like winds, and filled with the same race, to teach the same religion, and to practise the same cruelties, until they again finished their cycle, and gave place to others, such as the laws of climate and population might determine.”  When the reader, after perusing this extraordinary relation, recovers his breath, he naturally casts his eye towards the bottom of the page, in the hope of finding some explanation of it.  He accordingly discovers a note, in which Mr. Wilson states that he has “given a little different shading to the famous tradition,” but that “such, translated into Indian phraseology, would be the popular accounts.”  Now he had a perfect right to interpret the tradition as he pleased.  He was at liberty to conjecture that it related to the Phoenicians, as the Spaniards were at liberty to conjecture that it related to St. Thomas.  Of the two interpretations, we prefer the latter.  Mr. Wilson, were he consistent, would have done so too; for how could the Aztecs, when they saw the Spaniards desecrating the Phoenician temples and destroying the Phoenician idols, suppose that these people were of the “same race,” and had come “to teach the same religion”?  We care little for his inconsistencies; but the feat which he has here performed, by his “shadings,” his “translations into Indian phraseology,” and his medley of “pale faces,” “great waters,” “floating houses,” “truncated pyramids,” “hard taskmasters,” “winds,” “climates,” “religions,” and “laws of population,” we believe to be unsurpassed by anything ever perpetrated in prose or rhyme, by Grecian bard or mediaeval monk.

He appears to think himself justified in taking these liberties with the Muse of History by his anxiety to construct a narrative that should not overstep the bounds of probability.  As if all history were not a chain of improbabilities, and what is most improbable were not often that which is most certain!  But if, at Mr. Wilson’s summons, we reject as improbable a series of events supported by far stronger evidence than can be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England, what is it, we may ask, that he calls upon us to believe?  His skepticism, as so often happens, affords the measure of his credulity.  He contends that Cortes, the greatest Spaniard of the sixteenth century, a man little acquainted with books, but endowed with a gigantic genius and with all the qualities requisite for success in warlike enterprises and an adventurous career, had his brain so filled with the romances of chivalry, and so preoccupied with reminiscences of the Spanish contests with the Moslems, that he saw in the New World nothing but duplicates of those contests,—­that his heated imagination turned wigwams into palaces, Indian villages into cities like Granada, swamps into lakes, a tribe of savages into an empire of civilized men,—­that, in the midst of embarrassments and dangers which, even on Mr. Wilson’s showing,