giant, and it tamed his volatile passions, and concentrated his flashing powers, and put iron into his will. Everything, including life itself, was to him of little importance, compared with the conquest of Mexico. In his darkest hours of defeat and despondency, when hope appeared to all others but the insanity of folly, he never gave up his project, but renewed his attempts to perform the "impossible" with the coolness of one setting about a commonplace enterprise. It is needless to say that this idea made him unscrupulous, and silenced all objections to the commission of convenient crime. He was not cruel by nature; that is, he took no pleasure in viewing or inflicting pain: but his mind was remorseless. Like other conquerors, he never allowed his feelings to interfere with his plans, and carelessly sacrificed friends and foes to the success of a project. His hand executed at once what his mind conceived, not so much because he excelled other men in vigor, but because he was not deterred from action by any scruples. Remorselessness is almost ever the key to that vigor which is so much praised in great warriors and statesmen. If human nature consisted simply of intellect and will, the world would be full of vigorous characters; but the vigor would be demoniacal. To a cruel man the bloodshed which attended the conquest of Mexico would have been pleasant of itself; to Cortés, who was its cause, it was a mere means to an end. The desolation of a province and the butchery of its inhabitants were merely prócesses of working out a practical problem. The remorselessness of thought produces more suffering than the cruelty of passion. The latter may be glutted with a few victims at a time; the former may scatter firebrands arrows, and death, over an empire. Cortés, in this respect, was not worse than a hundred others whose "vigor" is the admiration of the world, and the inspiration of the devil.

No general ever excelled Cortés in the command he exercised over the minds and hearts of his followers. He knew them better than they knew themselves, and his ready eloquence reached the very sources of their volitions. He was at once their commander and companion. He could bring them round to his plans against the evidence of their five senses, and make them dance in the very chains of famine and fatigue. The enterprise would have been repeatedly abandoned, had it not been for his coolness, intrepidity, and honeyed eloquence. His whole lawless and licentious crew he held by a fascination for which they could not themselves account. They suspected him of making their lives and fortunes subsidiary to his ambition; they taxed him with deceit and treachery; they determined again and again to leave him; and yet they followed him - followed him, against their desires and reason, to encounter the most appalling dangers, for an object which receded as they advanced, and which they constantly pronounced a chimera. The speeches of Cortés, given by Mr. Prescott, are master-pieces of practical eloquence. Indeed, wherever Cortés was, there could be but one will; and what authority was unable to do, he did by finesse and persuasion.

Cortés was brave in almost every sense of the term. He combined the courage of the knight-errant and the martyr. His daring in battle, perhaps, was not greater than that exhibited by some of his officers, - Alvarado, for example; but he excelled all in the power of endurance. His constancy of purpose had the obstinacy of sheer stupidity, and seems almost incompatible with his fiery valor. Famine, fatigue, pestilence, defeat, every extreme of mental and physical wretchedness, could present no arguments sufficiently strong to shake his purpose of conquest. What depressed his followers only called forth his courage in its most splendid light. When he himself had most cause for despondency, his serene valor not only mounted above his own miseries, but enabled him to use all the resources of his fertile mind in cheering his followers. Wounded, bleeding, wasted by famine, broken down by disease and despair, there was always one voice whose magical tones could make their hearts leap with their old daring, and send them again on their old enterprise of peril and death.

We cannot follow the genius of Cortés as it was developed in the events of the conquest, and attempt an abstract of what Mr. Prescott has performed with such fulness, richness, and power. Rarely has so splendid a theme been treated by a historian so fortunate at once in the possession of requisite materials and requisite capacity. Among the many characteristics of the work, that which will be most likely to strike and charm the general reader is its picturesqueness of description, both as regards incidents and scenery. The freshness and vividness with which everything is presented is a continual stimulant to attention; and there is a nerve in the movement of the style which gives to the narrative a continual vitality. Among these descriptions we would particularize the account of the retreat from Mexico, in the second volume, and the battles which preceded its final conquest and destruction, in the third, as being especially pervaded by intense life. The critical reader, also, will not fail to perceive that the interest of particular passages is subservient to the general effect of the whole, and that the author has produced a work of art as well as a history. That quality of objectiveness, which we have mentioned as characterizing the mind of Mr. Prescott, and favorably distinguishing him from many eminent historians, is especially obvious when we contrast the representations in "Ferdinand and Isabella" with those in the "Conquest of Mexico." The objects are different, and in each case they are presented in their own form, life, and character. We can conceive of the two histories as the production of separate minds. But few historians are thus capable of representing objects in white light. To see anything through the medium of another mind, is too often to see it caricatured. Objects, to the egotist, whether he be called thinker or coxcomb, are commonly mirrors which more or less reflect himself. Nature, events, and persons, are considered as deriving their chief importance from their relation to him. This relation, and not their relation to each other, he is prone to call the philosophy of history.

PRESCOTT'S CONQUEST OF PERU.*

THIS work has probably been the most extensively popular of Mr. Prescott's histories, though the subject would not seem to admit so many elements of interest as the others. In "Ferdinand and Isabella" he had a period of time crowded with important events and striking characters, a period which witnessed the organization of a powerful nation out of seemingly discordant elements, and which opened to the historian the whole field of European politics during one of the most important epochs of modern civilization. In the "Conquest of Mexico" he had an epic story, capable of the strictest artistic treatment, with that strangeness in incidents and scenery which fastens most readily on the attention. If he has made the present work more interesting than the others, it must be owing to greater felicity in its treatment. This felicity does not arise from a departure from his historical method, or from the adoption of a new form of composition, but is the result of a more complete development of his method and his style. In the "Conquest of Peru" his characteristic merits are displayed in their best aspect, exhibiting the effects of time and experience in giving more intensity to his conceptions, and