he did not reach Sienchimalen until the fourth day.”  The main discrepancy here is Mr. Wilson’s own handiwork, as he has confounded the “Sienchimalen” of Cortes with Jalapa, instead of identifying it with the “Socochima” of Bernal Diaz.  But so far as there is any real discrepancy, it may be sufficient to remark, in explanation of it, that Bernal Diaz professes to have written many years after the events which he narrates, and at a distance from the scene, while the letters of Cortes were written in the country, and while the events were taking place.  On another occasion, Bernal Diaz represents the Tlascalans as complaining that they could “get no cotton for their clothing.”  “If this writer,” says Mr. Wilson, “had really been acquainted with the tribes of the table-land, he must have known that the fibres of the maguey were, among them, substitutes for that article, and are even now used at the city of Mexico in the manufacture of some fine fabrics.”  We do not see how Bernal Diaz could be expected to know that the fibres of the maguey are now used in Mexican manufactures; neither can we comprehend how his statement, that the Tlascalans had no cotton, is at variance with Mr. Wilson’s assertion, that they used the maguey as a substitute.  We can imagine, however, that an old soldier, writing for the “uninitiated,” might prefer to speak of cotton, for which he had a Spanish word, rather than enter into explanations in regard to an Indian substitute for cotton, resembling it in appearance; while it is not easy to believe, on Mr. Wilson’s bare assertion, that an article in common use throughout the Valley of Mexico was wholly unknown to the inhabitants of the table-land.

These, and, so far as we can discover, these alone, are the proofs on which Mr. Wilson convicts Bernal Diaz of being a nonentity,—­of having, like Rosalind in “As you like it,” merely “counterfeited to be a man.”  As a natural sequitur to this delicious train of reasoning, he proceeds to take this nonentity, this “myth,” as his guide throughout the narrative of the Conquest.  “We may safely follow Diaz,” he remarks, “in unimportant particulars”; and the “particulars” of the Conquest being, in Mr. Wilson’s narration of them, all equally “unimportant,” he is so far consistent in following Diaz throughout.  Surely the Grecian fables will never grow old; here again we have blind Polyphemus groping in pursuit of cunning [Greek:  Outis].  But we must be allowed to ask Mr. Wilson why he has not rather preferred to take Gomara as his guide.  It is true that he entertains a strong loathing, a rooted aversion, for this harmless old chronicler, whom he calls always “Gomora,”—­associating him, apparently, by some confusion of ideas, with the ancient city of bad fame, buried with Sodom beneath the waters of the Dead Sea.  But, at least, he does not deny that Gomara had an actual existence, that he was a veritable somebody,—­a reality, and not a