DR. JOHNSON, in his rather unsympathetic life of Milton, declares that it is impossible for a blind man to write history. Already, before Prescott began historical composition, this dictum had been refuted by the brilliant French historian, Augustin Thierry, whose scholarly study of the Merovingian period was composed after he had wholly lost his sight. In spite of all these obstacles and discouragements, however, he began his undertaking with a touch of that stoicism which, as Thomas Hughes has somewhere said, makes the Anglo-Saxon find his keenest pleasure in enduring and overcoming. Prescott had planned to devote a year to preliminary studies before putting pen to paper. The work which he then had in mind was intended by him to be largely one of compilation from the works of foreign writers, to be of moderate size, with few pretensions to originality, and to claim attention chiefly because the subject was still a new one to English readers. He felt that he would be accomplishing a great deal if he should read and thoroughly digest the principal French, Spanish, and Italian historians—Mariana, Llorente, Varillas, FlÉchier, and Sismondi—and give a well-balanced account of Ferdinand and Isabella's reign based upon what these and a few other scholarly authorities had written. But the zeal of the investigator soon had him in its grip. Scarcely had the packages of books which he had ordered from Madrid begun to reach his library than his project broadened out immensely into a work of true creative scholarship. His year of reading now appeared to him absurdly insufficient. It had, indeed, already been badly broken into by one of his inflammatory attacks; and his progress was hampered by the inadequate assistance which he received. A reader, employed by him to read aloud the Spanish books, performed the duty valiantly but without understanding a single word of Spanish, very much as Milton's daughters read Greek and Hebrew to their father. Thinking of his new and more ambitious conception of his purpose and of the hindrances which Some account of his manner of working may be of interest, and it is convenient to describe it here once for all. In the second year, after he had begun his preliminary studies, he secured the services of a Mr. James English, a young Harvard graduate, who had some knowledge of the modern languages. This gentleman devoted himself to Prescott's interests, and henceforth a definite routine of study and composition was established and was continued with other secretaries throughout Prescott's life. Mr. English has left some interesting notes of his experiences, which admit us to the library of the large house on Bedford Street, where the two men worked so diligently together. It was a spacious room in the back of the house, lined on two sides with books which reached the ceiling. Against a third side was a large green screen, toward which Prescott faced while seated at his table; while behind him was an ample window, over which a series of pale blue muslin shades could be drawn, thus regulating the illumination of the room according to the state of Prescott's eye and the conditions of the weather. At a second window sat Mr. English, ready to act either as reader or as amanuensis when required. Allusion has been made from time to time to Prescott's written memoranda and to his letters, which, indeed, were often very long and very frequent. It Of his noctograph Prescott made constant use. For composition he employed it almost altogether, seldom or never dictating to a scribe. Obviously, however, the instrument allowed no erasures or corrections to be made, and the writer must go straight forward with his task; since to go back and try to alter what had been once set down would make the whole illegible. Hence arose the necessity of what Irving once described as "pre-thinking,"—the determination not only of the content but of the actual form of the sentence before it should be written down. In this pre-thinking Prescott showed a power of memory and of But in 1827, the time had not yet come for composition. He was hearing books read to him and was taking copious notes. How copious these were, his different secretaries have told; and besides, great masses of them have been preserved as testimony to the minute and patient labour of the man who made and used them. As his reader went on, Prescott would say, "Mark that!" whenever anything seemed to him especially significant. These marked passages were later copied out in a large clear hand for future reference. When the time came, they would be read, studied, compared, verified, and digested. Sometimes he spent as much as five days in thus mastering the notes collected for a single chapter. Then at least another day Prescott had elaborated a system of his own for the regulation of his daily life while he was working. This system was based upon the closest observation, extending over years, of the physical effect upon him of everything he did. The result was a regimen which represented his customary mode of living. Rising early in the morning, he took outdoor exercise, except during storms of exceptional severity. He rode well and loved a spirited horse, though sometimes he got a fall from letting his attention stray to his studies instead of keeping it on the temper of his animal. But, in the coldest weather, on foot or in the saddle, he covered several miles before breakfast, to which he always came back in high spirits, having, as he expressed it, "wound himself up for the day." After a very simple breakfast, he went at once to his library, where, for an hour or so, he chatted with Mrs. Prescott or had her read to him the newspapers or some popular book of the day. By ten o'clock, serious work began with the arrival of his secretary, with whom he worked diligently until one o'clock, for he seldom sat at his desk for more than three consecutive hours. A brisk walk of a mile or two gave him an appetite for dinner, which This, it