usade of
buccaneers, who wanted only gold. The sieges and battles of the
Spaniards read like massacres, and the story of the death of the Inca
like an unbelievable horror of the Dark Ages. This scene, contrasted
with the glowing description of the former magnificence of the Inca,
shows Prescott in his most brilliant mood as a writer. Perhaps his
greatest gift is this power of reproducing faithfully the actual
spirit of the conquest, a spirit which, in spite of the glitter of
arms and splendor of religious ceremonial, proves to have been one of
greed and lowest selfishness.

_The Conquest of Peru_, published in 1847, when Prescott was
fifty-two years old, was the last of his historical works. These three
histories, with three volumes of an uncompleted life of Philip
II., which promised to be his greatest work, and a volume of essays
comprise Prescott's contribution to American literature, and begin
that series of brilliant historical works of which American letters
boast.

Prescott, during the most of his literary life, was obliged to sit
quietly in his study, leaving to other hands the collection of the
materials for his work. For, besides the accident which during
his college life deprived him of one eye, he was always delicate.
Sometimes he would be kept for months in a darkened room, and at best
his life was one of seclusion. The strife of the world and of action
was not for him. In his library, surrounded by his books and assisted
by his secretary, he sought for truth as the old alchemists sought for
gold. Patient and tireless he unravelled thread after thread of
the fabric from which he was to weave the history of the Spanish
conquests.

If Prescott had had access to documents which have since come to
light, if he had been able to visit the places he described, and to
study their unwritten records, his work would have been a splendid
and imperishable monument to the dead civilization of the Aztec and
Peruvian.

As it is, it must serve as a guiding light pointing to the right way,
one which shed lustre on the new literature of his country and opened
an unexplored region to the American writer.

CHAPTER VII

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

1807-1892

In an old New England farm-house kitchen, a barefoot boy, dressed in
homespun, one day sat listening to a lazy Scotch beggar who piped the
songs of Burns in return for his meal of bread and cheese and cider.
The beggar was good-natured, and the boy was an e