must have taxed all his faculties to the utmost, he employed himself chiefly in coining lies with which to deceive his imperial master and all the inhabitants of Christendom,—­that, although he had a host of powerful enemies among his countrymen, enemies who were in a position to discover the truth, his statements passed unchallenged and uncontradicted by them,—­that the numerous adventurers and explorers who followed in his track, instead of exposing the falsity of his relations and descriptions, found their interest in embellishing the narrative,—­that a similar drama was performed by other actors and on a different stage,—­that the Peruvian civilization, so analogous to that of the Aztecs and yet so different from it, was, like that, the baseless fabric of a vision,—­that the whole intellect, in short, of the sixteenth century was employed in fashioning a gorgeous fable, and that to this end continents were discovered, nations exterminated, countries laid waste, evidences forged, and witnesses invented.  And this theory is to be swallowed in one solid and indigestible lump, unleavened with logic, unmoistened with grammar, unsweetened with rhetoric.  Let those whose appetites are strong, and whose olfactory nerves are not too delicate, sit down to the repast.

For our own part, we are quite satisfied with the bare contemplation of the fare.  Our readers, also, we suspect, have long ago been satiated.  They have dropped off, one by one, and left us alone with our kind entertainer.  What more we have to say must therefore be bestowed upon his private ear.  We shall speak with the greater freedom.  We know the exquisite pleasure we have given him.  We are sure that he is not ungrateful.  When his book comes to a second edition,—­with a change of title-page corresponding to some change in the popular sentiment,—­we shall have to submit to the same honors which he has inflicted on Mr. Prescott and “Rousseau de St. Hilaire”; he will reprint our article as “a flattering notice,”—­as the “Atlantic Monthly’s estimate of his researches.”  We beg to call his attention to our closing remarks, which, indeed, may serve as a digest of the whole.  When he has “translated them into Indian phraseology,” (we regret that we cannot save him this trouble,) and “reduced them to reality,” we shall take our leave of him, not without a mournful presentiment that the separation is to be eternal.

There are many points of difference between his work and Mr. Prescott’s “History of the Conquest of Mexico”; but the chief distinction, we think, may be thus stated.  If the foundations on which Mr. Prescott’s narrative is built should ever be overthrown,—­a contingency which as yet we do not apprehend,—­that narrative would still rank among the masterpieces of our literature.  It could no longer be received as a truthful relation of what had actually happened in the past; but it would be received as a most faithful and graphic relation of what had been asserted, of what was once universally