did not require any examination of “authorities.”  We regret that it should also have rendered superfluous an acquaintance with the customs of civilized society.  The tone in which he speaks of his distinguished predecessor is sometimes amusing from the conceit which it displays, sometimes disgusting from its impudence and coarseness.  He concedes Mr. Prescott’s good faith in the use of his materials.  It was only his ignorance and want of the proper qualifications that prevented him from using them aright.  “His non-acquaintance with Indian character is much to be regretted.”  Mr. Wilson himself enjoys, as he tells us, the inestimable advantage of being the son of an adopted member of the Iroquois tribe.  Nay, “his ancestors, for several generations, dwelt near the Indian agency at Cherry Valley, on Wilson’s Patent, though in Cooperstown village was he born.”  We perceive the author’s fondness for the inverted style in composition,—­acquired, perhaps, in the course of his long study of Aboriginal oratory.  Even without such proofs, and without his own assertion of the fact, it would not have been difficult, we think, to conjecture his familiarity with the forms of speech common among barbarous nations.

But it is not merely through “his non-acquaintance with Indian character” that Mr. Prescott was at fault.  He was also, it appears, in a hopeless state of ignorance in regard to the political institutions of Spain.  He knew nothing of the Spanish censorship, and its restrictions upon the freedom of the press.  “He showed his faith,” writes Mr. Wilson, “by the expenditure of a fortune at the commencement of his enterprise, in the purchase of books and MSS. relating to ’America of the Spaniards.’” This last phrase is marked as quoted, but we believe it to be the author’s own.  “These were the materials out of which he framed his two histories of the two aboriginal empires, Mexico and Peru.  At the time these works were written he could not have had the remotest idea of the circumstances under which his Spanish authorities had been produced, or of the external pressure that gave them their peculiar form and character. He could hardly understand that peculiar organization of Spanish society through which one set of opinions might be uniformly expressed in public, while the intellectual classes in secret entertain entirely opposite ones.  He acted throughout in the most perfect good faith; and if, on a subsequent scrutiny, his authorities have proved to be the fabulous creations of Spanish-Arabian fancy, he is not in fault.” (p. 104.)—­We, also, desire to deal in “perfect good faith” with our readers, who will naturally inquire what new light has been thrown on the “peculiar organization of Spanish society,” and on the conditions which limit the expression of opinions in Spain, since Mr. Prescott made those subjects his especial study.  We have looked carefully through Mr. Wilson’s book in the hope of being enabled