AFTER the publication of Ferdinand and Isabella, its author rested on his oars, treating himself to social relaxation and enjoying thoroughly the praise which came to him from every quarter. Of course he had no intention of remaining idle long, but a new subject did not at once present itself so clearly to him as to make his choice of it inevitable. For about eighteen months, therefore, he took his ease. His correspondence, however, shows that he was always thinking of a second venture in the field of historical composition. His old bent for literary history led him to consider the writing of a life of MoliÈre—a book that should be agreeable and popular rather than profound. Yet Spain still kept its hold on his imagination, and even before his Ferdinand and Isabella had won its sure success, he had written in a letter to Ticknor the following paragraph:—

This purpose lingered in his mind all through his holidays, which were, indeed, not wholly given up to idleness, for he listened to a good deal of general reading at this time, most of it by no means of a superficial character. Ever since his little daughter's death, Prescott had felt a peculiar interest in the subject of the immortality of the soul, and had read all of the most serious treatises to be found upon that subject. He had also gone carefully through the Gospels, weighing them with all the acumen which he had brought to bear upon his Castilian chronicles. This investigation, which he had begun with reference to the single question of immortality, broadened out into an examination of the whole evidential basis of orthodox Christianity. In this study he was aided by his father, who brought to it the keen, impartial judgment of an able lawyer. Of the conclusions at which he ultimately arrived, he was not wont to talk except on rare occasions, and his cast of mind was always reverential. He did, however, reject the doctrines of his Puritan ancestors. He held fast to the authenticity of the Gospels, but he found in these no evidence to support the tenets of Calvinism.

Now, in his leisure time, he read over various works of a theological character, and came to the general conclusion that "the study of polemics or Biblical critics will tend neither to settle principles nor clear up doubts, but rather to confuse the former and multiply the latter." Prescott's whole religious creed was, in fact, summed up by himself in these words: "To do well and act justly, to fear and to love God, and to love our neighbour as ourselves—in these is the essence of religion. For what we can believe, we are not responsible, supposing we examine candidly and patiently. For what we do, we shall indeed be accountable. The doctrines of the Saviour unfold the whole code of morals by which our conduct should be regulated. Who, then, whatever difficulties he may meet with in particular incidents and opinions recorded in the Gospels, can hesitate to receive the great religious and moral truths inculcated by the Saviour as the words of inspiration? I cannot, certainly. On these, then, I will rest."

In April, 1838, Prescott took the first step toward beginning a study of the Mexican conquest. He wrote to Madrid in order to discover what materials were available for his proposed researches. At the same time he began collecting such books relating to Mexico as could be obtained in London. Securing personal letters to scholars and officials in Mexico itself, he wrote to them to enlist their interest in his new undertaking. By the end of the year it became evident that the wealth of material bearing upon the Conquest was very great, and a knowledge of this fact roused in Prescott all the enthusiasm of an historical investigator who has scented a new and promising trail. Only one thing now stood in the way. This was an intimation to the effect that Washington Irving had already planned a similar piece of work. This bit of news was imparted to Prescott by Mr. J. G. Cogswell, who was then in charge of the Astor Library in New York, and who was an intimate friend of both Prescott and Irving. Mr. Cogswell told Prescott that Irving was intending to write a history of the conquest of Mexico, as a sort of sequel, or rather pendant, to his life of Columbus. Of course, under the circumstances, Prescott felt that, in courtesy to one who was then the most distinguished American man of letters, he could not proceed with his undertaking so long as Mr. Irving was in the field. He therefore wrote a long letter to Irving, detailing what he had already done toward acquiring material, and to say that Mr. Cogswell had intimated that Irving was willing to relinquish the subject in his favour.

To this letter Irving made a long and courteous reply, not only assuring Prescott that the subject would be willingly abandoned to him, but offering to send him any books that might be useful and to render any service in his power. The episode affords a beautiful instance of literary and scholarly amenities. The sacrifice which Irving made in giving up his theme was as fine as the manner of it was graceful. Prescott never knew how much it meant to Irving, who had already not only made some study of the subject, but had sketched out the ground-plan of the first volume, and had been actually at work upon the task of composition for a period of three months. But there was something more in it than this. Writing to his nephew, Pierre Irving, who was afterward his biographer, he disclosed his real feeling with much frankness.

