who bears the name of Rosseeuw St. Hilaire; we admit Mr. Wilson’s incapacity to decipher foreign names or words, even when they stand before him in the clearest print,—­an incapacity of which his book affords numerous examples,—­and that this incapacity, and not any mental hallucination, has been the cause of the blunder which we have corrected.  But we must add that he does evidently labor under an hallucination when he calls this letter of M. St. Hilaire a “flattering notice.”  He has been misled by his inability to comprehend the employment of courteous language between persons who differ from each other in matters of opinion.  With the accustomed suavity of a Frenchman and a gentleman, M. St. Hilaire declines entering into a discussion with Mr. Wilson, and leaves him to “settle this difference with his learned fellow-citizen,” Mr. Prescott, mildly intimating at the same time that he will probably have “his hands full.”

Something more remains to be said of the use which our author has made of the learned professor of the Sorbonne.  One page of his book Mr. Wilson devotes to “Acknowledgments.”  These are few, but ponderous.  “Acknowledgments are made” to the Hon. Lewis Cass, for having written—­without any ulterior view, we imagine, to Mr. Wilson’s advantage—­the before-mentioned article in the “North American Review”; to the late Mr. Gallatin, for the publication—­also, we suspect, without any foresight of the tremendous uses to which it was to be turned—­of a paper on the Mexican dialects; to “Aaron Erickson, Esq., of Rochester, N.Y., for the advantages he has afforded us in the prosecution of our arduous investigations”; to “Major Robert Wilson, now at Fort Riley, Kanzas,” for no particular reason expressed; and to “M. Rousseau de St. Hilaire, both for the flattering notice he has taken of our preliminary work” (why not, “work preliminary?”) “on Mexico, and for the advantages derived from his writings.”  In regard to the “advantages” here mentioned, we are going to relieve Mr. Wilson’s mind.  His obligations to M. St. Hilaire are really far lighter than he supposes.  It is true that he has picked most of the little information he possesses in regard to Spanish history out of the professor’s work, and has strewed his pages with copious extracts from this recondite source.  But, in making his acknowledgments, he might have gone still farther back.  M. St. Hilaire is a laborious and enthusiastic scholar.

He has found time, in the midst of his professional duties, to write a really meritorious work on the history of Spain.  But he had not the time, perhaps not the opportunity, for making a thorough examination of the original authorities.  He was therefore obliged to take for his guide a modern author, who had made this history the peculiar field of his researches.  The guide whom he selected, and he could have made no better choice, was William Hickling Prescott.  So necessary was it for his purpose that the latter