and partly because they were, after their manner, religious men, and thought they did God service by destroying all the muniments of the synagogue of Satan. Their zeal was ill-directed; the loss is irreparable: yet so our puritan ancestors broke down the carved work of the sanctuary; and scattered to the winds and the rains inexhaustible treasures of learning, in the same spirit which gave to the fire the records of the Aztecs. We may not cast a stone against the Spaniards: they knew not what they did.

The second difficulty is that of repeating, so as to attract the reader, in the first place, and afterwards to win his grace and favour, a thrice-told tale. For, setting aside all intermediate versions of the story of Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro,—and even such portions of it as have percolated into fiction are no mean disadvantages to the fourth historical narrator,—Robertson, Washington Irving, and Prescott are no ordinary "Richmonds in the field." He should be a hardy writer who, with all the means and appliances of recent investigation to boot, would undertake to re-write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Southey, writing to his friend Beresford respecting his own forthcoming History of Brazil, observes, that if Robertson's other histories be no better than his History of America, his worth as a chronicler is of the slenderest. This may be so; but it is very difficult, even if it be meet, to demolish an established reputation; and zeal for "very truth" will never eat up the general reader. Mr. Helps's present work, however, does not essentially affect the reputation of any one of these established authors. It regards the subject from an opposite point of view. It is a correlate, not a rival. It deals rather with the issues and the victims of the conquest than with the conquest of America itself. We hear as much of the bondmen as of the bondholders:

"Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni.”

Mr. Helps is more on Cato's side than on Cæsar's, as his own words testify. He purposes "to bring before the reader not conquest only, but the results of conquest: the mode of colonial government which ultimately prevailed, the extirpation of native races, the introduction of other races, the growth of slavery, and the settlement of the encomiendas, on which all Indian society depended, has been the object of this history."

The conception of his present work, however, had an ethnological basis, which should be kept in mind by the reader.

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"Some years ago," Mr. Helps informs us, being much interested in the general subject of slavery, and engaged in writing upon it, I began to investigate the origin of modern slavery. I soon found that the works commonly referred to gave me no sufficient insight into the matter. Questions, moreover, arose in my mind not immediately con

nected with slavery, but bearing closely upon it, with respect to the distribution of races in the New World. Why,' said I to myself, ' are there none but black men in this island? why are there none but copper-coloured men on that line of coast? how is it that in one town the white population predominates, while in another the aborigines still hold their ground? There must be a series of historical events which, if brought to light, would solve all these questions; and I will endeavour to trace this out for myself."

Having thus stated the particular aspect from which Mr. Helps's volumes are to be regarded, and accordingly shown that, in spite of his many precursors, he is not repeating an oft-told tale, we proceed to consider his execution of the task which he has now undertaken. It is not often that a rifacimento of a previous work is successful. The bloom of a first conception is apt to pass away; the critical faculty often becomes too potent for the well-being of the conceptive and pictorial powers. Akenside and Tasso marred the freshness of their original poems by recasting them; and we imagine that there are few readers of Clarendon and Johnson who do not regret that the former did not adhere to his intention of composing a biography instead of a history, or that the latter congealed in a stately journal the spirit and familiarity of his Letters from the Hebrides. Although, how.. ever, the History of the Spanish Conquest of America is based upon the well-known Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen, and is an enlargement of the earlier essay, we have no reason to regret in this instance that the plan has been expanded, and the subject submitted to a complete revision.

So far, indeed, from regretting that Mr. Helps has foregone his earlier undertaking, we are rather disposed to lament that, as regards the form of his present work, he has occasionally retained so many vestiges of that essay. We conceive the functions of the essayist to be essentially distinct from those of the historian. In the one case, it is not only allowable, but also becoming, that the writer should frequently appear in his own person, admit us to the conclave of his own meditations, and discuss, as it were, with his readers such social and ethical questions as may come in his way. But as regards history, it can hardly be, in our opinion, too pictorial and apart from the author himself. In the colouring of his narrative there must always be abundant opportunities for expressing his own sentiments, but the expression should flow naturally from the events recorded and from the characters introduced, and not from the personal interposition of the author him

* We are not willing to forget the thoughtful essayist in the picturesque historian. Mr. Helps, in a former work, has expressed the same idea more briefly and quaintly; he wishes to show "how the black people came to the New World, how the brown people faded away from certain countries in it, and what part the white people had in these doings."

self as chorus. We do not think, for example, that the pictorial effect of the narrative of the conquest is heightened by the author's informing us that some of it was composed during the troubles of the year 1848. Such intimation of a totally dissimilar crisis strikes us as an anachronism not unlike the presence of a figure essentially modern in a representation of the schools of Athens or the garden of Gethsemane. And much more startling is it to find the writer occasionally acting as interlocutor or eye-witness in a council-chamber three hundred years ago. Mr. Carlyle set this evil precedent in his Life and Letters of Cromwell: but his powers of word-painting are so peculiar, that we forgive in him a practice which in any other narrative we must regard as blemishes.

And we are the more inclined to regret in the present instance these occasional departures from the precedents of classical historians, because in the greater portion of his narrative Mr. Helps's diction possesses many of the striking excellencies of historical composition. His language is generally perspicuous and idiomatic, free from all the current tricks and devices of style, free from bravura and epigram, and remarkably pregnant in sense and picturesque in form. In a second edition a very slight amount of excision will render his narrative inferior in vigour and grace to none of modern date, and entitle the accomplished author to rank beside the very foremost of those who, in the present century, have added permanent works to the historical library of England. Our official growl is soon uttered; and while reading the passages which we shall presently bring forward from the volumes before us, the reader may very probably wonder that it should have been uttered at all. A much more difficult task now remains for us, that of conveying to our readers such a general view of the conquest of America as will justly represent the learning, the thoughtfulness, the practical wisdom, and the pictorial beauty of the narrative.

