“When you see Prescott, give him my cordial remembrances. You two are shelved together for immortality.” Over a century ago Washington Irving thus prophesied an eternity of readers for two New England scholars, George Ticknor, first American master of European literature, and his close friend, the historian William II. Prescott. It is a coincidence ol America’s cultural (lowering in the nineteenth century that three of its principal figures, Ticknor, Irving, and Prescott, should have been united by their devotion to the relatively unknown field ol Spanish history and literature. Today, as Americans turn increasingly to rereading and revaluing their past and as the centenary of Prescott’s death in 1859 approaches, it is fitting to examine his daim upon the reading public, to see whether or not it is still valid, and to measure his stature as man and historian.

With Irving, Prescott was the first American to devote profound study to the Hispanic world, our first historian of Spain and Latin America, those old yet new lands. He wrote two books of particular interest to all Americans, the Conquest of Mexico, which he published in 1843, and the Conquest of Peru, which appeared four years later. Both were immediate best sellers in the United States and England. The first, and expensive, three-volume edition of the Conquest of Mexico sold 4,000 copies in four months in the United States. Both books were soon translated into several foreign languages.

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