"To him who has the patience and industry, many mysteries are thus revealed, which no political sagacity or critical acumen could have divined. He leans over the shoulder of Philip the Second at his writing-table, as the King spells patiently out, with cipher-key in hand, the most concealed hieroglyphics of Parma, or Guise, or Mendoza.... He enters the cabinet of the deeply pondering Burghleigh, and takes from the most private drawer the memoranda which record that minister's unutterable doubtings; he pulls from the dressing-gown folds of the stealthy, soft-gliding Walsingham the last secret which he has picked from the Emperor's pigeon-holes or the Pope's pocket.... He sits invisible at the most secret councils of the Nassaus and Barneveldt and Buys, or pores with Farnese over coming victories and vast schemes of universal conquest; he reads the latest bit of scandal, the minutest characteristic of King or minister, chronicled by his gossiping Venetians for the edification of the Forty."[52]
All this material and more was in Prescott's hands, and he made full use of it. His narrative, moreover, was told in a style which was easy and unstudied, less glowing than in the _Mexico_, but even better fitted for the telling of events which were so pregnant with good and ill to succeeding generations. In the pages of _Philip II._ we have neither the somewhat formal student who wrote of Ferdinand and Isabella, nor the romanticist whose imagination was kindled by the reports of Cortés. Rather do we find one who has at last reached the highest levels of historical writing, and who with perfect poise develops a noble theme in a noble way. The only criticism which has ever been brought against the book has come from those who, like Thoreau, regard literary finish as a defect in historical composition. The author of Walden seemed, indeed, to single out Prescott for special animadversion in this respect, and his rather rasping sentences contain the only jarring notes that were sounded by any contemporary of the historian. Thoreau, writing of the colonial historians of Massachusetts, such as Josselyn, remarked with a sort of perverse appreciation: "They give you one piece of nature at any rate, and that is themselves, smacking their lips like a coach-whip,--none of those emasculated modern histories, such as Prescott's, cursed with a style."