Side by side with these amusements there was another which curiously supplemented it. As Prescott and his friend went through the streets on their way to school, they made a practice of inventing impromptu stories, which they told each other in alternation. If the story was unfinished when they arrived at school, it would be resumed on their way home and continued until it reached its end. It was here that Prescott's miscellaneous reading stood him in good stead. His mind was full of the romances and histories that he had read; and his quick invention and lively imagination enabled him to piece together the romantic bits which he remembered, and to give them some sort of consistency and form. Ticknor attaches little importance either to Prescott's interest in the details of warfare or to this fondness of his for improvised narration. Yet it is difficult not to see in both of them a definite bias; and we may fairly hold that the boy's taste for battles, coupled with his love of picturesque description, foreshadowed, even in these early years, the qualities which were to bring him lasting fame.
All these boyish amusements, however, came to an end when, in August, 1811, Prescott presented himself as a candidate for admission to Harvard. Harvard was then under the presidency of the Rev. Dr. John Thornton Kirkland, who had been installed in office the year before Prescott entered college. President Kirkland was the first of Harvard's really eminent presidents.[3] Under his rule there definitely began that slow but steady evolution, which was, in the end, to transform the small provincial college into a great and splendid university. Kirkland was an earlier Eliot, and some of his views seemed as radical to his colleagues as did those of Eliot in 1869. Lowell has said of him, somewhat unjustly: "He was a man of genius, but of genius that evaded utilisation." It is fairer to suppose that, if he did not accomplish all that he desired and attempted, this was because the time was not yet ripe for radical innovations. He did secure large benefactions to the University, the creation of new professorships on endowed foundations, and the establishment of three professional schools. President Kirkland, in reality, stood between the old order and the new, with his face set toward the future, but retaining still some of the best traditions of the small college of the past. It is told of him that he knew every student by name, and took a very genuine interest in all of them, helping them in many quiet, tactful ways, so that more than one distinguished man in later life declared that, but for the thoughtful and unsolicited kindness of Dr. Kirkland, he would have been forced to abandon his college life in debt and in despair. Kirkland was a man of striking personal presence, and could assume a bearing of such impressive dignity as to verge on the majestic, as when he officially received Lafayette in front of University Hall and presented the assembled students to the nation's guest. The faculty over which he presided contained at that time no teacher of enduring reputation,[4] so that whatever personal influence was exerted upon Prescott by his instructors must have come chiefly from such intercourse as he had with Dr. Kirkland.