"It takes the strength out of me," he said. Nevertheless, neither this nor the fact that his general health was most unsatisfactory, caused him to abandon work. He could not bring himself to use what he called "the coward's word, 'impossible.'" And so, after a little time, he went on as before, studying "by ear-work," and turning off upon his noctograph from ten to fifteen pages every day. He continued also his outdoor exercise, and, in fact, one of the best-written chapters of the _Conquest of Peru_--the last one--was composed while galloping through the woods at Pepperell. On November 7, 1846, the _Conquest of Peru_ was finished. Like the preceding history, it was published by the Harper Brothers, who agreed to pay the author one dollar per copy and to bring out a first edition of seventy-five hundred copies. This, Mr. Ticknor says, was a more liberal arrangement than had ever before been made with an historical writer in the United States. The English copyright was purchased by Bentley for £800. Prescott's main anxiety about the reception which would be given to the _Conquest of Peru_ was based upon his doubts as to its literary style. Neither of his other books had been written so rapidly, and he feared that he might incur the charge of over-fluency or even slovenliness. Yet, as a matter of fact, the chorus of praise which greeted the two volumes was as loud and as spontaneous as it had been over his _Mexico_. Prescott now stood so firmly on his feet as to look at much of this praise in a somewhat humorous light. The approbation of the _Edinburgh Review_ no longer seemed to him the _summa laus_, though he valued it more highly than the praise given him by American periodicals, of which he wrote very shrewdly: "I don't know how it is, but our critics, though not pedantic, have not the businesslike air, or the air of the man of the world, which gives manliness and significance to criticism. Their satire, when they attempt it--which cannot be often laid to their door--has neither the fine edge of the _Edinburgh_ nor the sledgehammer stroke of the _Quarterly_. They twaddle out their humour as if they were afraid of its biting too hard, or else they deliver axioms with a sort of smart, dapper conceit, like a little parson laying down the law to his little people.... In England there is a far greater number of men highly cultivated--whether in public life or men of leisure--whose intimacy with affairs and with society, as well as books, affords supplies of a high order for periodical criticism."