of Spain, France, and Italy, in connection with public affairs, and are able to estimate the degree of moral control it exercised over the action of states. In the Histories of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru we see it more directly in its influence upon individuals, taken from various classes of society, and pretty well representing their age. No reader who profoundly studies both aspects of this phenomenon, can fail to acknowledge the wonderful flexibility and power of adaptation in Catholicism, at the same time he finds new reasons to rejoice in the Reformation. He will see clearly reflected, in Mr. Prescott's page, the ductility with which Catholicism adapted itself to the natural disposition of its believers, binding equally saints and sinners to its communion, and strong with the strength of the worst and best men of the time. The policy of Spain, during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, was to have all its enterprises stamped with a holy character. Its relations with the pope are among the most curious points in its history. It is hardly a paradox to say that Spain would have seceded from the church, had its interests or passions been crossed instead of aided. by the Papacy. Ferdinand's dealings with the pope are exceedingly characteristic. When the latter interfered with the internal affairs of his kingdom, or opposed him abroad, he had no scruples in covering him with public disgrace or in making war upon him. He found the pope a very convenient person to use, but he took care not to be used by him.

The second work of Mr. Prescott, the History of the Conquest of Mexico, appeared in six years after the publication of his first. The materials for this were such as no other historian had ever enjoyed. From Madrid alone he obtained unpublished documents, consisting of military and private journals, contemporary chronicles, legal instruments, correspondence of the actors in the conquest, &c., amounting to eight thousand folio pages. From Mexico he gleaned numerous valuable MSS., which had escaped the diligence of Spanish collectors. These, with what he derived from a variety of other sources, including the archives of the family of Cortés, placed in his possession a mass of materials sufficient to give a basis of undoubted facts to his wonderful narrative, and subdue the skepticism of the modern reader by the very accumulation of testimony. It is needless to add that he also obtained everything in a printed form which had reference to his subject. The result of all his labors, of research, thought, and composition, was a history possessing the unity, variety, and interest, of a magnificent poem. It deals with a series of facts, and exhibits a gallery of characters, which, to have invented, would place its creator by

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the side of Homer; and which to realize and represent, in the mode Mr. Prescott has done, required a rare degree of historical imagination. It may be that the imperfection of the historian's eyes was one cause of his success. He was compelled to deve lop his memory to the full extent of its capacity; but memory depends, in a considerable degree, upon understanding, sensibility, and imagination. To recollect facts they must be digested, methodized, and realized. The judgment must place them in their natural order; the heart must fasten its sympathies to them; the imagination must see them as pictures. They are then a possession for ever. To the inward vision of the mind they are as much living realities as though they were present to the outward eye.

In our limited space we cannot give anything which would approach an account of this work. In its general plan and composition it illustrates what we have previously said of Mr. Prescott's processes as an historian. We had marked our copy on every page, intending to notice numerous passages for comment or quotation; and certainly the work is full enough of strange facts and wonderful adventures to awaken new views of the powers and perversions of human nature. Mr. Prescott first introduces the reader to the people and country of Mexico, and gives a luminous view of the ancient Mexican civilization. In the space of two hundred pages he comprehends a survey of the races inhabiting the country, and brings before us their character, history, government, religion, science, arts, domestic manners, everything, in short, necessary to a comprehension of their intellectual, moral, and political condition at the period Cortés commenced his enterprise. This introduction is mostly confined to the Aztecs, as they were the fiercest, most sanguinary, most intelligent, and most powerful, of the Mexican races; and as it was against their empire that the efforts of the conquerors were principally directed. Then follows the story of the conquest with all its remarkable features of heroism and cruelty. Cortés is, of course, the central figure of the group, the soul and the body of the enterprise, and around him are gathered some of the bravest warriors that romance ever imagined, encountering dangers and surviving miseries which, in a romance, would be pronounced impossible. The picture presents the meeting of two civilizations, brought in a rude shock against each other, and the triumph of the race which was superior in craft and science. In the followers of Cortés we have, what we would now call a gang of thieves, pirates, ravishers, and assassins, displaying in their worst excesses the courage and endurance of heroes, and

sustained in their worst calamities by what they were pleased to call their religion. The pagan Aztec gave the first place in his bloody pantheon to his terrible war-god, and with a cannibal appetite devoured the body of his captive. We have some consolation for this in knowing the Aztec was a heathen, and his god a chimera. But the deity the Spanish Catholic worshiped, and to whom he prayed for aid in his schemes of avarice, lust, and murder, was also of the family of Mexican deities, however much he may have deceived himself into the belief he was addressing the Christian's God. Moloch, Mammon, and Belial, were the inspiration of his schemes of conquest and deeds of massacre.

The great checks upon rapacity are conscience and natural humanity. It is one of the objects of true religion to strengthen and increase these natural obstacles to crime. When, however, bigotry sides with rapacity against human feeling, and breaks, instead of tightening, the bond of brotherhood, it produces those monstrosities of action so difficult to reconcile with the common principles of human nature. We can conceive of men as becoming demons, but the difficulty is to conceive of them as performing demoniacal acts from motives partly religious, and preserving any humanities in their character after the performance. Yet this we are compelled continually to do in following the Spaniards in their American conquests. It is one of the charms of Mr. Prescott's history that his worst characters are so fully developed that we perceive their humanity as well as their rascality. They never appear as bundles of evil qualities, but as men.

