“and receive no idea of antiquity that does not come through them.  For any, then, too wise to learn or too thoughtless to inquire, this chapter is not designed....  Many there are,” [how many, we wonder,] “who have dealt in Spanish romances, supposing them to be history; and these are slow to abandon their delusions.  At enormous expense they have gathered volumes of authorities; will they readily admit them to be cheats and counterfeits?  They grudge the time too they have spent in their perusal; and are loth, as well they may be, to lose it.  But individual loss and injury is” [the proof-reader will please not to interfere with Mr. Wilson’s grammar] “perhaps inevitable in the search after truth.  Men cannot be held down to the theories of barbarism.  These must give way to knowledge, or the intelligent, as in Roman Catholic countries, be driven to infidelity." [The printer may venture to italicize the closing prediction, as we wish to bring it under the particular notice of school-committees and superintendents of education, who will see the fearful responsibility they incur by placing copies of Prescott’s Histories, bound in sheep, in their school-libraries.]

But we interrupt the flow of our author’s bile by these irrelevant remarks.  Let him have a full hearing:  “Before closing this chapter, the status of our literature suggests an apology is necessary, for having opened it in conformity with the, now neglected, rules of history—­that we should try and snatch something from the wreck of antiquity.” [We cheerfully offer a reward of one copy of the present number of the “Atlantic” to any person who will parse the last sentence, explain the punctuation of it, and interpret its meaning.] “In other countries, the standard of history has been steadily rising for centuries; but with us, it has been so lowered, as to sink every other qualification in the single one of turning faultless periods; and a gentleman possessing this, has been adjudged fully capable of purging the annals of Spain and her quondam colonies, from the mass of modern fable and forgery which now disfigure them.  Incapable of submitting Cortez’ statement to the test, he assumes it to be true, even in those parts where it is impossible.  Unable to detect the counterfeit in Diaz—­he pronounces him the ‘child of nature,’ but does not on the testimony of this natural child reject the still more monstrous falsifier, Gomora; but adopts them both, according to the custom of novelists; and not the slightest objection is raised.  Then descending lower and still lower; disregarding alike the warning of Lord Bacon ‘a credulous man is a deceiver,’ and of Tacitus fingunt simul creduntque—­he rakes up even a devotee, Boturini, and makes him also an historic authority, without overtaxing public credulity; though this wretch, as we have seen, out-Munchausens Pietro himself, and as he may have surpassed every other man in Spain in drawing the long bow, was justly selected for historiographer,