History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, Vols. 1 and 2

Prescott devoted his final years to chronicling the decline of the Spanish empire. He published The Life of Charles the Fifth after His Abdication (1856), a continuation of William Robertson’s The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), but only managed to finish the first three volumes of The History of the Reign of Philip the Second (1855–58). William H. Prescott died of a stroke at his home in Boston on January 29, 1859. In assessing his achievements, Daniel J. Boorstin wrote: “One of Prescott’s greatest feats as a ‘scientific’ historian was to depict the scenes of his drama so vividly without ever having been there—for he never visited Spain, Mexico, or Peru.… Prescott created from the rawest of raw material, laboring under physical handicaps and displaying a single-minded courage with few precedents in the annals of literature.… He had to discover the landscape, conceive new heroes, and mark their own paths through time. The story of how he made his histories was itself a kind of epic.
(excerpt: - final passage of the Preface to Prescott's "History of the Conquest of Mexico")