praise is due to him for the firmness he displayed in governing himself.

His piety was genuine and fervent; religion mingled with the whole course of his thoughts and actions, and shone forth in his most private and unstudied writings. Whenever he made any great discovery, he devoutly returned thanks to God. The voice of prayer and the melody of praise rose from his ships on discovering the new world, and his first action on landing was to prostrate himself upon the earth, and offer up thanksgivings. Every evening the Salve Regina, and other vesper hymns, were chanted by his crew, and masses were performed in the beautiful groves that bordered the wild shores of this heathen land. All his great enterprises were undertaken in the name of the Holy Trinity, and he partook of the holy sacrament previous to embarkation. He observed the festivals of the church in the wildest situations. The Sabbath was to him a day of sacred rest, on which he would never sail from a port, unless in case of extreme necessity. The religion thus deeply seated in his soul diffused a sober dignity, and a benign composure, over his whole deportment; his very language was pure and guarded, and free from all gross or irreverent expressions.

It cannot be denied, however, that his piety was mingled with superstition, and darkened by the

bigotry of the age. He evidently concurred in the

opinion, that all the nations who did not acknowledge the christian faith were destitute of natural rights; and that the sternest measures might be used for their conversion, and the severest punishments inflicted upon them, if obstinate in unbelief. In

this spirit of bigotry he considered himself justified in making captives of the Indians, and transporting them to Spain, to have them taught the doctrines of Christianity, and in selling them for slaves if they pretended to resist his invasions. In doing the Îatter, he sinned against the natural goodness of his heart, and against the feelings he had originally entertained and expressed towards this gentle and hospitable people; but he was goaded on by the mercenary impatience of the crown, and by the sneers of his enemies, at the unprofitable result of his enterprises. It is but justice to his character to observe, that the enslavement of the Indians thus taken in battle was at first openly countenanced by the crown, and that, when the question of right came to be discussed at the request of the queen, several of the most distinguished jurists and theologians advocated the practice; so that the question was finally settled in favour of the Indians solely by the humanity of Isabella. As the venerable bishop Las Casas observes, where the most learned men have doubted, it is not surprising that an unlearned mariner should err.

These remarks, in palliation of the conduct of Columbus, are required by candour. It is proper to show him in connexion with the age in which he lived, lest the errors of the times should be considered his individual faults. It is not intended, however, to justify him on a point where it is inexcusable to err. Let it remain a blot on his illustrious name, and let others derive a lesson from it.

A peculiar trait in his rich and varied character remains to be noticed; namely, that ardent and enthusiastic imagination, which threw a magnificence

over his whole course of thought. A poetical temperament is discernible throughout all his writings and in all his actions. We see it in all his descriptions of the beauties of the wild lands he was discovering; in the enthusiasm with which he extols the verdure of the forests, the grandeur of the mountains, and the crystal clearness of the running streams; the blandness of the temperature, the purity of the atmosphere, and the fragrance of the air, "full of dew and sweetness." It spread a golden and glorious world around him, and tinged every thing with its own gorgeous colours. It betrayed him into visionary speculations, which subjected him to the sneers and cavils of men of cooler and safer, but more grovelling minds. Such were the conjectures formed on the coast of Paria, about the form of the earth, and the situation of the terrestrial paradise ; about the mines of Ophir, and the Aurea Chersonesus of the ancients; and such was the heroic scheme of a crusade, for the recovery of the holy sepulchre. It filled his mind with solemn and visionary meditations on mystic passages of the scriptures, and on the shadowy portents of the prophecies. It exalted his own office in his eyes, and made him conceive himself an agent sent forth upon a sublime and awful mission, and subject to mysterious intimations from the Deity; such as the voice which he imagined spoke to him in comfort amidst the troubles of Hispaniola, and in the silence of the night on the disastrous coast of Veragua.

He was decidedly a visionary, but a visionary of an uncommon kind, and successful in his dreams. The manner in which his ardent imagination and mercurial nature were controlled by a powerful

judgment, and directed by an acute sagacity, is the most extraordinary feature in his character. Thus governed, his imagination, instead of exhausting itself in idle flights, lent aid to his judgment, and enabled him to form conclusions at which common minds could never have arrived, nay, which they could not perceive when pointed out.

To his intellectual vision it was given to read the signs of the times, and to trace in the conjectures and reveries of past ages the indications of an unknown world, as soothsayers were said to read predictions in the stars, and to foretell events from the visions of the night. "His soul," observes a Spanish writer, “ was superior to the age in which he lived. For him was reserved the great enterprise of traversing a sea which had given rise to so many fables, and of deciphering the mystery of his age."

With all the visionary fervour of his imagination, its fondest dreams fell short of the reality. He died in ignorance of the real grandeur of his discovery! Until his last breath, he entertained the idea that he had merely opened a new way to the old resorts of opulent commerce, and had discovered some of the wild regions of the east. He supposed Hispaniola to be the ancient Ophir, which had been visited by the ships of King Solomon, and that Cuba and Terra Firma were but remote parts of Asia. What visions of glory would have broken upon his mind, could he have known that he had indeed discovered a new continent equal to the old world in magnitude, and separated by two vast oceans from all the earth hitherto known by civilized man! and how would his magnanimous spirit have been consoled, amidst the afflictions of age, and the cares of penury,

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the neglect of a fickle public, and the injustice of an ungrateful king, could he have anticipated the splendid empires which would arise in the beautiful world he had discovered; and the nations and tongues and languages which were to fill its lands with his renown, and to revere and bless his name to the latest posterity!