REVIEWS—A NEW HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. 443 
to him from Madrid were reliable authorities, while I insisted on the 
lawyer’s privilege of sifting the evidence—a labour he was incapable 
of performing from a physical infirmity.” The assumption here 
made that, because from the temporary deprivation and long weakness 
of sight, which compelled Prescott to pursue his historical labours 
with the aid of a reader and amanuensis, he was therefore incapable 
of sifting the evidence on which his historical deductions were based, 
is a very extraordinary one, and will be acquiesced in by few among 
the admirers of the great American historian. But the feelings of 
dissent from the basis thus set forth for a relative estimate of the 
merits of the two histories of the Conquest of Mexico, will not be 
diminished by a critical perusal of the author’s arguments; though 
in one respect he enjoys a great advantage over Prescott, in speaking 
of the incidents of the Conquest, with a personal knowledge of many 
of the localities where its chief events transpired. But Mr. R. A. 
Wilson has this grand qualification for “the lawyer’s privilege of 
sifting the evidence,” that he is a famous doubter. He disbelieves 
Cortes, he denies the very existence of Bernal Diaz, the most valua- 
able of hitherto accredited authorities; and as for Spanish bishops, 
priests, and missionaries, he can scarcely find words strong enough to 
express his contempt for them. Torquemada, Sahagan, and Herrera 
are alike “filled with childish trash,’ “monkish ideas distilled through 
Indian brains,” and exhibitions “of the besetting sin of Spaniards, 
the monk’s evil, lying ;” and after describing the history of Fernando 
de Alva—whom he contemptuously styles the guadroon,—as only the 
counterpart of the fabulous picturings by Cortes, “ with a few additions 
drawn from Scripture History, Moorish Romances, and the Arabian 
Nights ;” he thus closes his critique on that ingenious native historian 
of Aztec civilization :—‘‘ We now take leave of Fernando de Alva de 
Ixtlilxochitl, with the remark that an epithet, too common at Mexico, 
cannot with justice be applied to him—/e lies like a priest ; for if 
he does state what he knew to be untrue, he has done it far more 
elegantly than any of the priestly historians whose works we shall 
discuss.” Snch, it need scarcely be said, is a lawyer’s mode of sifting 
evidence such as the historian of the “‘ Conquest of Mexico” was in- 
capable of performing, and however consistent with the partizan tone 
of a Counsel in his address to a jury, is not the most promising for 
the impartial verdict of the judge. 
But besides this duty of a lawyer-like sifting of evidence, which 
