demonstration.  That he had no acquaintance with Mr. Prescott’s collection is a matter within our personal knowledge.  Had he been in a position to obtain copies for himself, and had he availed himself of that circumstance, he would not have failed to proclaim the fact in his loudest and shrillest tones.  Nor does he pretend that he has ever visited Spain, and had access to the originals.  Indeed, we do not think he would have ventured upon such a step.  He tells us, that, “besides the reasons already given for distrusting the correctness of Spanish statements, there is another, more secret in character, but not less potent than all combined—­fear of incurring the displeasure of that tribunal which punished unbelief with fire, torture, and confiscation.”  If Mr. Wilson, as his language implies, stands in fear of “fire, torture, and confiscation,” and if this is his most potent reason for distrusting the correctness of Spanish statements, we can readily understand why he should have chosen to remain on his native soil and write the history of the Conquest of Mexico from “the American stand-point.”  Lastly, Mr. Wilson makes no allusions to matter contained in the manuscripts which had not been reproduced in the pages of Prescott.  He is careful, indeed, to tell us very little of the contents of these works; but he talks about them with the most gratifying candor, and in his choicest phraseology.  He informs us, that “Sarmiento’s History of the Peruvian Incas altogether surpasses that of Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas and the Happy Valley.”  The history of Dr. Johnson’s “Rasselas” is related, we believe, by Boswell.  The great moralist composed his beautiful and philosophical, but somewhat gloomy romance, in the evenings of a single week, in order to obtain the means of defraying the expenses of his mother’s funeral.  The story is a touching one; but Mr. Wilson’s comparison is so inapt, that we cannot help suspecting him of having had in his mind, not the history of Johnson’s “Rasselas,” but Johnson’s history of Rasselas.  We think it rather hard, that, having, in general, such a limited amount of meaning to express, Mr. Wilson should have followed the maxim of Talleyrand, and employed language chiefly as a means of concealing his thoughts.

Mr. Wilson nowhere asserts, in so many words, that he has had access to manuscript authorities.  His mode of speaking of them, however, implies as much, and he evidently intends that this inference should be drawn by his readers.  In a printed note, addressed to his publishers, disclaiming any intention of “assailing the memory of the dead,”—­a disclaimer which was not needed to suggest the reason why his book, loaded with typographical blunders, was hurried through the press,[A]—­he “insists on the lawyer’s privilege of sifting the evidence—­a labor which Mr. Prescott was incapable of performing, from a physical infirmity”; and he undertakes to prove that Mr. Prescott’s “books and manuscripts were not reliable authorities.”