Prescott, WILLIAM HICKLING, historian, was born at Salem, Massachusetts, May 4, 1796. His father was a prosperous lawyer; his grandfather, Colonel William Prescott (1726-95), was a distinguished soldier in the Revolution, to whose memory a statue was erected on Bunker Hill in 1881. He entered Harvard College in 1811, and graduated in 1814. Early in his college course he had his left eye blinded by a piece of bread playfully thrown by a fellow-student, and the other was soon sympathetically affected, so that he was obliged to live for months in a darkened room. He next travelled in England, France, and Italy, married in 1820, and abandoned the study of law for literature. He now devoted himself to severe study, and formed splendid literary projects, in spite of the grievous disadvantage of being able only to use his remaining eye for brief periods. His first studies were in Italian literature, and it was not till the beginning of 1826 that he had found the work of his life within the range of Spanish history. Fortunately his means were ample, so that he was able to procure the services of assistants, and to live amid conditions of comfort. By constant habit he gained the power of carrying a great deal in his memory, and after he had revolved the whole of a chapter in his mind he quickly transferred it to paper by means of his stylus and an ingenious writing-case specially constructed for the blind. His first secretary knew no Spanish, yet he went through the seven quarto volumes of Mariana's History with him. So he laboured with almost unexampled courage and patience at his History of Ferdinand and Isabella (3 vols. Boston, 1838), which quickly carried his name across the ocean to the Old World, and was straightway translated into French, Spanish, and German. He next devoted six years to the History of the Conquest of Mexico (3 vols. 1843), and four years to the Conquest of Peru (2 vols. 1847). These works deservedly brought him a great reputation; he was chosen a corresponding member of the French Institute, and on a visit to Europe in 1850 was received with the highest distinction. In 1855 he published two volumes of his History of Philip II., and a third volume in 1858, but died of apoplexy before its close at Boston, January 28, 1859. Prescott's style alone would have assured him popularity, and to this day he remains unrivalled among English historians for vigorous and direct narrative and for sustained splendour of colour. His imagination worked all the more freely because he saw but with the inward eye, and the splendid visions that it wove gave his pages the vivid colours of reality and life. He is not a philosophical historian, but he is a master of narrative and incident, and there is not a dull passage in all his histories.
See the complete edition of Prescott's works in 15 volumes by his secretary, J. Foster Kirk (1884; new ed. 1889); and the Life of him by George Ticknor (1864; new ed. Lond. 1875).