We shall not attempt to determine the exact place that ought to be assigned in an illustrious brotherhood to our American historian.  The country is justly proud of him, as one whose name is a household word in many lands,—­who has done more, perhaps, than any other of her living writers, with the exception of Washington Irving, to obtain for a still youthful literature the regard and attention of the world,—­who has helped to accomplish the prediction of Horace Walpole, that there would one day be “a Thucydides at Boston and a Xenophon at New York”; a prediction which seemed so fanciful, at the time it was made, (less than two years before the declaration of Independence,) that the prophet was fain to link its fulfilment with the contemporaneous visit of a South American traveller to the deserted ruins of London.[4] His writings have won favor with hosts of readers, and they have received the homage of learned and profound inquirers, like Humboldt and Guizot.  They have merits that are recognizable at a glance, and they have also merits that will bear the closest examination.  They occupy a field in which they have no compeers.  They are the products of a fertile soil and of laborious cultivation.  The mere literary critic, accustomed to dwell with even more attention on the form than on the substance of a work, commends above all the admirable skill shown in the selection and grouping of the incidents, the facile hand with which an obscure and entangled theme is divested of its embarrassments, the frequent brilliancy and picturesqueness of the narrative, the judicious mixture of anecdote and reflection, and the harmony and clearness of the style.  These are the qualities which make Mr. Prescott’s histories, with all their solid learning and minute research, as pleasant reading as the airiest of novels.  And yet not these alone.  A charm is felt in many a sentence that has a deeper origin than in the intellect.  No egotism obtrudes itself upon our notice; but the subtile outflow of a generous and candid spirit, of a genial and singularly healthy nature, wins for the author a secure place in the affections of his readers.

The third volume of the “History of Philip the Second” is, we think, superior to its predecessors.  It contains, perhaps, no single scene equal in elaborate and careful painting to the death of Count Egmont.  It has no chapter devoted to the elucidation of the darker passages in Philip’s personal history, like that which in a former volume traced to a still doubtful end the unhappy career of Don Carlos, or such as will doubtless, in a future volume, shed new light on that of Antonio Perez.  But there is a more continuous interest, arising from a greater unity of subject.  With the exception of the two chapters already referred to, the narrative is taken up with the contest waged by the Spaniards against those Moslem foes whom they hated with the hereditary hate of centuries, the mingled hate that had grown out of diversity of