There was no longer any obstacle in Prescott's way, and he set to work with an interest which grew as the richness of the material revealed itself. There came to him from Madrid, books, manuscripts, copies of official documents, and all the apparatus criticus which even the most exacting scholar could require. The distinguished historian, Navarrete, placed his entire collection of manuscripts relating to Mexico and Peru at the disposal of his American confrÈre. The Spanish Academy let him have copies of the collections made by MuÑoz and by Vargas y Ponce—a matter of some five thousand pages. Prescott's friend, SeÑor Calderon, who at this time was Spanish Minister to Mexico, aided him in gathering materials relating to the early Aztec civilisation. Don Pascual de Gayangos, who had written the favourable notice in the Edinburgh Review, delved among the documents in the British Museum on behalf of Prescott, and caused copies to be made of whatever seemed to bear upon the Mexican conquest. A year or two later, he even sent to Prescott the whole of his own collection of manuscripts. In Spain very valuable assistance was given by Mr. A. H. Everett, at that time American Minister to the Spanish court, and by his first Secretary of Legation, the South Carolinian who had taken his entrance examination to Harvard in Prescott's company, and who throughout his college life had been a close and valued friend. A special agent, Dr. Lembke,[11] was also employed, and he gave a good part of his time to rummaging among the archives and libraries. Prescott's authorship of Ferdinand and Isabella, however, was the real touchstone which opened all doors to him, and enlisted in his service enthusiastic purveyors of material in every quarter. In Spain especially, the prestige of his name was very great; and more than one traveller from Boston received distinguished courtesies in that country as being the conciudadano of the American historian. Mr. Edward Everett Hale, whose acquaintance with Prescott was very slight, relates an experience which is quite illustrative:—

Actual work upon the Conquest began early in 1839, though not at first with a degree of progress which was satisfactory to the investigator. By May, however, he had warmed to his work. He went back to his old rigorous regime, giving up again all social pleasures outside of his own house, and spending in his library at least five hours each day. His period of rest had done him good, and his eyesight was now better than at any time since it first became impaired. After three months of preliminary reading he was able to sketch out the plan of the entire work, and on October 14, 1839, he began the actual task of composition. He found the introduction extremely difficult to write, for it dealt with the pre-historic period of Mexico, obscured as it was by the mist of myth and by the contradictory assertions of conflicting authorities. "The whole of that part of the story," wrote Prescott, "is in twilight, and I fear I shall at least make only moonshine of it. I must hope that it will be good moonshine. It will go hard with me, however, but that I can fish something new out of my ocean of manuscripts." He had hoped to dispose of his introduction in a hundred pages, and to finish it in six months at the most. It actually extended to two hundred and fifty pages, and the writing of it took nearly eighteen months. One interruption occurred which he had not anticipated. The success of Ferdinand and Isabella had tempted an unscrupulous publisher to undertake an abridgment of that book. To protect his own interests Prescott decided to make an abridgment of his own, and thus to forestall the pirate. This work disheartened and depressed him, but he finished it with great celerity, only to find that the rival abridgment had been given up. A brief stay upon the sea-coast put him once more into working condition, and from that time he went on steadily with the Conquest, which he completed on August 2, 1843, not quite four years from the time when he began the actual composition. His weariness was lightened by the confidence which he felt in his own success. He knew that he had produced a masterpiece.

Naturally, he now had no trouble in securing a publisher and in making very advantageous terms for the production of the book. It was brought out by the Harpers of New York, though, as before, Prescott himself owned the plates. His contract allowed the Harpers to publish five thousand copies for which they paid the author $7500, with the right of publishing more copies if required within the period of one year and on the same general terms. An English edition was simultaneously brought out by Bentley in London, who purchased the foreign copyright for £650. Three Spanish translations appeared soon after, one in Madrid in 1847 and two in Mexico in 1844. A French translation was published in Paris, by Didot in 1846, and a German translation, in Leipzig, by Brockhaus in 1845. A French reprint in English appeared in Paris soon after Bentley placed the London edition upon the market.

