He was less of an artist, however, than
Prescott, the eldest and in some ways the finest figure of the
well-known Prescott-Motley-Parkman group of Boston historians.
All of these men, together with their friend George Ticknor, who
wrote the "History of Spanish Literature" and whose own "Life and
Letters" pictures a whole generation, had the professional
advantages of inherited wealth, and the opportunity to make
deliberate choice of a historical field which offered freshness
and picturesqueness of theme. All were tireless workers in spite
of every physical handicap; all enjoyed social security and the
rich reward of full recognition by their contemporaries. They had
their world as in their time, as Chaucer makes the Wife of Bath
say of herself, and it was a pleasant world to live in.
Grandson of "Prescott the Brave" of Bunker Hill, and son of the
rich Judge Prescott of Salem, William Hickling Prescott was born
in 1796, and was graduated from Harvard in 1814. An accident in
college destroyed the sight of one eye, and left him but a
precarious use of the other.
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