Mr. Prescott places his readers in a position to understand the moral condition of his personages, as that condition was influenced by the current practices of their age, and by their individual lives. Crimes, in their effect upon character, change their nature as the conventional standard of morals varies. To commit any delinquency whatever exercises a pernicious effect upon character; but its effect is not so pernicious when it is hailed as the sign of the hero, as when it is hooted at as the brand of the felon. In the one case a man may discharge many of the social and public duties of life, and preserve that degree of morality and religion conveyed in the phrase of "a respectable citizen;" in the other case he sinks into the common herd of profligates and criminals, and makes war upon respectable citizens. In one sense shedding blood in battle is murder; yet there is still a great difference in the moral character of General Scott and Gibbs the pirate. No well-minded person can now follow the career of Cortés without an expression of horror and indignation; yet the countrymen of Cortés applauded

his exploits as our countrymen applaud those of the victor of Monterey and Buena Vista.

There is another very important fact to be considered in our estimate of the Spaniards. The pope, in whom was lodged the power to dispose of the kingdoms of the heathen, had given the new world to Spain, to be conquered and converted. Cortés, as a devout Catholic, had no scruples about the right of conquest. Mexico was clearly his, or his sovereign's, provided he could get it. Now, assuming the right of conquest, all the crimes in which he was directly implicated might be extenuated by the right of selfdefense. The truth is, he had no right to Mexico at all; and the chief crime he committed was in its invasion: but the head of Christendom had decided for him that this was not a crime, but a right. Many good Catholics might have been, and doubtless were, shocked at the barbarities which accompanied the conquest; but Cortés might have replied that what he did was necessary to obtain his rightful objects; that the question simply was, whether he and his followers should be sacrificed to the Mexican gods, or a certain number of Aztecs should be massacred. We know that his cruelties sprung from no disregard of his religion, such as it was. For that religion he was ready to die at any moment; for that religion he repeatedly risked the success of his enterprise; and it required all the address of father Almedo to prevent his zeal for the conversion of the natives and the overthrow of their gods from involving himself and his cause in a common ruin.

Cortés was in all respects a remarkable man, whether we consider the strength or the versatility of his genius. He attempted an enterprise as daring as ever entered the head of a maniac, and brought it to a successful result by the resources of his own mind. He was at once the most enthusiastic and most prudent of men,— a heart all fire, and a head all ice. His intellect was large, flexible, capacious of great plans, inexhaustible in expedients, and preserving, in the fiercest inward excitement of his passions, a wonderful coolness, clearness, and readiness. He seems to have been naturally a man of quick sensibility, rather than of deep feeling,— a cavalier elegant in person, lax in morals, with much versatility but little concentration of power, and chiefly distinguished for qualities which captivate, rather than command. It was not until his mind had been possessed by one dominant idea that the latent powers of his nature were displayed. This idea he held with the grasp of a giant, and it tamed his volatile passions, and concentrated his flashing powers, and put iron into his will. Everything, including life itself, was to him of little importance compared with

the conquest of Mexico. In his darkest hours of defeat and despondency, when hope appeared to all others but the insanity of folly, he never gave up his project, but renewed his attempts to perform the "impossible" with the coolness of one setting about a common-place enterprise. It is needless to say that this idea made him unscrupulous, and silenced all objections to the commission of convenient crime. He was not cruel by nature; that is, he took no pleasure in viewing or inflicting pain: but his mind was remorseless. Like other conquerors, he never allowed his feelings to interfere with his plans, and carelessly sacrificed friends and foes to the success of a project. His hand executed at once what his mind conceived, not so much because he excelled other men in vigor, but because he was not deterred from action by any scruples. Remorselessness is almost ever the key to that vigor which is so much praised in great warriors and statesmen. If human nature consisted simply of intellect and will, the world would be full of vigorous characters; but the vigor would be demoniacal. To a cruel man the bloodshed which attended the conquest of Mexico would have been pleasant of itself; to Cortés, who was its cause, it was a mere means to an end. The desolation of a province and the butchery of its inhabitants were merely processes of working out a practical problem. The remorselessness of thought produces more suffering than the cruelty of passion. The latter may be glutted with a few victims at a time; the former may scatter firebrands, arrows, and death, over an empire. Cortés, in this respect, was not worse than a hundred others whose " vigor" is the admiration of the world, and the inspiration of the devil.

No general ever excelled Cortés in the command he exercised over the minds and hearts of his followers. He knew them better than they knew themselves, and his ready eloquence reached the very sources of their volitions. He was at once their commander and companion. He could bring them round to his plans against the evidence of their five senses, and made them dance in the very chains of famine and fatigue. The enterprise would have been repeatedly abandoned had it not been for his coolness, intrepidity, and honeyed eloquence. His whole lawless and licentious crew he held by a fascination for which they could not themselves account. They suspected him of making their lives and fortunes subsidiary to his ambition; they taxed him with deceit and treachery; they determined again and again to leave him; and yet they followed him-followed him, against their desires and reason, to encounter the most appalling dangers, for an object which receded as they advanced, and which they constantly pronounced a chimera.