Our reason for believing that Mr. Wilson has never read the works, relating to his subject, which have been published only in the original Spanish or in translations into other foreign languages, is a very simple one.  He produces no evidence that he has ever read them.  Some of them he does not even mention.  From none of them does he glean a single fact that was not ready to his hand in the pages of Prescott.  Except in two or three instances, where he filches a reference from the citations made by the latter historian, he brings forward no statement contained in any of these books, either to support his own positions or to refute theirs.  Why did he take from Prescott—­to whom on this occasion he confesses his indebtedness—­the facts in relation to the early life of Cortes, (we would he had borrowed the language as well as the matter!) if he had himself the means of consulting the works from which Prescott’s account was derived?  But it is unnecessary to pursue the argument; Mr. Wilson acknowledges that he knows nothing of the works in question.  “For our purpose,” he writes, “the standard histories of the conquest might as well be blank paper.”  We believe him; but had his purpose been, not “to denounce in general terms the venerable precedents so constantly quoted by our annalists, but to show their defects and their errors in detail,” he would hardly have used them, as he has done, as mere wadding for the great gun which he was loading, and which has exploded with such terrible effect.  His objection to the “standard histories” is, that their authors were Spaniards, ecclesiastics, royal historiographers,—­that they wrote under the eye of the Inquisition and the censorship.  Like objections would apply to the whole field of Spanish history.  The reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles the Fifth, and Philip the Second must, therefore, be as fabulous as the conquests of Mexico and Peru.  Accordingly, Mr. Wilson, when he wishes to study the history of Spain, declines to have recourse to Spanish writers.  He goes to writers of other countries, and has a very natural preference for such as speak the English tongue.  Besides that valuable work known among mortals as the “Encyclopaedia Britannica,” but usually cited by Mr. Wilson, in an off-hand and familiar way, as “Britannica,” he draws much upon a treasure of his own discovery, “a ponderous folio” of the seventeenth century, written in English by one Grimshaw, and containing a full and veritable history of Spain from the earliest epochs.  He makes much of Grimshaw, styling him “our chronicler.”  He pats the volume fondly, and calls it “my old folio,”—­just as Mr. Collier pats and fondles his celebrated old folio.  To judge from some specimens which Mr. Wilson gives us, the venerable Grimshaw cannot have the merit of being very easy of comprehension.  Here is an extract, just as we find it:—­“About the year 756, at which time there were great troops of Turks beginne to disperse themselves over all Armenia,