“myth,”—­that he was the chaplain of Cortes, that he had access to the papers of the great commander, that he wrote a history of the Conquest, and that this history is still extant.  Mr. Wilson himself asserts that the dispatches of Cortes “and the work of Gomora are the only original documents touching the Conquest of Mexico, its people, its civilization, its difficulties, and its dangers.”  After this declaration, it is somewhat remarkable, that, throughout his narrative of the Conquest, while continually quoting from Diaz, he makes not a single reference to Gomara; and he even censures Mr. Prescott for having pursued a different course.  How shall we explain this fact?  Alas for Gomara! he wrote in his native Castilian, no Lockhart or Folsom had done him into English, and so he missed his chance of having his statements cited, and, possibly even,—­though we should not like to hazard an assertion on this point,—­of having his name correctly spelt, by the author of the “New History of the Conquest of Mexico.”

It remains only that we should notice, as briefly as possible, the use which Mr. Wilson has made of his two authorities, the translations of Bernal Diaz and Cortes, which, rejecting all assistance from other quarters, he takes for the basis of his narrative.  That narrative is constructed on a plan which, we venture to say, is without a parallel in literature.  Like whatever else is strikingly original, it cannot be described; we can only hope to convey a faint idea of it by some random illustrations.  To nearly every statement which he notices in the works before him Mr. Wilson offers a flat contradiction.  When these statements relate to numbers, his method of treating them is a systematic one.  He has picked out of Bernal Diaz, who wrote in an avowed spirit of hostility to Gomara, a pettish remark, that the exaggerations of the latter are so great, that, when he says eighty thousand, we may read one thousand.  This piece of rhetoric Mr. Wilson receives literally, and makes it a rule of measurement, applying it with more or less exactness,—­not, however, to the statements of Gomara, with whose work he is acquainted only at second hand, but to those of Cortes and of Bernal Diaz himself!  Thus, in every computation of the number of the enemy’s forces, or of the Indian allies who joined the Spaniards in their contest with the Aztecs, Mr. Wilson “takes the liberty,” to use his own phrase, of “dropping” one or more ciphers from the amount.  This mode of adapting the narrative to his own conceptions he calls “reducing it to reality.”  When Cortes—­not Gomara, be it remembered—­computes the number of his allies at eighty thousand, Mr. Wilson says, “Let us drop the thousands, and assume eighty as the actual number. We must do so often.” When Cortes writes “thirty-five thousand,” Mr. Wilson prefers to say “three hundred or so.”  When Diaz writes “twelve thousand,” Mr. Wilson suggests that we should read “five hundred.”  Cortes says that he caused a