will be seen, was not the life of a recluse or of a Casaubon, though it was a life regulated by a wise discretion. To adjust himself to its routine, Prescott had to overcome many of his natural tendencies. In the first place, he was, as has been already noted, of a somewhat indolent disposition; and a steady grind, day after day and week after week, was something which he had never known in school or college. Even now in his maturity, and with the spurring of a steady purpose to urge him on, he often faltered. His memoranda show now and then a touch of self-accusation or regret. "I have worked lazily enough, or rather have been too busy to work at all. Ended the old year very badly." "I find it as hard to get under way, as a crazy hulk that has been boarded up for repairs." How thoroughly he conquered this repugnance to hard work is illustrated by a pathetic incident which happened once when he was engaged upon a bit of writing that interested him, but when he was prevented by rheumatic pains from sitting upright. Prescott then placed his noctograph upon the floor and lay down flat beside it, writing in this attitude for many hours on nine consecutive days rather than give in. He tried some curious devices to penalise himself for laziness. He used to persuade his friends to make bets with him that he would not complete certain portions of writing within a given time. This sort of thing was a good deal of a make-believe, for Prescott cared nothing about money and had plenty of it at his disposal; and when his friends lost, he never permitted them to pay. He did a like thing on a larger scale and in a somewhat different way by giving a bond to his secretary, Mr. English, binding himself to pay a thousand dollars if within one year from September, 1828, Prescott should not have written two hundred and fifty pages of Ferdinand and Isabella. This number of pages was specified, because Prescott dreaded his own instability of purpose, and felt that if he should once get so far as two hundred and fifty pages, he would be certain to go on and finish the entire history. Other wagers or bonds with Mr. English were made by Prescott from time to time, all with the purpose of counteracting his own disposition to far niente. His settled mode of life also compelled him in some measure to give up the delights of general social intercourse and the convivial pleasures of which he was naturally fond. There were, indeed, times The death of Prescott's little daughter, Catherine, in February, 1829, did much to drive him to hard work as a relief from sorrow. She was his first-born child, and when she died, she was a few months over four years of age,—a winsome little creature, upon And so his preparation for Ferdinand and Isabella went on apace. Prescott no longer thought it enough to master the historians who had already written of this reign. He went back of them to the very Quellen, having learned that the true historical investigator can afford to slight no possible source of information,—that nothing, good, bad, or indifferent, can safely be neglected. The packets which now reached him from Spain and France grew bulkier and their contents more diversified. Not merely modern tomes, not merely printed books were there, but parchments in quaint and crabbed script, to be laboriously deciphered by his secretary, with masses of black-letter and copies of ancient archives, from which some precious fact Prescott had given a bond to Mr. English pledging himself to complete by September, 1829, two hundred and fifty printed pages of the book. Yet it was actually not until this month had ended that the first line was written. On October 6, 1829, after three months devoted to reviewing his notes for the opening chapter, he took his noctograph and scrawled the initial sentence. A whole month was consumed in finishing the chapter, and two months more in writing out the second and the third. From this time a sense of elation filled him, now that all his patient labour was taking concrete form, and there was no more question of putting his task aside. His progress might be, as he called it, "tortoise-like," but he had felt the joy of creation; and the work went on, always with a firmer grasp, a surer sense of form, and the clearer light which comes to an artist as his first vague impressions begin under his hand to take on actuality. There were times when, from illness, he had almost to cease from writing; there were other times when he turned aside from his special studies to accomplish some casual piece of literary work. But these interruptions, while they delayed the accomplishment of his purpose, did not break the current of his interest. The casual pieces of writing, to which allusion has just been made, were oftenest contributions to the North American Review. One of them, however, was somewhat more ambitious than a magazine article. How thoroughly Prescott prepared himself for the writing of his book reviews may be seen in the fact that, having been asked for a notice of CondÉ's History of the Arabs in Spain, he spent from three to four months in preliminary reading, and then occupied nearly three months more in writing out the article. In this particular case, however, he felt that the paper represented too much labour to be sent to the North American, and therefore it was set aside and ultimately made into a chapter of his Ferdinand and Isabella. It was on the 25th of June, 1836, that his history was finished, and he at once began to consider the question of its publication. Three years before, he had had the text set up in type so far as it was then completed; and as the work went on, this private printing continued until, soon after he had reached the end, four copies of the book were in his hands. These printed copies had been prepared for several reasons. First of all, the sight of his labour thus taking concrete form was a continual stimulus to him. He was still, so far as the public was concerned, a