In the matter of style, Prescott had not yet emancipated himself from that formalism which had been inherited from the eighteenth-century writers, and which Americans, with the wonted conservatism of provincials, retained long after Englishmen had begun to write with naturalness and simplicity. Even in fiction this circumstance is noticeable. At a time when Scott was thrilling the whole world of English readers with his vivid romances, written hastily and often carelessly, in a style which reflected his own individual nature, Cooper was producing stories equally exciting, but told in phraseology almost as stilted as that which we find in _Rasselas_. This was no less true in poetry. The great romantic movement which in England found expression in Byron and Shelley and the exquisitely irregular metres of Coleridge had as yet awakened no true responsive echo on this side of the Atlantic. Among the essay-writers and historians of America none had summoned up the courage to shake off the Addisonian and Johnsonian fetters and to move with free, unstudied ease. Irving was but a later Goldsmith, and Bancroft a Yankee Gibbon. The papers which then appeared in the _North American Review_, to whose pages Prescott himself was a regular contributor, give ample evidence that the literary models of the time were those of an earlier age,--an age in which dignity was supposed to lie in ponderosity and to be incompatible with grace. Prescott's nature was not one that had the slightest sympathy with pedantry. No more spontaneous spirit than his can be imagined. His joyousness and gayety sometimes even tended toward the frivolous. Yet in this first serious piece of historical writing, he imposed upon himself the shackles of an earlier convention. Just because his mood prompted him to write in an unstudied style, all the more did he feel it necessary to repress his natural inclination. Therefore, in the text of his history, we find continual evidence of the eighteenth century literary manner,--the balanced sentence, the inevitable adjective, the studied antithesis, and the elaborate parallel. Women are invariably "females"; a gift is a "donative"; a marriage does not take place, but "nuptials are solemnized"; a name is usually an "appellation"; a crown "devolves" upon a successor; a poet "delivers his sentiments"; a king "avails himself of indeterminateness"; and so on. A cumbrous sentence like the following smacks of the sort of English that was soon to pass away:-- "Fanaticism is so far subversive of the most established principles of morality that under the dangerous maxim 'For the advancement of the faith all means are lawful,' which Tasso has rightly, though perhaps undesignedly, derived from the spirits of hell, it not only excuses but enjoins the commission of the most revolting crime as a sacred duty."[24] And the following:--