So far as the present volumes extend, the course of events group themselves around three principal figures, Columbus, Las Casas, and Cortes; and around two capital ethnological subjects, the characters of the conquered and their conquerors. Immediately belonging to these, and essentially interwoven with them, are numerous important questions upon colonial government and commerce, opposite aspects of civilisation, the meeting of the two great floods of European and Indian life, and the almost inevitable destiny of certain races of mankind to sink, to die away, to disappear, when brought into contact with stronger forms of social and religious life. Neither is the interest of Mr. Helps's volumes confined to the first encounter between the white and

the red man. The Negro race plays no unimportant part in the scene; the discovery of America being fraught with incalculable

misery for those who, drinking the waters of the Niger and the Gambia, seemed to be severed from the interests of Europe by insurmountable barriers of sand, by inhospitable shores, and by the beasts which it is not granted to man to harness to his chariot or to pen within his folds.

One of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Helps's volumes is that in which, under the somewhat quaint title of an "Imaginary Voyage," he has reviewed the aspect of the Indian races as they would have appeared to European eyes a generation before their invasion by the Spaniards. The voyage is imaginary; but the facts from which the review is constructed are collected from the journals of the first explorers with indefatigable pains. Of all the sections of his work, this has probably cost the author the most care and anxiety. He has admitted nothing unwarranted; he has carefully winnowed and sifted his authorities-bushels of chaff often returning to him but a few grains of wheat-and, like a dexterous worker in mosaic, he has set in a new frame, and arranged with rare pictorial skill, whatsoever he found scattered through printed or manuscript documents illustrative of the population, opinions, institutions, and civilisation of the various races of the new continent.

The history of the human race, its derivation, and its migrations, is no longer consigned to the hands of the mere speculator. Buffon and Lord Kaimes would not obtain a hearing at the present time. The questions of race and dispersion have been rescued from their hands by the severe investigations of the philologer and the physiologist. And so far as these fellowlabourers have proceeded hitherto, their conclusions seem to point to an original stock and cradle of the human race; and so far support equally the most ancient of records and of legends. Until better evidence has been adduced than that which satisfied Dr. Knox and some recent inquirers, we shall adhere to the belief that the high lands of Armenia sent forth the first detachment of emigrants to the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, "to Arachosia and Candaor east," and westward, through the Transcaucasian regions, to the central plateau of Europe between the Balkan and Carpathian Hills. But the very restriction of the area of dispersion, and the implied derivation of mankind from a common stock-the question of a single pair is immaterial—only render more difficult the problem of the population of the new continent. The parentage of America, indeed, has nearly as many claimants as that of the oldest patrician house in Europe. It has been derived from the Phoenicians, whose known but unrecorded voyages seem to give them some title to be regarded as the progenitors of the nations west of the Pillars of Hercules. It has been traced to the dispersed Hebrews, who assuredly, centuries before

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their place as a nation was made void, had permeated to nearly every corner of the civilised world, and who were found alike on the banks of the Tagus and of the Amour. But in the strict

sense of the word the Jews founded no colonies, since they drifted over the earth, in pursuit of gain or shelter, only as families or individuals. Nor, in spite of some startling religious ideas contained in the creed of the Aztecs, is there any reason or necessity for assuming that the descendants of Abraham ever visited, before the conquest, either the eastern or western flank of the new continent. Mr. Helps indulges in no premature speculations on this question, although he intimates his general agreement with Humboldt and other sound inquirers, that the oceanitic races were probably the first peoplers of America. Even then, however, the curtain of the mystery is scarcely lifted. For, whatever may have been the source of either Mexican or Peruvian civilisation, it is certain, not only that each was of comparatively recent date, and, had we the documents, might probably be brought within chronological limits, but also that the Aztec and Capac dynasties had reared themselves upon nations older and mightier than themselves, and whose antiquity and power are attested by monuments no less striking than the pyramids of the Pharaohs, and by the ruins of cities as expressive of departed might as Thebes, or Babylon, or Hecatompolis.

Mr. Helps "imagines" a voyage undertaken by navigators well qualified to observe and record what they beheld, and sufficiently acquainted with the diversified nations and institutions of Europe in the fifteenth century to comprehend at once the points of resemblance and difference between the old and the new continent. They depart, too, as the real discoverers did after them, deeply imbued with the religious or superstitious prejudices of their age, eager to bring within the pale of the church whatsoever forms of unbelief they might encounter, and disposed to regard all that was not of "the household of faith" as an unclean and abominable thing. In two respects only they differ from the actual explorers; they did not go forth in quest of gold or pearls, nor to render the red man their tributaries and slaves.

To the supposed or the actual discoverers at once presented itself a palpable difference between the inhabitants of the islands which, like so many ante-chambers, stud the eastern coast of America, and the inhabitants of the continent. Various degrees and discrepancies in civilisation were also perceptible in the population of the mainland itself. The seat of the great empires was either, like Mexico, drawn deep within the mainland and radiated towards the sea, or, like Peru, it was seated on the west flank of that gigantic spine of the continent which, even at a distance of 150 miles, casts the shadow of its peaks and ridges upon the