Within a brief period the grave has closed over one of the most irreproachable and assiduous of American writers of History,—­whose career signally illustrates the blessing of such a resource to unoccupied and cultivated leisure, and at the same time the fortuitous circumstances which often originate and prolong this kind of literary labor.  In a letter to a friend abroad, written by Prescott soon after he found himself thus congenially occupied, the case is most frankly stated.  “Ennui crept over me, when I found myself a perfectly idle man, with nothing to do, and, what made it worse, with eyes so debilitated that I had no power of doing anything with them.  However, ’necessity is the mother of invention,’ and I resolved to turn author in spite of my eyes; and it is a great satisfaction to me to think that the volumes I have put together for my own amusement should have afforded some to my countrymen, and, above all, to my friends."[A]

[Footnote A:  Letter of W. H. Prescott to Miss Preble, dated Boston, February 28, 1845. Memoir of Harriet Preble, by Professor R.H.  LEE, p. 285-6.]

This modest and candid estimate of his vocation indicates how much more a thing of volition and opportunity, and how much less a work of special endowment and intuitive recognition is the literature of History than that of Poetry, Psychology, or Philosophy, notwithstanding all these may be fused therein.  “Whatever may be the use of this sort of composition in itself and abstractedly,” observes a judicious critic,[B] “it is certainly of great use relatively and to literary men.  Consider the position of a man of that species.  He sits beside a library-fire, with nice white paper, a good pen, a capital style, every means of saying everything, but nothing to say.  What, again, if something would happen, and then one could describe it?  Something has happened, and that something is History.”  To feel fully the difference between a formal, mechanical annalist and the revival of the past through poetic or artistic sympathy, it is only requisite to turn from some dry chronicle of political vicissitudes, duly registered by a dull, matter-of-fact, conscientious antiquary, to the fresh classical or colonial romance, of which such graceful and well-studied exemplars have been produced by Lockhart, Bulwer, D’Azeglio, Kingsley, Ware, Longfellow, and other bards and novelists.  While the attempt, by intensity of description and brilliant generalities, to impart to veritable history the charm we accept in the historical romance, has caused many an old-school reader to place Macaulay’s fascinating volumes, called “The History of England,” on the same shelf with works of fiction,—­Aytoun, Hugh Miller, and William Penn’s champions have given special meaning to this principle or prejudice, whichever it may be, by challenging the delightful author to the test of fact.

[Footnote B:  Bagehot.]