No historical work written by an American has ever been received with so much enthusiasm alike in America and in Europe. Within a month, four thousand copies were disposed of by the Harpers, and at the end of four months the original edition of five thousand had been sold. The reviewers were unanimous in its praise, and an avalanche of congratulatory letters descended upon Prescott from admirers, known and unknown, all over the civilised world. Ferdinand and Isabella had brought him reputation; the Conquest of Mexico made him famous. Honours came to him unsought. He was elected a member of the French Institute[13] and of the Royal Society of Berlin. He had already accepted membership in the Royal Spanish Academy of History at Madrid and in the Royal Academy of Sciences in Naples. Harvard conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Laws. Perhaps nothing pleased him more, however, than a personal letter from Humboldt, for whom Prescott had long entertained a feeling of deep admiration. This eminent scholar, at that time the President of the Royal Society of Berlin, in which body Niebuhr, Von Raumer, and Ranke had been enrolled, wrote in French a letter of which the following sentences form a part:—

While gathering the materials for the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott had felt his way toward still another subject which his Mexican researches naturally suggested. This was the conquest of Peru. Much of his Mexican reading had borne directly upon this other theme, so that the labour of preparation was greatly lightened. Moreover, by this time, he had acquired both an accurate knowledge of sources and also great facility in composition. Hence the only serious work which was necessary for him to undertake as a preliminary to composition was the study of Peruvian antiquities. This occupied him eight months, and proved to be far more troublesome to him and much less satisfactory than the like investigation which he had made with reference to the Aztecs. However, after the work had been commenced it proceeded rapidly,—so rapidly, in fact, as to cause him a feeling of half-comical dismay. He began to write on the 12th of August, 1844, and completed his task on November 7, 1846. During its progress he made a note that he had written two chapters, amounting in all to fifty-one printed pages, in four days, adding the comment, "I never did up so much yarn in the same time. At this rate Peru will not hold out six months. Can I finish it in a year? Alas for the reader!" No doubt he might have finished it in a year had certain interruptions not occurred. The first of these was the death of his father, which took place on December 8th, not long after he had begun the book. His brother Edward had died shortly before, and this double affliction affected very deeply so sensitive a nature as Prescott's. To his father, indeed, he owed more than he could ever express. The two had been true comrades, and had treated one another with an affectionate familiarity which, between father and son, was as rare in those days as it was beautiful. Judge Prescott's generosity had made it possible for the younger man to break through all the barriers of physical infirmity, and not only to win fame but also the happiness which comes from a creative activity. They understood each other very well, and in many points they were much alike both in their friendliness and in their habits of reserve. One little circumstance illustrates this likeness rather curiously. Fond as both of them were of their fellows, and cordial as they both were to all their friends, each wished at times to be alone, and these times were when they walked or rode. Therefore, each morning when the two men mounted their horses or when they set out for a walk, they always parted company when they reached the road, one turning to the right and the other to the left by a tacit understanding, and neither ever thought of accompanying the other. Sometimes a friend not knowing of this trait would join one of them to share the ride or walk. Whenever such a thing as this took place, that particular route would be abandoned the next day and another and a lonelier one selected.

A further interruption came from the purchase of a house on Beacon Street and the necessity of arranging to leave the old mansion on Bedford Street. The new house was a fine one, overlooking the Mall and the Common; and the new library, which was planned especially for Prescott's needs, was much more commodious than the old one. But the confusion and feeling of unsettlement attendant on the change distracted Prescott more than it would have done a man less habituated to a self-imposed routine. "A month of pandemonium," he wrote; "an unfurnished house coming to order; a library without books; books without time to open them." It took Prescott quite a while to resume his methodical habits. His old-time indolence settled down upon him, and it was some time before his literary momentum had been recovered. Moreover, he presumed upon the fairly satisfactory condition of his eye and used it to excess. The result was that his optic nerve was badly over-taxed, "probably by manuscript digging," as he said. The strain was one from which his eye never fully recovered; and from this time until the completion of the Peru, he could use it in reading for only a few minutes every day, sometimes perhaps for ten or fifteen, but never for more than thirty. As this is the last time that we shall mention this subject, it may be said that for all purposes of literary work Prescott was soon afterward reduced to the position of one who was actually blind. What had before been a merely stationary dimness of vision became a slowly progressive decay of sight, or, to express it in medical language, amblyopia had passed into amaurosis. He followed rigorously his oculist's injunctions, but in the end he had to face the facts unflinchingly; and a little later he recorded his determination to give up all use of the eye for the future in his studies, and to be contented with preserving it for the ordinary purposes of life. The necessity disheartened him. "It takes the strength out of me," he said. Nevertheless, neither this nor the fact that his general health was most unsatisfactory, caused him to abandon work. He could not bring himself to use what he called "the coward's word, 'impossible.'" And so, after a little time, he went on as before, studying "by ear-work," and turning off upon his noctograph from ten to fifteen pages every day. He continued also his outdoor exercise, and, in fact, one of the best-written chapters of the Conquest of Peru—the last one—was composed while galloping through the woods at Pepperell. On November 7, 1846, the Conquest of Peru was finished. Like the preceding history, it was published by the Harper Brothers, who agreed to pay the author one dollar per copy and to bring out a first edition of seventy-five hundred copies. This, Mr. Ticknor says, was a more liberal arrangement than had ever before been made with an historical writer in the United States. The English copyright was purchased by Bentley for £800.

