William Hickling Prescott, born in Salem, Massachusetts, 4th May 1796, was sixth in descent from John Prescott, who came to Massachusetts from Lancashire about 1640. Successive generations of Prescotts and of Hicklings, the historian's maternal ancestors, bore effective share in public affairs during the development of the colony into the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. At William's birth his father was practising law in Salem, whence he removed to Boston in 1808; and at fifteen Prescott entered the Sophomore or second year class at Harvard University. Possessing exceptional good looks and much personal charm, with a fund of high spirits which stood him in good stead throughout his life, the lad was very popular, but showed no special proficiency in his studies, and was even decidedly backward in mathematics. In the second year of his college experience occurred the painful accident which affected his whole life. As he was leaving the dining-hall, where a group of undergraduates were amusing themselves with rather rough play, he turned suddenly at some sound, and was struck full in the open eye by a piece of hard bread, thrown at random by a careless hand. The immediate effect upon him was like concussion of the brain. He recovered quickly from the general shock, but the injured eye had lost its sight for

ever.

But after a few weeks he resumed his studies, and did better work with one eye than he had ever done with two.

After leaving college he entered his father's office, and was beginning legal studies when acute rheumatism in his uninjured eye cut short his legal career (1815); and by medical advice he went to the Azores, where his maternal grandfather Hickling was consul for the United States. When next year he came to London the medical experts agreed that one eye was completely paralysed. In the autumn he went south in company with a friend; and the travellers paid their respects to Lafayette, as was then the bounden duty of every American who passed through France. But travel and change were in truth beyond his physical powers, and Prescott was glad to return home in midsummer 1817.

In the following years he learned to listen closely to anything read aloud to him, and to accustom himself to write on a noctograph, a writing-frame for the blind about the size of a large slate, which held a carbonated sheet firmly over a piece of white paper. The writing, done with an ivory or agate stylus on the upper sheet, impressed the black substance upon the white, while brass wires stretched across the frame directed the hand. During these years of fluctuating health and uncertainty as to what he could make of his life, Prescott met Susan Amory, whom he married in 1820; and his singularly happy marriage contributed not a little to Prescott's success. Meanwhile he had determined that

authorship was the one career open to him. He set himself to the systematic study of English style, and had been working at French and Italian when the return of his friend George Ticknor from Spain to be Professor of Spanish Literature at Harvard University interested Prescott in the language, literature, and history of the Peninsula; and that interest remained paramount throughout the rest of his life. One author read to him at this period was destined to leave a lasting impression; he found Mably's Sur l'Etude de l'Histoire 'full of admirable reflections and hints.' Though for some time he thought of writing on Italian literature, he ultimately resolved to take up the history of the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella; and his first step was to ask his friend Alexander Everett, United States minister to Spain, to procure the books he required and to set on foot necessary researches. Luckily for him, his orders for books, secretary work, and transcripts were unrestricted by any necessity for economy.

On 25th June 1836 the author, then in his fortieth year, finished the concluding note of Ferdinand and Isabella, the result of ten years' close work. Fears proved groundless; the book was a brilliant and immediate success. Only five hundred copies were printed at first, and they were all gone in five weeks. The reviews were numerous and almost uniformly favourable. One notice in the Edinburgh Review by Don Pascual de Gayangos, a learned Spaniard, and another somewhat surprised article in the Quarterly by Richard Ford, gave Prescott much satisfaction, as did a series of articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève by Count Adolphe de Circourt. One American review alone (the Massachusetts Quarterly, 1849) struck a key of disapproval; the article, anonymous, but written by Theodore Parker, asserted that Prescott's work lacked philosophy to a degree exceeding belief'that he seemed to know nothing of the philosophy of history, and little even of political economy. Having more of the spirit of chivalry than of humanity, it is impossible that he should write in the interests of mankind, or judge men and their deeds by justice, by the immutable law of the universe.' It is true that Prescott was not a philosophic historian. He was essentially a dramatic story-teller-a story-teller, however, who scrutinised. the value of the sources whence sprang his narrative. He put together a brilliant mosaic, but it was after he had selected each fragment with care and with all the knowledge to be had at the time. His story of the agglomeration of Castile, Aragon, and Granada into the kingdom of Spain retains its charm and holds the interest from beginning to end. Posterity has learned to read some portions of their history differently, but posterity has never been able to sneer at Prescott for defective or careless work, though he worked at a distance from the Peninsula, and though by force of circumstances he did not search archives in person. Nearly two years elapsed before he was actually

