The Life of William Hickling Prescott.  By GEORGE TICKNOR.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields.

The third edition of Mr. Ticknor’s “History of Spanish Literature” was noticed with due commendation in our number for November last.  That was a work drawn exclusively from the region of the intellect, and written by the “dry light” of the understanding.  The author appeared throughout in a purely judicial capacity.  His task was to summon before his literary tribunal the writers of a foreign country, and mostly of past generations, and pronounce sentence upon their claims and merits.  Learning, method, sound judgment, and good taste are displayed in it; but the subject afforded no chance for the expression of those personal traits which are shown in daily life, and make up a man’s reputation in the community where he dwells.

But the Life of Prescott is a book of another mood, and drawn from other fountains than those of the understanding.  It glows with human sympathies, and is warm with human feeling.  It is the record of a long and faithful friendship, which began in youth and continued unbroken to the last.  It is the elder of the two that discharges this last office of affection to his younger brother.  Mr. Ticknor could not write the life of Mr. Prescott without showing how worthy he himself was of having so true, so loving, and so faithful a friend.  But he has done this unconsciously and unintentionally.  For it is one of the charms of this delightful book—­one of the most attractive of the attractive class of literary biography to which it belongs that we have ever read—­that the biographer never intrudes himself between his subject and the reader.  The story of Mr. Prescott’s life is told simply and naturally, and as far as possible in Mr. Prescott’s own words, drawn from his diaries and letters.  Whatever Mr. Ticknor has occasion to say is said with good taste and good feeling, and he has shown a fine judgment in making his portraiture of his friend so life-like and so true in detail, and yet in never overstepping the line of that inner circle into which the public has no right to enter.  We have in these pages a record of Mr. Prescott’s life from his cradle to his grave, sufficiently minute to show what manner of man he was, and what influences went to make up his mind and character; and it is a record of more than common value, as well as interest.

For the last twenty years of his life Mr. Prescott was one of the most eminent and widely known of the residents of Boston.  He was universally beloved, esteemed, and admired.  He was one of the first persons whom a stranger coming among us wished to see.  His person and countenance were familiar to many who had no further acquaintance with him; and as he walked about our streets, many a glance of interest was turned upon him of which he himself was unconscious.  The general knowledge that his literary honors had been won under no common difficulties, owing to his