defective sight, invested his name and presence with a peculiar feeling of admiration and regard.  The public at large, including those persons who had but a slight acquaintance with him, saw in him a man very attractive in personal appearance, and of manners singularly frank and engaging.  There was the same charm in his conversation, his aspect, the expression of his countenance, that was felt in his writings.  Everything that he did seemed to have been done easily, spontaneously, and without effort.  There were no marks of toil and endurance, of temptations resisted and seductions overcome.  His graceful and limpid style seemed to flow along with the natural movement of a running stream, and to those who saw his winning smile and listened to his gay and animated talk he appeared like one who had basked in sunshine all his days and never known the iron discipline of life.

But this was not true; at least, it was not the whole truth.  Besides this external, superficial aspect, there was an inner life which was known only to the few who knew him intimately, and which his biography has now revealed to the world.  This memoir sets the author of “Ferdinand and Isabella” before the public, as Mr. Ticknor says in his preface, “as a man whose life for more than forty years was one of almost constant struggle,—­of an almost constant sacrifice of impulse to duty, of the present to the future.”  Take Mr. Prescott as he was at the age of twenty-five, and see what the chances are, as the world goes, of his becoming a laborious and successful man of letters.  He was handsome in person, attractive in manners, possessed of a competent property, very happy in his domestic relations, with one eye destroyed and the other impaired by a cruel accident; what was more probable, more natural, than that he should become a mere man of wit and pleasure about town, and never write anything beyond a newspaper-article or a review?  And we should remember that defective sight was not the only disability under which he labored.  His health was never robust, and he was a frequent sufferer from rheumatism and dyspepsia,—­the former a winter visitor, and the latter a summer.  And not only this, but there was yet another lion in his path.  His temperament was naturally indolent.  He was fond of social gayety, of light reading, of domestic chat.  He had that love of lounging which Sydney Smith said no Scotchman but Sir James Mackintosh ever had.  But there was a stoical element in him, lying beneath this easy and pleasure-loving temperament, and subduing and controlling it.  He had a vigilant conscience and a very strong will.  He had early come to the conclusion that not only no honor and no usefulness, but no happiness, could be secured without a regular and daily recurring occupation.  He made up his mind, after due reflection and consideration, to make literature his profession; and not only that, but he further made up his mind to toil in this, his chosen and voluntary vocation, with the patient and uninterrupted industry of a professional man whose daily bread depends upon his daily labor.