embarked on the new book on 'The Conquest of Mexico and the anterior civilisation of the Mexicans, a beautiful prose epic, for which rich, virgin materials teem in Simancas and Madrid, and probably Mexico.' The Spanish historian Navarrete placed at his disposal all his MS. material gathered for his Coleccion de Viages y Descubrimientos; but there came at a later date a moment when this choice was almost abandoned, Prescott having heard that Washington Irving had turned his attention to Mexico as a natural sequence to his Columbus. Happily, the great courtesy of the elder author encouraged the younger to proceed. Irving had already made a rough draft of his

WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT. After a Photograph.

story of the Mexican conquest when he learned accidentally of Prescott's plan; whereupon he immediately relinquished his own project, though, as he confessed later, at a great personal sacrifice. Letters from Sismondi, Thierry, and Patrick Fraser Tytler encouraged Prescott in his new enterprise; and in addition to splendid supplies sent to him from Spain, Don Pascual de Gayangos examined the British Museum and the State Paper Office on his behalf, and had transcripts made of all matter bearing on his subject which could not be purchased.

In August 1843 the History of the Conquest of Mexico was completed, and was published in December 1843, six years after 'Ferdinand and Isabella made their bow to the public.' The second work was greeted with a chorus of applause; five thousand copies were sold in about four months. In England the first edition was speedily exhausted; and on the Continent also the book was exceedingly well received. The

brilliant story of Hernando Cortes' expedition appealed to the public, and opened up a new field of research to scholars. Prescott gathered his materials from the accounts of Cortes and of his contemporaries, of Spanish historians and of Mexicans like Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who wrote at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and out of them wove a new web. From these all but unknown and inaccessible writings a spirited narrative sprang into life, which reads like a historical romance with Hernando Cortes as hero. In one sense it is a historical romance and nothing more. Descriptions of scenery called up vivid pictures in the writer's mind, which, sketched upon his pages, are often far from accurate. The Aztec civilisation as described by Cortes 'caught the imagination and overcame the critical judgment of Prescott, our most charming writer,' wrote Morgan, the first scientific American ethnologist.

The preparation for the story of the first Spanish inroad into the American continent covered much of the ground of the second, The Conquest of Peru. The author's zest in his new work was checked and saddened by the sudden death of his father (8th December 1844), always a close sympathiser in all his work; but Prescott soon roused himself to activity, cheered by an appreciative letter from Alexander von Humboldt about the Conquest of Mexico. A few months later he was honoured in Paris and in Berlin by election as corresponding member of the French Institute and of the Royal Society of Berlin. This foreign encouragement was a great refreshment to his spirits; for, in addition to mental depression, he suffered greatly from an access of inflammation in his eye. March 1847 saw the Conquest of Peru finished, two years and nine months after the author put pen to paper. Success was great and immediate on both sides of the Atlantic. Reviews were laudatory, and private letters from scholars and friends-Thierry, Gayangos, and others--full of warm appreciation. The adventures of the Pizarros are related with somewhat less dash than those of Cortes. sources are perhaps less ample. Francesco Pizarro, unable to write his own story, could not vaunt his exploits as did Cortes. As in the Conquest of Mexico, here also ethnological and historic research has taught us to read a different interpretation into many of the facts seen by Spanish eyes with sixteenth-century spectacles.

The

Even while busied with Peru, Prescott began to prepare for his Philip II.; and Motley was almost discouraged from his Rise of the Dutch Republi by learning that Prescott had gone back from the Spanish colonies to the mother-country. In his turn Prescott encouraged the younger man to go on with his book. But in 1850 Prescott's health moved him to make his second voyage to England, more than thirty years after the first. Most cordial was the welcome extended to him; every door was opened to him; and he greatly enjoyed his social

experiences. His letters to his wife give interesting pictures of English society in 1850, from the Queen, by whom he was graciously received, to minor authors delighted to claim him as a colleague from across the sea.

In October 1850 he returned home and began again to 'Philippize,' as he called it. Two volumes were published in November 1855; and not only were large sales made immediately, but interest was revived in Prescott's earlier books. Work on the third volume was interrupted by Prescott's addition to Robertson's Charles V., published in 1856.

