nto melodious expression, the life of a noble mind thus
majestically expressed itself: but we can easily fancy cold and cultured
Gibbon returning from the Continent, full of classic lore, disgusted
with his failure in public life, not sympathetic enough to enjoy
heartily a career either of pleasure or of society, and so, in his
dreams of scholarship, seizing upon the idea of a long, laborious,
erudite, and elegant task; and we can also well imagine Hume, with his
love of speculation, turning gratefully to the records of the past for
subjects of reflection, analysis, and inference. In these and other
notable instances, we feel it is more an accident than an inspiration,
more from circumstances than from innate and absolute endowment and
impulse, that the historic Muse is wooed.

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