Prescott, we believe, did more than any other one man to establish the independence of American authorship. He was the first, so far as we know, who worked with a truly adequate literary apparatus, and at the same time brought the results of his extensive, long-continued, costly researches into picture-like and popular forms. It was not the judgment of England, but of Europe, that settled his claims in the world of letters; and from the day when the verdict of the learned world awarded him a place in the first rank of historians, the hereditary curse of American authorship was removed, and the insolent question of the Quarterly was asked no more. From that time nearly to this the literary relations between England and America have been growing more and more intimate, until every English writer of repute reckoned upon his great circle of readers in the United States, and every native author of a certain distinction depended upon a welcome, more or less cordial, but still a welcome, from a British reading constituency. Never had the mutual interchange of literary gifts from the one people to the other been so active as during the years preceding the outbreak of the Great Conspiracy. So close was the communication of thought and feeling, that it seemed as if there were hardly need of a submarine cable to stretch its nervous strands between two national brains that were locked in Siamese union by the swift telegraph of thought. We reprinted each other's books, we made new reputations for each other's authors, we wrote in each other's magazines, and introduced each other's young writers to our own several publics. Thought echoed to thought, voice answered to voice across the Atlantic. But for one fatal stain upon our institutions,--a stain of which we were constantly reminded, as the one thing that shamed all our pretensions,--it seemed as if the peaceful and prosperous development of the great nation sprung from the loins of England were accepted as a gain to universal civilization. In the fulness of time the heir of Great Britain's world-shadowing empire came among us to receive the wide and cordial welcome which we could afford to give without compromising our republicanism, and he to receive without lessening his dignity. It was the seal upon the _entente cordiale_ which seemed to have at last established itself between the thinkers as well as the authorities of the two countries.