young author, and he felt all of the young author's joy in contemplating the printed pages of his first real book. In the second place, he wished to make a number of final alterations and corrections; and every writer of experience is aware that the last subtle touches can be given to a book only when it is actually in type, for only then can he see the workmanship as it really is, with its very soul exposed to view, seen as the public will see it, divested of the partial nebulosity which obscures the vision while it still remains in manuscript. Finally, Prescott wished to have a printed copy for submission to the English publishers. It was his earnest hope to have the book appear simultaneously in England and America, since on the other side of the Atlantic, rather than in the United States, were to be found the most competent judges of its worth. But the search for an English publisher was at first unsuccessful. Murray rejected it without even looking at it. The Longmans had it carefully examined, but decided against accepting it. Prescott was hurt by this rejection, the more so as he thought (quite "What do I expect from it, now it is done? And may it not be all in vain and labour lost, after all? My expectations are not such, if I know myself, as to expose me to any serious disappointment. I do not flatter myself with the idea that I have achieved anything very profound, or, on the other hand, that will be very popular. I know myself too well to suppose the former for a moment. I know the public too well, and the subject I have chosen, to expect the latter. But I have made a book illustrating an unexplored and important period, from authentic materials, obtained with much difficulty, and probably in the possession of no one library, public or private, in Europe. As a plain, veracious record of facts, the work, therefore, till some one else shall be found to make a better one, will fill up a gap in literature which, I should hope, would give it a permanent value,—a value founded on its utility, though bringing no great fame or gain to its author. "Come to the worst, and suppose the thing a dead failure, and the book born only to be damned. Still, it will not be all in vain, since it has encouraged me in forming systematic habits of intellectual occupation, and proved to me that my greatest happiness is to be the result of such. It is no little matter to be possessed of this conviction from experience." But Prescott had received encouragement in his moods of doubt from Jared Sparks, at that time one of the most scientific American students of history. Sparks had read the book in one of the first printed copies, and had written to Prescott, in February, 1837: "The book will be successful—bought, read, and praised." And so finally, on Christmas Day of 1837,—though dated 1838 upon the title-page,—the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella was first offered for sale. It was in three volumes of about four hundred pages each, and was dedicated to his father. Only five hundred copies of the book had been printed as a first edition, and of these only a small number had been bound in readiness for the day of publication. The demand for the book took both author and publishers by surprise. This demand came, first of all, and naturally enough, from Prescott's personal friends. One of these, a gentleman of convivial habits, and by no means given to reading, rose early on Christmas morning and waited outside of the bookshop in order to secure the first copy sold. Literary Boston, which was also fashionable Boston, adopted the book as its favourite New Year's present. The bookbinders could not work fast enough to supply the demand, and in a few months the whole of the 1250 copies, which it had been supposed would last for at least five years, had been sold. Other parts of the country followed Boston's lead. The book was praised by the newspapers and, after a little interval, by the more serious reviews,—the North American, the Examiner, and the Democratic Review, the last of which published an elaborate appreciation by George Bancroft. Meanwhile, Prescott had succeeded in finding a London publisher; for in May, Mr. Richard Bentley accepted the book, and it soon after appeared in England. To the English criticisms Prescott naturally looked forward with interest and something like anxiety. American approval he might well ascribe to national bias if not to personal friendship. Therefore, the uniformly favourable reviews in his own country could not be accepted by him as definitely fixing the value of what he had accomplished. In a letter to Ticknor, after recounting his first success, he said:— "'Poor fellow!'—I hear you exclaim by this time,—'his wits are actually turned by this flurry in his native village,—the Yankee Athens.' Not a whit, I assure you. Am I not writing to two dear friends, to whom I can talk as freely and foolishly as to one of my own household, and who, I am sure, will not misunderstand me? The effect of all this—which a boy at Dr. Gardiner's school, I remember, called fungum popularitatem—has been rather to depress me, and S—— was saying yesterday, that she had never known me so out of spirits as since the book has come out." What he wanted most was to read a thoroughly impartial estimate written by some foreign scholar of distinction. He had not long to wait. In the Athenoeum there soon appeared a very eulogistic notice, written by Dr. Dunham, an industrious student of Spanish and Portuguese history. Then followed an admirably critical paper in the Edinburgh Review by Don Pascual de Gayangos, a distinguished Spanish writer living in England. Highly important among the English criticisms was that which was published in the Quarterly Review of June, 1839, from the pen of Richard Ford, a very accurate and critical Spanish scholar. Mr. Ford approached the book with something of the morgue of a true British pundit when dealing with the work of an unknown American; |