448 REVIEWS—A NEW HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. 
Whilst, however, we thus indicate the tone of writing in this new 
History, as differing widely from that which we generally look for in 
the impartial and unprejudiced historian; and the authoritative criti- 
cism as carried out in a fashion very different from what we might 
justly expect in the work of a learned Counsellor at Law, who has 
undertaken to supplement the defects of Prescott, and sift the evi- 
dence which—literally as well as metaphorically,—he had blindly 
followed ; nevertheless, while this ‘“‘ New History of the Conquest 
of Mexico,” will not supersede Prescott’s fascinating story of the 
triumphs of Cortes, there are points in it well worthy of the notice 
of the students of History. In testing the narrative of Cortes by 
the physical evidence which the scene of his chief triumphs and re- 
verses supplies, Mr. R. A. Wilson has availed himself of the Ameri- 
can Army Survey of the Valley of Mexico, and undertakes, on 
Seemingly satisfactory ground, to demonstrate that the Mexico of 
Montezuma was not built on an island in the lake of Tezcuco, nor 
surrounded by its waters; but that it stood nearly as now, enclosed 
by marshy ground, through which its causeways were formed, merely 
by throwing up the earth from a ditch or canal on either side. This 
appears to be proved by the present relative levels of the lake and 
the surrounding country, which show that the water, if standing at 
a height sufficient to reach the city, would drown much of the land 
which formed the chief theatre of Cortes’s deeds on ¢erra-firma. 
Still further, our new historian discredits the possible existence of 
Montezuma’s fabled capital, by affirming that no building of any 
magnitude can be erected in Mexico, im consequence of its marshy 
site, except on piles. Here is a specimen of the fashion in which he 
demolishes “ the fables of Cortes and Bernal Diaz :” 
“Tn the beginning of the dry season, November 8, 1519, Cortez made his formal 
entry into the city, and lodged in one spacious enclosure the whole of his little 
army. Here both Cortez and Diaz turn aside to paint wild figments of the mag- 
nificence of the capital of Montezuma. Oriental story, in its richest flights, has 
hardly ever reached the extravagance of their tales. Were either narrating a 
publie reception of the Caliph of Cordova, in the zenith of his glory, or the 
triumphal entry of those of Bagdad, they could not have pictured scenes com- 
parable to these described, as actually transpiring in their presence in this 
Indian metropolis. The enormity of the fiction is not, after all, its most striking 
feature. It lies rather in the credulity—not of the Spaniards, whose belief was 
regulated by authority—but in that of the whole civilized world, which credited 
these remarkable narrators without either scrutiny or evidence. The violation of 
natural laws, which their statements involved, may mot have been readily de- 
