cott, how few, comparatively, are those to whom it has been more than a biography of Cortez; and perhaps, of the number, fewer still who have not wholly lost sight of the vices of the man in the dazzling career of the intrepid soldier. And, indeed, it is impossible not to be attracted, and difficult not to admire, and the fascinated senses are apt to get the mastery, when we attempt to weigh such a character in the nice scales of a pure morality.

That element of the highest greatness Cortez lacked. The influences of his early life, and the objects of his matured ambition, neither generated nor permitted a strict code of ethics. The age in which he lived was splendid, rather than good, and its great prizes were won by the scheming, rather than the scrupulous-by the daring, rather than the devout. If he had remained in the cloistered halls of Salamanca in honour, instead of being driven from them in disgrace, the natural force of his character would doubtless have won him some distinction, in the career to which he had been destined; but he fortunately obeyed the instinct that more surely indicated his appropriate sphere. Reckless, restless, convivial and dissolute, he loathed a studious and quiet life, that would have trammelled his wild tastes, and he sought the banner of Gonsalvo of Cordova, because the camp offered all that the cloister denied. When his attention was attracted to the vast field of enterprise and gain opened by Columbus, in the New World, his soul seems to have been filled with no large designs of chivalric enterprise. No lofty visions of new empires, added by his sword to the crown of Spain, or of thronging converts, led by him to the cross of Christ, fired the ardour of the soldier, or inflamed the zeal of the Catholic. "I come for gold!" said he to the Secretary of Ovando, when he reached Hispaniola. "I come for gold!" and the succeeding fourteen years of his life, varied only by the expedition to Cuba, the conspiracy against Velasquez, and amorous intrigues, exciting general condemnation, were passed in the accretion of the wealth he sought, from the broad lands he cultivated and the public offices he held. With the subsequent responsibility of command, however, and the consciousness of a great field of enterprise opening before him, a sudden change passed upon his character, and the energies, wasted in unworthy pursuits before, were recalled, for the

achievement of a great purpose. He escaped from the grasp of Velasquez, a new man. His genius sprang, full armed, from the brain of circumstance, and instead of the reckless, restless, purposeless youth, whose career, for fourteen years, had been unmarked by praise, he developed an instant fitness for every position, a prompt resource for every emergency, an immovable decision of purpose, and an astute forecast, as little to be expected from his previous life as consistent with his immature years. The records of adventure and daring present to us no spectacle more striking than the muster of his little band of six hundred men, upon the scorching sands of Vera Cruz. Widely separated from each other in motives, they were one in the face of a common danger, and under the rule of a controlling mind. Before them stretched a great empire, swarming with a hostile people, and appalling the fancy with its untried dangers. Behind them was the ocean, reddened by their burning ships, whose flames lighted up the figure of Cortez, as he sternly watched the destruction of the last hope of the wavering. As he revolved in his thoroughly awakened mind the perils and results of the great enterprise before him, the treasure to be gained was doubtless still one of his strongest incentives; but that passion was hardly so vile, now that it was linked with a higher ambition and more extended aims. This was the starting-point of his greatness, and each onward step but served to develope his extraordinary character. A young man, of but thirty-three years, he won the hearts of his Indian allies with the prompt skill of a trained diplomatist, and ruled the discordant elements of his disaffected camp with the iron hand of a veteran leader. In his after career, there was much that stained his name, and deserved the severest censure; but, though never a good man, even measured by the standard of the age in which he lived, he was unswervingly bold and undeniably great.

The discontent that ripened into mutiny, and the envy that plotted against his life-the barriers reared by nature, and the armed myriads that swarmed around him-opposed no lasting obstacles in the path of his invincible. purposes, and, with an unwavering confidence in himself, that bordered on the sublime, he swept on in his appointed

course.

With the recall of Cortez to Spain, the romance of Mexican history closes. From that point, where the polished narrative of Prescott leaves us, Mr. Mayer's clear and well-digested record of subsequent events brings us down to the present time. What he has to relate lacks the engrossing interest of personal biography, and the thrilling accompaniments of the conquest; but the philosophical student will perhaps find his pages the more interesting, in that they substitute for the rush of antecedent events the calm analysis of the results that flowed from them, and the investigation of causes that, in the slow processes of their development, exchanged colonial rule for independent nationality. The history of the world has very imperfectly solved the problem, how nations shall be best governed. To the reverse of the proposition, however, Spain may be held to have furnished a strong illustration, in the government of her Mexican dependancy, after the death of Cortez. Although the spirit of religion, or bigotry, mingled largely with all schemes of conquest and settlement in the New World, the controlling motive was unquestionably gold. The first measures adopted, therefore, were such as looked to the readiest and fullest supply of treasure. The natural advantages of the country, its facilities for commercial, agricultural or manufacturing development, were of too secondary importance to merit consideration, so long as the supply of the precious metals held out. Not only the capacities of the soil, but the common obligations of humanity, were disregarded by this grasping avarice, and the native population of Mexico were so absolutely degraded into mere instruments for the accretion of wealth, that it really seemed to need the bull of his Holiness, issued in 1537, declaring the aborigines to be "ipsos veros homines," to raise the aborigines to the dignity of men. This lust of gold, first manifested by the government at home and the settlers in Mexico, against the natives of the country, which led to their abject debasement, and subjected them to cruel wrongs, was also at the bottom of that shortsighted and grievous policy, which, afterward carried out in the vice-royal rule, became the cause of final rupture, and has always contributed to retard the expansion of Mexico. We pronounce such a policy eminently unwise, because, although it attains one of the results of labour,