'My poor wife! I am so sorry this has come upon you so soon,' was his first conscious sentence on recovering from a sudden stroke of apoplexy in February 1858; but nearly a year more of comparative health enabled him to publish the third volume of Philip (April 1858), leaving his story at 1580. The succeeding months were given to revision of Mexico. It was in the midst of this labour that a second attack dealt him his deathblow, from which he died in a few hours, 28th January 1859. A man without enemies, he had commanded the attention and interest of his contemporaries at large, and been the life and soul of every circle, great and small, of which he formed a part. Few writers have lived a life so uniformly happy and serene as that of Prescott, save for the one overwhelming misfortune of half-blindness. He kept wholly apart from the social and political questions agitating America and Europe.

His last work was received with warm commendation, and cannot even now be ignored; but it has a somewhat arid quality, and is distinctly lacking in charm. In its arrangement the material is disproportioned; thus more space is given to the Moors and less to the Netherlands than seems justified. Guizot strongly commended the presentation (Edinburgh Review, 1887), but thought the author was too impartial and lacking in passion. Prescott belongs distinctly to the school of literary history, a school for which the new Regius Professor at Cambridge (Inaugural Address, January 1903) thinks there is no place. He is not a philosophical historian, nor scientific in the modern sense. But he vastly surpassed the older school like Robertson in research, and he is much more careful in citing his authorities. He is a masterly narrator; and it may confidently be affirmed that Prescott's sixty years of work won him grateful recognition from a large body of readers on both sides of the Atlantic, for whom scientific history would have remained a sealed volume.

Aguilar.

Soon after landing, a canoe with several Indians was seen making its way from the neighbouring shores of Yucatan. On reaching the island one of the men inquired, in broken Castilian, 'if he were among Christians;' and, being answered in the affirmative, threw

himself on his knees and returned thanks to Heaven for his delivery. He was one of the unfortunate captives for whose fate so much interest had been felt. His name was Jerónimo de Aguilar, a native of Ecija, in Old Spain, where he had been regularly educated for the Church. He had been established with the colony at Darien, and on a voyage from that place to Hispaniola eight years previous, was wrecked near the coast of Yucatan. He escaped with several of his companions in the ship's boat, where some perished from hunger and exposure, while others were sacrificed on their reaching land by the cannibal natives of the peninsula. Aguilar was preserved from the same dismal fate by escaping into the interior, where he fell into the hands of a powerful cacique, who, though he spared his life, treated him at first with great rigour. The patience of the captive, however, and his singular humility, touched the better feelings of the chieftain, who would have persuaded Aguilar to take a wife among his people; but the ecclesiastic steadily refused, in obedience to his vows. This admirable constancy excited the distrust of the cacique, who put his virtue to a severe test by various temptations, and much of the same sort as those with which the devil is said to have assailed St Anthony. From all these fiery trials, however, like his ghostly predecessor, he came out unscorched. Continence is too rare and difficult a virtue with barbarians not to challenge their veneration, and the practice of it has made the reputation of more than one saint in the Old as well as the New World. Aguilar was now entrusted with the care of his master's household and his numerous wives. He was a man of discretion, as well as virtue; and his counsels were found so salutary that he was consulted on all important matters. In short, Aguilar became a great man among the Indians.

It was with much regret, therefore, that his master received the proposals for his return to his countrymen, to which nothing but the rich treasure of glass beads, hawk-bells, and other jewels of like value, sent for his ransom, would have induced him to consent. When Aguilar reached the coast there had been so much delay that the brigantines had sailed, and it was owing to the fortunate return of the fleet to Cozumel that he was enabled to join it.

On appearing before Cortes, the poor man saluted him in the Indian style, by touching the earth with his hand and carrying it to his head. The commander, raising him up, affectionately embraced him, covering him at the same time with his own cloak, as Aguilar was simply clad in the habiliments of the country, somewhat too scanty for a European eye. It was long, indeed, before the tastes which he had acquired in the freedom of the forest could be reconciled to the constraints either of dress or manners imposed by the artificial forms of civilisation. Aguilar's long residence in the country had familiarised him with the Mayan dialects of Yucatan, and, as he gradually revived his Castilian, he became of essential importance as an interpreter. Cortes saw the advantage of this from the first, but he could not fully estimate all the consequences that were to flow from it.

