Before gaining his international reputation as America's foremost romantic historian of Spain, William Hickling Prescott was a regular contributor to the North American Review, one of the oldest and most prestigious of American literary magazines. His reviews, covering thirty years from his literary apprenticeship to his period of master craftsmanship, reveal a knowledgeable and perceptive literary historian and scholar whose essays reflect the critical principles current in America before the Civil War. William Charvat's view of Prescott as one of the most important literary critics in the early period of American literary criticism (1810-1835) has not gone unchallenged by scholars who fault Prescott for his lack of analytical and interpretative skills. What is unchallenged is the sound scholarship and extensive knowledge displayed in his reviews, where cogent comparisons and contrasts of authors, literatures, and national characteristics vivify his commentaries. When Prescott examines narrative history, the genre in which...