Prescott's nature was not one that had the slightest sympathy with pedantry. No more spontaneous spirit than his can be imagined. His joyousness and gayety sometimes even tended toward the frivolous. Yet in this first serious piece of historical writing, he imposed upon himself the shackles of an earlier convention. Just because his mood prompted him to write in an unstudied style, all the more did he feel it necessary to repress his natural inclination. Therefore, in the text of his history, we find continual evidence of the eighteenth century literary manner,—the balanced sentence, the inevitable adjective, the studied antithesis, and the elaborate parallel. Women are invariably "females"; a gift is a "donative"; a marriage does not take place, but "nuptials are solemnized"; a name is usually an "appellation"; a crown "devolves" upon a successor; a poet "delivers his sentiments"; a king "avails himself of indeterminateness"; and so on. A cumbrous sentence like the following smacks of the sort of English that was soon to pass away:—
"Fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established principles of morality that under the dangerous maxim 'For the advancement of the faith all means are lawful,' which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from the spirits of hell, it not only excuses but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crime as a sacred duty."[24]
And the following:—
"Casiri's multifarious catalogue bears ample testimony to the emulation with which not only men but even females of the highest rank devoted themselves to letters; the latter contending publicly for the prizes, not merely in eloquence and poetry, but in those recondite studies which have usually been reserved for the other sex."[25]
The style of these sentences is essentially the style of the old North American Review and of eighteenth-century England. The particular chapter from which the last quotation has been taken was, in fact, originally prepared by Prescott for the North American, as already mentioned,[26] and was only on second thought reserved for a chapter of the history.
The passion for parallel, which had existed among historical writers ever since the time of Plutarch, was responsible for the elaborate comparison which Prescott makes between Isabella and Elizabeth of England.[27] It is worked out relentlessly—Isabella and Elizabeth in their private lives, Isabella and Elizabeth in their characters, Isabella and Elizabeth in the selection of their ministers of State, Isabella and Elizabeth in their intellectual power, Isabella and Elizabeth in their respective deaths. Prescott drags it all in; and it affords evidence of the literary standards of his countrymen at the time, that this laboured parallel was thought to be the very finest thing in the whole book.
If, however, Prescott maintained in the body of his text the rigid lapidary dignity which he thought to be appropriate, his natural liveliness found occasional expression in the numerous foot-notes, which at times he wrote somewhat in the vein of his private letters from Pepperell and Nahant. The contrast, therefore, between text and notes was often thoroughly incongruous because so violent. This led his English reviewer, Mr. Richard Ford,[28] to write some rather acrid sentences that in their manner suggest the tone which, in our days, the Saturday Review has always taken with new authors, especially when they happen to be American. Wrote Mr. Ford of Prescott:—
"His style is too often sesquipedalian and ornate; the stilty, wordy, false taste of Dr. Channing without his depth of thought; the sugar and sack of Washington Irving without the half-pennyworth of bread—without his grace and polish of pure, grammatical, careful Anglicism. We have many suspicions, indeed, from his ordinary quotations, from what he calls in others 'the cheap display of school-boy erudition,' and from sundry lurking sneers, that he has not drunk deeply at the Pierian fountains, which taste the purer the higher we track them to their source. These, the only sure foundations of a pure and correct style, are absolutely necessary to our Transatlantic brethren, who are unfortunately deprived of the high standing example of an order of nobility, and of a metropolis where local peculiarities evaporate. The elevated tone of the classics is the only corrective for their unhappy democracy. Moral feeling must of necessity be degraded wherever the multitude are the sole dispensers of power and honour. All candidates for the foul-breathed universal suffrage must lower their appeal to base understandings and base motives. The authors of the United States, independently of the deteriorating influence of their institutions, can of all people the least afford to be negligent. Far severed from the original spring of English undefiled, they always run the risk of sinking into provincialisms, into Patavinity,—both positive, in the use of obsolete words, and the adoption of conventional village significations, which differ from those retained by us,—as well as negative, in the omission of those happy expressions which bear the fire-new stamp of the only authorised mint. Instances occur constantly in these volumes where the word is English, but English returned after many years' transportation. We do not wish to be hypercritical, nor to strain at gnats. If, however, the authors of the United States aspire to be admitted ad eundem, they must write the English of the 'old country,' which they will find it is much easier to forget and corrupt than to improve. We cannot, however, afford space here for a florilegium Yankyense. A professor from New York, newly imported into England and introduced into real good society, of which previously he can only have formed an abstract idea, is no bad illustration of Mr. Prescott's over-done text. Like the stranger in question, he is always on his best behaviour, prim, prudish, and stiff-necky, afraid of self-committal, ceremonious, remarkably dignified, supporting the honour of the United States, and monstrously afraid of being laughed at. Some of these travellers at last discover that bows and starch are not even the husk of a gentleman; and so, on re-crossing the Atlantic, their manner becomes like Mr. Prescott's notes; levity is mistaken for ease, an un-'pertinent' familiarity for intimacy, second-rate low-toned 'jocularities' (which make no one laugh but the retailer) for the light, hair-trigger repartee, the brilliancy of high-bred pleasantry. Mr. Prescott emulates Dr. Channing in his text, Dr. Dunham and Mr. Joseph Miller in his notes. Judging from the facetiæ which, by his commending them as 'good,' have furnished a gauge to measure his capacity for relishing humour, we are convinced that his non-perception of wit is so genuine as to be organic. It is perfectly allowable to rise occasionally from the ludicrous into the serious, but to descend from history to the bathos of balderdash is too bad—risu inepto nihil ineptius."
This passage, which is an amusing example of an overflow of High Tory bile, does not by any means fairly represent the general tone of Ford's review. Prescott had here and there indulged himself in some of the commonplaces of republicanism such as were usual in American writings of that time; and these harmlessly trite political pedantries had rasped the nerves of his British reviewer. To speak of "the empty decorations, the stars and garters of an order of nobility," to mention "royal perfidy," "royal dissimulation," "royal recompense of ingratitude," and generally to intimate that "the people" were superior to royalty and nobility, roused a spirit of antagonism in the mind of Mr. Ford. Several of Prescott's semi-facetious notes dealt with rank and aristocracy in something of the same hold-cheap tone, so that Ford was irritated into a very personal retort. He wrote:—
"These pleasantries come with a bad grace from the son, as we learn from a full-length dedication, of 'the Honourable William Prescott, LL.D.' We really are ignorant of the exact value of this titular potpourri in a soi-disant land of equality, of these noble and academic plumes, borrowed from the wing of a professedly despised monarchy."