, valuable as his histories are in many important respects, they generally want grace, lightness, sympathy, picturesqueness, glow. From his deficiency of sensibility and imagination, and from his habit of bringing everything to the tribunal of the understanding, he rarely grasps character or incidents in the concrete. Both are interesting to him only as they illustrate certain practical or abstract principles. He looks at external acts without being able to discern inward motives. He cannot see things with the same eyes, and from the same position, as did the persons whom he judges; and, consequently, all those extenuations and explanations of conduct which are revealed in an insight into character, are of little account with him. He does not realize a past age to his imagination, and will not come down from his pinnacle of judgment to mingle with its living realities. As he coldly dissects some statesman, warrior, or patriot, who at least had a living heart and brain, we are inclined to exclaim with Hamlet,-"Has this fellow no feeling of his business?" It is the same in his literary criticisms. He gives the truth as it is about the author, not as it is in the author. He describes his genius in general terms, not in characteristic epithets. Everything that is peculiar to a particular writer slips through his analysis. That subtil interpenetration of personality with feelings and powers, which distinguishes one man's genius from another's, escapes the processes of his understanding. Persons, in Mr. Hallam's hands, commonly subside into general ideas, events into generalizations. He does not appear to think that persons and events have any value in themselves apart from the principles they illustrate; and, consequently, he conceives neither with sufficient intensity to bring out always the principles they really contain.

We have already said that this mode of writing history has its advantages, but it is still so over-informed with understanding as to sink representation in reflection. Now the historian should address the eye and heart as well as the understanding, to enable the reader really to understand his work. Mr. Prescott possesses the qualities by which this object is attained, and he possesses them in fine harmony with the qualities of his understanding. He has a quick sensibility and a high degree of historical imaginationan imagination which, though it cannot create character and events which never existed, can still conceive facts in the concrete, and represent them instinct with their peculiar life. In studying a past age he is not content with appending to a rigid digest of facts certain appropriate reflections, but he brings the age up to his mind

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