contemporaries of Pizarro were afflicted with a scribbling mania. They have left masses of correspondence, of memoranda and personal diaries, contradictory of each other, often absurd in their exaggerations and childish in their triviality. From this farrago has Mr Prescott had to cull,--a labour of no trifling magnitude, whose result is most creditable to him. And to our admiration of his talents are added feelings of strong sympathy, when we read his manly and affecting account of the painful circumstances under which the work was done. Deprived by an accident of the sight of one eye, the other has for years been so weak as at times to be useless to him for all purposes of reading and writing. At intervals he was able to read print several hours a-day, but manuscript was far more trying to his impaired vision, and writing was only possible through those aids by which even the stone-blind may accomplish it. But when he could read, although only by daylight, he felt, he says, satisfied with being raised so nearly to a level with the rest of his species. Unfortunately the evil increases. “The sight of my eye has become gradually dimmed, whilst the sensibility of the nerve has been so far increased, that for several weeks of the last year I have not opened a volume, and through the whole time I have not had the use of it, on an average, for more than an hour a-day.” Sustained by love of letters, and assisted by readers and amanuenses, the student and scholar has triumphed over these cruel disadvantages, surmounted all obstacles, and produced three long and important historical works, conspicuous by their impartiality, research, and elegance; entitling him to an exceedingly honourable position amongst writers in the English tongue, and to one of the very loftiest places in the as yet scantily filled gallery of American men of letters. The last of these works, of which Pizarro is the hero and Peru the scene, yields nothing in merit or interest to its predecessors.