The repairs of the vessels being at length completed, the Spanish commander once more took leave of the friendly natives of Cozumel, and set sail on the 4th of March. Keeping as near as possible to the coast of Yucatan, he doubled Cape Catoche, and with flowing

sheets swept down the broad bay of Campeachy, fringed with the rich dye-woods which have since furnished so important an article of commerce to Europe. He passed Potonchan, where Cordova had experienced a rough reception from the natives; and soon after reached the mouth of the Rio de Tabasco, or Grijalva, in which that navigator had carried on so lucrative a traffic. Though mindful of the great object of his voyage-the visit to the Aztec territories-he was desirous of acquainting himself with the resources of this country, and determined to ascend the river and visit the great town on its borders.

The water was so shallow, from the accumulation of sand at the mouth of the stream, that the general was obliged to leave the ships at anchor, and to embark in the boats with a part only of his forces. The banks were thickly studded with mangrove trees, that, with their roots shooting up and interlacing one another, formed a kind of impervious screen or network, behind which the dark forms of the natives were seen glancing to and fro with the most menacing looks and gestures. Cortes, much surprised at these unfriendly demonstrations, so unlike what he had had reason to expect, moved cautiously up the stream. When he had reached an open place, where a large number of Indians were assembled, he asked, through his interpreter, leave to land, explaining at the same time his amicable intentions. But the Indians, brandishing their weapons, answered only with gestures of angry defiance. Though much chagrined, Cortes thought it best not to urge the matter further that evening, but withdrew to a neighbouring island, where he disembarked his troops, resolved to effect a landing on the following morning.

When day broke, the Spaniards saw the opposite banks lined with a much more numerous array than on the preceding evening, while the canoes along the shore were filled with bands of armed warriors. Cortes now made his preparations for the attack. He first landed a detachment of a hundred men under Alonso de Avila, at a point somewhat lower down the stream, sheltered by a thick grove of palms, from which a road, as he knew, led to the town of Tabasco, giving orders to his officer to march at once on the place, while he himself advanced to assault it in front. (From The Conquest of Mexico.) Atahuallpa.

་

Whether Atahuallpa possessed himself of every link in the curious chain of argument by which the monk connected Pizarro with St Peter may be doubted. It is certain, however, that he must have had very incorrect notions of the Trinity, if, as Garcilasso states, the interpreter Felipillo explained it by saying that the Christians believed in three Gods and one God, and that made four.' But there is no doubt he perfectly comprehended that the drift of the discourse was to persuade him to resign his sceptre and acknowledge the supremacy of another.

The eyes of the Indian monarch flashed fire, and his dark brow grew darker as he replied, 'I will be no man's tributary! I am greater than any prince upon earth. Your emperor may be a great prince; I do not doubt it, when I see that he has sent his subjects so far across the waters; and I am willing to hold him as a brother. As for the Pope of whom you speak, he must be crazy to talk of giving away countries which do not belong to him. For my faith,' he continued, 'I will not change

it. Your own God, as you say, was put to death by the very men whom he created. But mine,' he concluded, pointing to his deity-then, alas ! sinking in glory behind the mountains--my God still lives in the heavens, and looks down on his children.'

He then demanded of Valverde by what authority he had said these things. The friar pointed to the book which he held as his authority. Atahuallpa, taking it, turned over the pages a moment; then, as the insult he had received probably flashed across his mind, he threw it down with vehemence, and exclaimed, 'Tell your comrades that they shall give me an account of their doings in my land. I will not go from here till they have made me full satisfaction for all the wrongs they have committed.'

