"I have received $17,000 for the Philip and the other works the last six months.... From the tone of the foreign journals and those of my own country, it would seem that the work has found quite as much favour as any of its predecessors, and the sales have been much greater than any other of them in the same space of time."

Later, writing to Bancroft, he said:—

"The book has gone off very well so far. Indeed, double the quantity, I think, has been sold of any of my preceding works in the same time. I have been lucky, too, in getting well on before Macaulay has come thundering along the track with his hundred horse-power."

While engaged in the composition of Philip II., Prescott had undertaken to write a continuation of Robertson's History of Charles V. He had been asked to prepare an entirely new work upon the reign of that monarch, but this seemed too arduous a task. He therefore rewrote the conclusion of Robertson's book—a matter of some hundred and eighty pages. This he began in the spring of 1855, and finished it during the following year. It was published on December 8, 1856, on which day he wrote to Ticknor: "My Charles the Fifth, or rather Robertson's with my Continuation, made his bow to-day, like a strapping giant with a little urchin holding on to the tail of his coat."[23] At about the same time Prescott prepared a brief memoir of Mr. Abbott Lawrence, the father of his daughter's husband. This was printed for private distribution.

During the year which followed, Prescott's health began steadily to fail. He suffered from violent pains in the head; so severe as to rob him of sleep and to make work of any kind impossible. He still, however, enjoyed intervals when he could laugh and jest in his old careless way, and even at times indulge in the pleasant little dinners which he loved to share with his most intimate friends. On February 4th, however, while walking in the street, he was stricken down by an apoplectic seizure, which solved the mystery of his severe headaches. When he recovered consciousness his first words were, "My poor wife! I am so sorry for you that this has come upon you so soon." The attack was a warning rather than an instant summons. After a few days he was once more himself, except that his enunciation never again became absolutely clear. Serious work, of course, was out of the question. He listened to a good deal of reading, chiefly fiction. He was put upon a very careful regimen in the matter of diet, and wrote, with a touch of rueful amusement, of the vegetarian meals to which he was restricted: "I have been obliged to exchange my carnivorous propensities for those of a more innocent and primitive nature, picking up my fare as our good parents did before the Fall." Improving somewhat, he completed the third volume of Philip II.; not so fully as he had intended, but mainly putting together so much of it as had already been prepared. The book was printed in April, 1858, and the supervision of the proof-sheets afforded him some occupation, as did also the making of a few additional notes for a new edition of the Conquest of Mexico. The summer of 1858 he spent in Pepperell, returning to Boston in October, in the hope of once more taking up his studies. He did, in fact, linger wistfully over his books and manuscripts, but accomplished very little; for, soon after the New Year, there came the end of all his labours. On January 27th, his health was apparently in a satisfactory condition. He listened to his secretary, Mr. Kirk, read from one of Sala's books of travel, and, in order to settle a question which arose in the course of the reading, he left the library to speak to his wife and sister. Leaving them a moment later with a laugh, he went into an adjoining room, where presently he was heard to groan. His secretary hurried to his side, and found him quite unconscious. In the early afternoon he died, without knowing that the end had come.

Prescott had always dreaded the thought of being buried alive. His vivid imagination had shown him the appalling horror of a living burial. Again and again he had demanded of those nearest him that he should be shielded from the possibility of such a fate. Therefore, when the physicians had satisfied themselves that life had really left him, a large vein was severed, to make assurance doubly sure.

On the last day of January he was buried in the family tomb, in the crypt of St. Paul's. Men and women of every rank and station were present at the simple ceremony. The Legislature of the State had adjourned so that its members might pay their tribute of respect to so distinguished a citizen. The Historical Society was represented among the mourners. His personal friends and those of humble station, whom he had so often befriended, filled the body of the church. Before his burial, his remains, in accordance with a wish of his that was well known, had been carried to the room in which were his beloved books and where so many imperishable pages had been written. There, as it were, he lay in state. It is thus that one may best, in thought, take leave of him, amid the memorials and records of a past which he had made to live again.

CHAPTER VII
"FERDINAND AND ISABELLA"—PRESCOTT'S STYLE

THE History of Ferdinand and Isabella is best regarded as Prescott's initiation into the writing of historical literature. It was a prolusio, a preliminary trial of his 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 reviews. He had neither acquired a style nor gained that self-confidence which does so much to command success. No such work as this had as yet been undertaken by an American. How far he could himself overcome the peculiar difficulties which confronted him was quite uncertain. Whether he had it in him to be at once a serious investigator and a maker of literature, he did not know. Therefore, the Ferdinand and Isabella shows here and there an uncertainty of touch and a lack of assured method such as were quite natural in one who had undertaken so ambitious a task with so little technical experience.

In the matter of style, Prescott had not yet emancipated himself from that formalism which had been inherited from the eighteenth-century writers, and which Americans, with the wonted conservatism of provincials, retained long after Englishmen had begun to write with naturalness and simplicity. Even in fiction this circumstance is noticeable. At a time when Scott was thrilling the whole world of English readers with his vivid romances, written hastily and often carelessly, 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 summoned up the courage to shake off the Addisonian and Johnsonian fetters and to move with free, unstudied ease. Irving was but a later Goldsmith, and Bancroft a Yankee Gibbon. The papers which then appeared in the North American Review, to whose pages Prescott himself was a regular contributor, give ample evidence that the literary models of the time were those of an earlier age,—an age in which dignity was supposed to lie in ponderosity and to be incompatible with grace.