thought with magic charm of style, which was soon to be revealed in his essays on Milton and Napoleon Bonaparte.  Ticknor and Everett were professors in Harvard College, giving a new impulse to the minds of the students by their admirable lectures; and the latter was also conducting the “North American Review.”  Neither had as yet attained to anything more than a local reputation.  Prescott, a gay and light-hearted young man,—­gay and light-hearted, in spite of partial blindness,—­the darling of society and the idol of his home, was silently and resolutely preparing himself for his chosen function by a wide and thorough course of patient study.  Bancroft was in Germany, and working like a German.  Emerson was a Junior in College.  Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Whittier, and Poe were school-boys; Mrs. Stowe was a school-girl; Whipple and Lowell were in the nursery, and Motley and the younger Dana had not long been out of it.

“Precaution,” though an indifferent novel, was yet a novel; of the orthodox length, with plot, characters, and incidents; and here and there a touch of genuine power, as in the forty-first chapter, where the scene is on board a man-of-war bringing her prizes into port.  It found many readers, and excited a good deal of curiosity as to who the author might be.

“Precaution” was published on the 25th of August, 1820, and “The Spy” on the 17th of September, 1821.  The second novel was a great improvement upon the first, and fairly took the public by storm.  We are old enough to remember its first appearance; the eager curiosity and keen discussion which it awakened; the criticism which it called forth; and, above all, the animated delight with which it was received by all who were young or not critical.  Distinctly, too, can we recall the breathless rapture with which we hung over its pages, in those happy days when the mind’s appetite for books was as ravenous as the body’s for bread-and-butter, and a novel, with plenty of fighting in it, was all we asked at a writer’s hands.  In order to qualify ourselves for the task which we have undertaken in this article, we have read “The Spy” a second time; and melancholy indeed was the contrast between the recollections of the boy and the impressions of the man.  It was the difference between the theatre by gas-light and the theatre by day-light:  the gold was pinchbeck, the gems were glass, the flowers were cambric and colored paper, the goblets were gilded pasteboard.  Painfully did the ideal light fade away, and the well-remembered scene stand revealed in disenchanting day.  With incredulous surprise, with a constant struggle between past images and present revelations, were we forced to acknowledge the improbability of the story, the clumsiness of the style, the awkwardness of the dialogue, the want of Nature in many of the characters, the absurdity of many of the incidents, and the painfulness of some of the scenes.  But with all this, a candid, though critical judgment