Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 16.djvu/435

PRESCOTT. 373 PRESCOTT. PRESCOTT, OuvEB (1731-1804). An Ameri- can soldier; born at Groton, Mass. He graduated at Harvard in 1750, became brigadier-general of militia for the County of iliddlesex, and a mem- ber of the Board of War in 1776. From 1777 to 1780 lie was a member of the Supreme Executive Council of State, in 1779 was made judge of probate for the County of Middlesex, and in 1781 was promoted to the rank of second major-gen- eral of State militia. In 1786-87 he took a prominent part in the suppression of Shays's Re- bellion. PRESCOTT, William (1726-95). An Ameri- can soldier, born at Groton, Mass. In 1755 he served with distinction as lieutenant and captain under Wilson in an expedition against Xova Scotia, but at the end of the war declined a com- mission in the Regular Army offered him by the British general, and retired to his large estate in Pepperell. There he remained until the bat- tle of Lexington, when he organized a regiment of minute men, and marched as its colonel to Cambridge. On June 16th he was ordered to Charlestown, and threw up intrenchments at Breed's Hill, near Bunker Hill. In the next day's battle, during which he is generally consid- ered to have been the patriot commander, he dis- played great braverj', and was the last to leave the field. After sening about two years longer, he returned to his farm, but again served as a volunteer for a short time at oaratoga in 1777. He was subsequently a member of the Massachu- setts Legislature for several years. Consult Parker, Colonel William Prescott, the Command- er in the Battle of Bunker's Hill (Boston, 1875). PRESCOTT, William Hicklixg (1796-1859). .An American historian. He was the son of a distinguished lawyer and statesman and grandson of Col. William Prescott, and was born at Bos- ton, May 4, 1796. He entered Harvard College in 1811. as a sophomore, and graduated in 1814. While there he lost the sight of one eye by an aeoident, and the other was so affected that he had to pass several months in a darkened room. He partly recovered the sight of it, but he could use it only a little each day and nevf r in any diffi- cult work. He entered his father's law office, but in .January, 1815, the injured eye be- came inflamed and refused to yield to reme- dies: so it was determined in the autumn that he should .seek health by wintering at Saint Michael's and get medical advice in the spring. At the Azores, where he often had to live in a darkened room, he acquired the accomplishment of learning almost by heart long passages which he had thought out and which he meant to have written. Physicians told him that the sight was hopelessly gone from one eye, and that the preser- vation of the other depended on his health. Prescott now returned to Boston and on May 4, 1820, married iliss Susan Amory. A legal career was, of course, out of the question, but Prescott's family were well off; so his half blindness was not made still more cruel by the trammels of poverty. Having at this time decided to devote himself to literature, he set to work on the study of Murray's Grammar, Johnson's Dictionary, Blair's Rhetoric, and the English classics from Elizabethan times to his own. The reading of Gibbon's autobiography increased his passion for historical writing. In 1820 he contributed to the Jlorth American Review a review of Bvron's Let- ters on Pope. He soon turned to French lit- erature and made a comparison of French and English tragedy-; then took up Italian and Ger- man, but Ticknor, his friend and biographer, aroused in him a still greater interest in the literature and history of Spain. He had begun the study of Italian iiterature in 1823. In 1824 he wrote an essay on Italian Xarrative Poetry, and had thoughts of taking up Roman history, but, in 1826, he chose the Spanish field. Owing to his bad eyesight, he was obligml to have the aid of readers and secretaries, and for his own writing had recourse to a writing frame designed especially for the blind. After ten years of hard labor, he produced the first results of his research, the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (3 vols.. 18.38). Tlie work at once gained favor, and was soon trans- lated into French, Spanish, and German. He then spent six years on what is probably his most brilliant work, a History of the Conquest of Mex- ico, with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilisation, and the Life of the Con- queror, Hernando Cortes (3 vols., 1843). His third work in the series was the History of the Conquest of Peru, uith a Preliminary View of the Civilization of the [ncas (3 vols., 1847). These greatly added to his reputation. He was made corresponding member of the French Institute, and on his visit to Europe in 1850 was received with honor. In 1855 appeared two volumes of the History of the Reiyn of Philip the Second, King of Spain, and three years later the third volume, but the work was cut short by a stroke of apoplexy which caused Prescott's death. He had, however, added to his series by editing Rob- ertson's History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth (3 vols., 1857), adding thereto a supplement em- bracing the life of the Emperor after his abdica- tion. Aside from his histories, his literary work consists of a preface to ^Ime. Calderon de la Barca's Life in Mexico (2 vols., 1843) ; Biographi- cal and Critical Miscellanies (1845) : A Memoir of the Honorable John Pickering (1848) : and a Memoir of the Honorable Abbott Lawrence (1856). Prescott is eminent in American letters as one of the first and most accomplished of the histori- ans. Slightly younger than Irving and later in acquiring literary reputation, he excelled him in the extent and system with which he treated his work. To him, with Irving in history and ro- mance, Ticknor in Spanish literary research, and ^lotley. a few years later, in history, belongs the honor of having introduced and made popu- lar to the English-speaking and a good part of the foreign world the story of the Spanish na- tion. Technically, as an historian, Prescott has been justly criticised for a tendency to color his pictures too highly and to allow his admiration for his heroes to get the better of his judg- ment : nor is he altogether successful in deal- ing with political complications. His most serious defect is one for which he cannot fairly be held responsible. American archneology has been revolutionized since his day by the labors of Morgan. Bandelier. and others, and the more or less romantic and distorted pictures of Jlexican and Peruvian development given by the Spanish chroniclers on whom Prescott relied have been corrected. Thus his work needs to be read in the light of modern research and to be corrected at various points, but with the proper