Excerpt from William Hickling Prescott This volume makes no pretense of supplanting Ticknor's "Life of Prescott." It aims simply to supplement it. Ticknor wrote the biography of his lifelong friend, possessed of ample materials; but he was already an old man; his view of society and literature, always severe, had deepened into something like austerity; and to bring out vividly the playful and engagingly human aspects of Prescott's character would doubtless have seemed to him like taking liberties with the Muse of History. To complete and correct the picture of Prescott's personality, while giving a condensed but connected account of his life and work, has been the sole task undertaken by the present writer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.