“This,” said Amyas, “is indeed the proudest day of my life!  I have lost one brother, but I have gained fourscore.  God do so to me and more also, if I do not deal with you according to the trust which you have put in me this day!”

We, I suppose, are to believe that we have a right to laugh at Amyas’s scheme as frantic and chimerical.  It is easy to amuse ourselves with the premises, after the conclusion has been found for us.  We know, now, that he was mistaken:  but we have not discovered his mistake for ourselves, and have no right to plume ourselves on other men’s discoveries.  Had we lived in Amyas’s days, we should have belonged either to the many wise men who believed as he did, or to the many foolish men, who not only sneered at the story of Manoa, but at a hundred other stories, which we now know to be true.  Columbus was laughed at:  but he found a new world, nevertheless.  Cortez was laughed at:  but he found Mexico.  Pizarro:  but he found Peru.  I ask any fair reader of those two charming books, Mr. Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and his Conquest of Peru, whether the true wonders in them described do not outdo all the false wonders of Manoa.

But what reason was there to think them false?  One quarter, perhaps, of America had been explored, and yet in that quarter two empires had been already found, in a state of mechanical, military, and agricultural civilization superior, in many things, to any nation of Europe.  Was it not most rational to suppose that in the remaining three-quarters similar empires existed?  If a second Mexico had been discovered in the mountains of Parima, and a second Peru in those of Brazil, what right would any man have had to wonder?  As for the gold legends, nothing was told of Manoa which had not been seen in Peru and Mexico by the bodily eyes of men then living.  Why should not the rocks of Guiana have been as full of the precious metals (we do not know yet that they are not) as the rocks of Peru and Mexico were known to be?  Even the details of the story, its standing on a lake, for instance, bore a probability with them.  Mexico actually stood in the centre of a lake—­why should not Manoa?  The Peruvian worship centred round a sacred lake—­why not that of Manoa?  Pizarro and Cortez, again, were led on to their desperate enterprises by the sight of small quantities of gold among savages, who told them of a civilized gold-country near at hand; and they found that those savages spoke truth.  Why was the unanimous report of the Carib tribes of the Orinoco to be disbelieved, when they told a similar tale?  Sir Richard Schomburgk’s admirable preface to Raleigh’s Guiana proves, surely, that the Indians themselves were deceived, as well as deceivers.  It was known, again, that vast quantities of the Peruvian treasure had been concealed by the priests, and that members of the Inca family had fled across the Andes, and held out against the Spaniards.  Barely fifty years had elapsed since then;—­what more probable than that