Fable for Critics_, that it was "the first Yankee book with the soul of
Down East in it." It was very imperfect in point of art, and its
second part--a rhapsodical description of a sort of Unitarian
Utopia--is quite unreadable. But in the delineation of the few chief
characters and of the rude, wild life of an outlying New England
township just after the close of the Revolutionary War, as well as in
the tragic power of the catastrophe, there was genius of a high order.

As the country has grown older and more populous, and works in all
departments of thought have multiplied, it becomes necessary to draw
more strictly the line between the literature of knowledge and the
literature of power. Political history, in and of itself, scarcely
falls within the limits of this sketch, and yet it cannot be altogether
dismissed, for the historian's art, at its highest, demands
imagination, narrative skill, and a sense of unity and proportion in
the selection and arrangement of his facts, all of which are literary
qualities. It is significant that many of our best historians have
begun authorship in the domain of imaginative literature: Bancroft with
an early volume of poems; Motley with his historical romances, _Merry
Mount_ and _Morton's Hope_; and Parkman with a novel, _Vassall Morton_.
The oldest of that modern group of writers that have given America an
honorable position in the historical literature of the world was
William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859). Prescott chose for his theme
the history of the Spanish conquests in the New World, a subject full
of romantic incident and susceptible of that glowing and perhaps
slightly overgorgeous coloring which he laid on with a liberal hand.
His completed histories, in their order, are the _Reign of Ferdinand
and Isabella_, 1837; the _Conquest of Mexico_, 1843--a topic which
Irving had relinquished to him; and the _Conquest of Peru_, 1847.
Prescott was fortunate in being born to leisure and fortune, but he had