The friar, greatly scandalised by the indignity offered to the sacred volume, stayed only to pick it up, and, hastening to Pizarro, informed him of what had been done, exclaiming at the same time, 'Do you not see that, while we stand here wasting our breath in talking with this dog, full of pride as he is, the fields are filling with Indians? Set on at once! I absolve you.' Pizarro saw that the hour had come. He waved a white scarf in the air, the appointed signal. The fatal gun was fired from the fortress. Then springing into the square, the Spanish captain and his followers shouted the old war-cry of 'St Jago and at them!' It was answered by the battle-cry of every Spaniard in the city, as, rushing from the avenues of the great halls in which they were concealed, they poured into the plaza, horse and foot, each in his own dark column, and threw themselves into the midst of the Indian crowd. The latter, taken by surprise, stunned by the report of artillery and muskets, the echoes of which reverberated like thunder from the surrounding buildings, and blinded by the smoke which rolled in sulphurous volumes along the square, were seized with a panic. They knew not whither to fly for refuge from the coming ruin. Nobles and commoners-all were trampled down under the fierce charge of the cavalry, who dealt their blows right and left, without sparing; while their swords, flashing through the thick gloom, carried dismay into the hearts of the wretched natives, who now, for the first time, saw the horse and his rider in all their terrors. They made no resistance-as, indeed, they had no weapons with which to make it. Every avenue to escape was closed, for the entrance to the square was choked up with the dead bodies of men who had perished in vain efforts to fly; and such was the agony of the survivors under the terrible pressure of their assailants that a large body of Indians, by their convulsive struggles, burst through the wall of stone and dried clay which formed part of the boundary of the plaza! It fell, leaving an opening of more than a hundred paces, through which multitudes now found their way into the country, still hotly pursued by the cavalry, who, leaping the fallen rubbish, hung on the rear of the fugitives, striking them down in all directions.

(From The Conquest of Peru)

In addition to the works mentioned, Prescott wrote a Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1834), and a series of reviews in the North American Review on literary subjects. A collection of his Biographical and Critical Essays was published in 1845. The standard edition of his works is that edited by J. Foster Kirk, long his secretary (15 vols. 1884; new ed. 1889; republished in London, 1890); and the standard Life of him was written by his friend George Ticknor (1864).

RUTH PUTNAM.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, best loved of his country's poets and best known of them abroad, was born in Portland, Maine, 27th February 1807. The English Longfellows were Yorkshire folk. William, the poet's first colonial ancestor, had the contemporary reputation of being a little wild' and 'not so much a Puritan as some.' He married a sister of Samuel Sewall, witch-judge and famous diarist. On his mother's

side the poet was descended from John Alden, the hero of his Courtship of Miles Standish, as was also the poet Bryant. His father was a cultivated gentleman, a Harvard classmate of Dr Channing and Judge Story, but

to the mother he

was indebted for

his poetic temperament. The atmosphere of the home was that of the best English books; the local influences are described to perfection in the poem 'My Lost Youth.' He began early to write poetry, and his first published poem, written in his fourteenth year, was 'The Battle of Lovell's Pond,' the subject

an Indian fight of local celebrity. In 1821 he entered Bowdoin College, where he had Hawthorne for a classmate, barely making his acquaintance, perhaps because Hawthorne had been in the college a year when Longfellow entered his class. During his college years he wrote many verses if not much poetry, publishing twenty-three pieces in two years, some of them side by side with Bryant's in the United States Literary Gazette, as if frankly confessing their imitation, sometimes successful, of the elder poet. Only five of these pieces were tolerated in the collected editions of Longfellow's works. Immediately upon his graduation the college sent him to Europe for three years to fit himself for its new chair of modern languages. The fruits of this travel, beyond its special end, were a series of translations and the book OutreMer, as imitative of Irving as the carly poems had

later he passed to German and other northern originals. To the habit so definitely formed he frequently recurred, its culmination in his later life being his complete translation of Dante's Divina Commedia, a wonder of fidelity, but strangely lacking in the verve of the original, and even in that of his own early experiments with the same material.

Much had happened to Longfellow in the period during which his originality as a poet had been in complete abeyance. For five years he had been a professor of the modern languages in Bowdoin College. In 1835, having been ap

pointed to a similar chair at Harvard, he went to Europe for a two years' course of study. In 1831 he had married Mary Storer Porter, a lovely and intelligent girl. She died in the first year of his second sojourn in Europe, November 1835, and his spirit was profoundly shaken by the event. It made him a new creature. It reopened the fountain of poetry in his mind. What he had learned in sorrow, he now essayed to teach in song; but not until he had embodied in Hyperion the experiences of his second European journey, as he had embodied those of the first in OutreMer. The manner of the new romance reflected that of Richter as plainly as the former had reflected that of Irving. Its allusions thinly veiled the sorrow of his personal loss, while on its verge arose the shape of a consoler, Frances Elizabeth Appleton, who in 1843 became his second