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-i89i] Prescott. Motley. Parkman. Ticknor. Thoreau. 745 Prescott, whose work dealt with the Spanish conquests of America, and subsequently with the later history of Spain. Its next leader was John Lothrop Motley, whose chief subject was the assertion of liberty by the Dutch, in their conflicts with the Spaniards. But the most accomplished member of this school was Francis Parkman, whose work, persisted in for fifty years despite incredible physical obstacles, records, perhaps definitively, the struggle in America between the constitutional system of England and the more arbitrary system of continental Europe, as embodied in the Canadian colonies of France. Among the earlier writers of history in New England none had more permanent influence than George Ticknor; but this influence was not primarily due to his writings. His principal work is a History of Spanish Literature, never very widely read. His principal activity, so far as popular memory goes, was the generous part which he took in the foundation of the Boston Public Library. But what seems now his most important contribution to the intellectual life of his country was the work which he conscientiously did for many years as Smith Professor at Harvard College. The chair, of which he was the first tenant, was founded to promote a study at that time almost unknown in America the study of modern literature. He began his teaching in 1819; by 1835, when he resigned his professorship, the facts of modern literature were generally familiar to New England. A year later he was succeeded, at his own suggestion, by Longfellow, who held the chair until 1854 ; by that time New England not only knew what modern literature was, but eagerly enjoyed it. Longfellow was succeeded by Lowell, who, at least nominally, remained Smith Professor until his death in 1891. In his time New England learned not only to enjoy modern literature but critically to appreciate it. Since 1891 the chair has remained vacant. The names of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and of James Russell Lowell are among the most eminent in the roll of literary men who flourished in New England during this epoch ; and the fact that both these men were professors of Mies lettres in the oldest of American universities throws light on the nature of the literature which they made and which was in making about them. It was essentially an expression of the effect produced on the native American mind, when, deeply imbued with the ideal traditions of its country, it awakened at once to national consciousness and to sympathetic knowledge of what world-literature had achieved elsewhere. Hardly in existence before 1832, this Renaissance of New England was virtually complete when Nathaniel Hawthorne died in 1864. Though many of his contemporaries long survived him, none added any new feature to the characters which had been adequately expressed during his lifetime. We have already touched on the buoyant and vagrant idealism of Emerson and on the less inspiring individualism of Thoreau. Thoreau, even more memorably, CH. XXIII.