without the delay of its intermediary processes, it attains only one, and that the least important, of those results. The prosperity of a country thus enriched may be splendid; but it is unsound. Those steady virtues that are developed in a people, by the habit of continuous labour, and that element of permanence in governmental institutions which is born in the slow travail of gradual development, are worth to a nation infinitely more than the golden treasures of the most prolific soil. Wealth, especially when too easily acquired, hardens and corrupts the heart of nations, as of individuals, and we do not need to look beyond the history we are considering for the evidence of our views. From Guatemozin, stretched upon the rack, in the palace of his Aztec forefathers, to the bribery, but yesterday, of some government official, in the capital of modern Mexico, the chain of evidence is unbroken. With, here and there, an exception, the more striking from its rarity, the history of Spanish rule in Mexico is a succession of unwise laws, harshly enforced; of narrow views, obstinately carried out; of grasping and tyrannic viceroys, seldom comprehending or caring for the true interests of the people, but intent only upon the spoils of their official station. To drain the country of its wealth, and to create a market for Spain, were the leading aims of this ruinous policy. The spirit of commercial enterprise, and the idea of freedom of opinion, were strangled in the very cradle. A harsh and prohibitory system of imposts checked the one, and a corrupt church accomplished the other. The people were bowed to the earth with taxes. Church and State strove with marvellous ingenuity each to overstep the other, in the race of imposition. From the egg brought to the market, the Indian who carried it, and the sale that transferred it, up through all the transactions and articles of trade, every thing was taxed. The only exceptions were travellers, clergymen and paupers; the first, we suppose, because their presence was a source of profit; the second, because they were a tax-laying party; and the last, for an obvious reason. Of the most infamous of all these taxes, we will let Mr. Mayer speak for himself:

"It was not enough to tax the necessaries and luxuries of lifethings actually in existence and tangible-but, through a refined

alchemy of political invention, he managed to coin even the superstitions of the people, and add to the royal income, by the sale of "Bulls de defuntos," "Bulls for eating milk and eggs during Lent," and "Bulls of composition." Bales upon bales of these badly printed licenses were sent out from Spain, and sold by priests, under the direction of a commissary.

"The villany of this scheme may be more evident, if we detain the reader a moment, in order to describe the character of these spiritual licenses. Whoever possessed a "Bull de cruzada" might be absolved from all crimes except heresy; nor could he be suspected even of so deadly a sin, as long as this talismanic paper was in his possession. Besides this, it exempted him from many of the rigorous fasts of the church; while two of them, of course, possessed double the value of one. The "Bull for the dead" was a needful passport for a sinner's soul from purgatory. There was no escape, without it, from the Satanic police, and the poor and ignorant classes suffered all the pains of their miserable friends, who had gone to the other world, until they were able to purchase the inestimable ticket of release. But, of all these wretched impostures, the "Bull of composition was probably the most shameful, as well as dangerous. It "released persons who had stolen goods from the obligation to restore them to the owner, provided the thief had not been moved to commit his crime in consequence of a belief that he might escape from its sin, by subsequently purchasing the immaculate 'Bull." 999 Nor were these all the virtues of this miraculous document. It had the power to "correct the moral offence of false weights and measures, tricks and frauds in trade, all the obliquities of principle and conduct by which swindlers rob honest folks of their property, and, finally, whilst it converted stolen articles into the lawful property of the thief, it also assured to purchasers the absolute ownership of whatever they obtained by modes that ought to have brought them to the gallows. The price of these bulls depended on the amount of goods stolen; but it is just to add that only fifty of them could be taken by the same person in a year.”

After the sceptre came the crozier, and when the servants of the crown had gathered in the royal harvest of taxation, the followers of the cross swarmed to the gleaning of the field. If the paternal rule was bad, the maternal rule was worse; for while both grasped at the purse— the one claiming a tithe, where the other raised a taxthe Holy Mother laid her blighting hand upon the mind of the country. The religion introduced by Cortez was to be enforced by Loyola. The sword and the inquisition! stern teachers these of the religion of love! The simple