Prescott's main anxiety about the reception which would be given to the Conquest of Peru was based upon his doubts as to its literary style. Neither of his other books had been written so rapidly, and he feared that he might incur the charge of over-fluency or even slovenliness. Yet, as a matter of fact, the chorus of praise which greeted the two volumes was as loud and as spontaneous as it had been over his Mexico. Prescott now stood so firmly on his feet as to look at much of this praise in a somewhat humorous light. The approbation of the Edinburgh Review no longer seemed to him the summa laus, though he valued it more highly than the praise given him by American periodicals, of which he wrote very shrewdly:

As for newspaper eulogies, he remarked: "I am certainly the cause of some wit and much folly in others." His latest work, however, brought him two new honours which he greatly prized,—an election to the Royal English Society of Literature, and the other an invitation to membership in the Royal Society of Antiquaries. The former honour he shared with only one of his fellow-countrymen, Bancroft; the latter had heretofore been given to no American.

Prescott now indulged himself with a long period of "literary loafing," as he described it, broken in upon only by the preparation of a short memoir of John Pickering, the antiquarian and scholar, who had been one of Prescott's most devoted friends. This memoir was undertaken at the request of the Massachusetts Historical Society. It has no general interest now, but is worthy of note as having been the only one of Prescott's works which he dictated to an amanuensis. Prescott had an aversion to writing in this way, although he had before him the example of his blind contemporary, Thierry. Like Alphonse Daudet, he seems to have felt that what is written by hand comes more directly from the author's inner self, and that it represents most truly the tints and half-tones of his personality. That this is only a fancy is seen clearly enough from several striking instances which the history of literature records. Scott dictated to Lockhart the whole of The Bride of Lammermoor. Thackeray dictated a good part of The Newcomes and all of Pendennis, and even Henry Esmond, of which the artificial style might well have made dictation difficult. Prescott, however, had his own opinion on the subject, and, with the single exception which has just been cited, he used his noctograph for composition down to the very end, dictating only his correspondence to his secretary.

His days of "literary loafing" allowed him to enjoy the pleasures of friendship which during his periods of work were necessarily, to some extent, intermitted. No man ever had more cordially devoted friends than Prescott. He knew every one who was worth knowing, and every one was attracted by the spontaneous charm of his manner and his invincible kindliness. Never was a man more free from petulance or peevishness, though these defects at times might well have been excused in one whose health was such as his. He presented the anomaly of a dyspeptic who was still an optimist and always amiable. Mr. John Foster Kirk, who was one of his secretaries, wrote of him:—

Bancroft the historian has added his testimony to the greatness of Prescott's personal charm.

No wonder then that his friends were legion, comprising men and women of the most different types. Dry and formal scholars such as Jared Sparks; men of the world like Lord Carlisle; nice old ladies like Maria Edgeworth and the octogenarian Miss Berry, Walpole's friend; women of fashion like Lady Lyell, Lady Mary LabouchÈre, and the Duchess of Sutherland; Spanish hidalgos like Calderon de la Barca; smooth politicians like Caleb Cushing; and intense partisans like Charles Sumner,—all agreed in their affectionate admiration for Prescott. His friendship with Sumner was indeed quite notable, since no men could have been more utterly unlike. Sumner was devoid of the slightest gleam of humour, and his self-consciousness was extreme; yet Prescott sometimes poked fun at him with impunity. Thus, writing to Sumner about his Phi Beta Kappa oration (delivered in 1846), he said:—

"Last year you condemned wars in toto, making no exception even for the wars of freedom. This year you condemn the representation of war, whether by the pencil or the pen. Marathon, Salamis, Bunker Hill, the retreat from Moscow, Waterloo, great and small, are all to be blotted from memory equally with my own wild skirmishes of barbarians and banditti. Lord deliver us! Where will you bring up? If the stories are not to be painted or written, such records of them as have been heedlessly made should by the same rule be destroyed. I laugh; but I fear you will make the judicious grieve. But fare thee well, dear Sumner. Whether thou deportest thyself sana mente or mente insana, believe me always truly yours."