Prescott had given a bond to Mr. English pledging himself to complete by September, 1829, two hundred and fifty printed pages of the book. Yet it was actually not until this month had ended that the first line was written. On October 6, 1829, after three months devoted to reviewing his notes for the opening chapter, he took his noctograph and scrawled the initial sentence. A whole month was consumed in finishing the chapter, and two months more in writing out the second and the third. From this time a sense of elation filled him, now that all his patient labour was taking concrete form, and there was no more question of putting his task aside. His progress might be, as he called it, "tortoise-like," but he had felt the joy of creation; and the work went on, always with a firmer grasp, a surer sense of form, and the clearer light which comes to an artist as his first vague impressions begin under his hand to take on actuality. There were times when, from illness, he had almost to cease from writing; there were other times when he turned aside from his special studies to accomplish some casual piece of literary work. But these interruptions, while they delayed the accomplishment of his purpose, did not break the current of his interest. The casual pieces of writing, to which allusion has just been made, were oftenest contributions to the _North American Review_. One of them, however, was somewhat more ambitious than a magazine article. It was a life of Charles Brockden Brown, which Prescott undertook at the request of Jared Sparks, who was editing a series of American biographies. This was in 1834, and the book was written in two weeks at Nahant. It certainly did nothing for Prescott's reputation. What is true of this is true of everything that he wrote outside of his histories. In his essays, and especially in his literary criticisms, he seemed devoid of penetration and of a grasp upon the verities. His style, too, in all such work was formal and inert. He often showed the extent of his reading, but never an intimate feeling for character. He could not get down to the very core of his subject and weigh and judge with the freedom of an independent critic. His life of Brown will be found fully to bear out this view. In it Prescott chooses to condone the worst of Brown's defects, and he gives no intimation of the man's real power. Prescott himself felt that he had been too eulogistic, whereas his greatest fault was that the eulogy was misapplied. Sparks mildly criticised the book for its excess of generalities and its lack of concrete facts.