450 REVIEWS—A NEW HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO. 
ever floated in mud; or that brigantines ever sailed in a salt-marsh ; 
or even that 100,000 men ever entered the mud-built city of Mexico 
by a narrow causeway in the morning, and, after fighting all day, re- 
turned by the same path at night to their camp; or that so large a 
besieging army as 150,000 men could be supported in a salt-marsh 
valley, surrounded by high mountains.” Gaining courage as he pro- 
ceeds, he doubts if human sacrifices were ever practised among the 
Mexicans. The whole is a mere lying version of the barbarian prac- 
tise of the Red Indian torturmg his prisoner. He doubts if picture- 
writing existed among the Mexicans; and regards the whole costly 
volumes published by Lord Kingsborough, as reprints of “ pious 
frauds” of the priests. One of their collectors, Boturini, is “the 
very personification of imposture and credulity ;’’ another, Veytia, is 
his match in credulity, and seemingly worse in morals; a high au- 
thority on Mexican History, Clavigero, is the interpreter of a mere 
valueless waif of “the manufactured antiquities ;’ Bernal Diaz, as we 
have already said, was “‘a myth,” never fought, never existed, except 
by virtue of the creation of a lymg Monk’s pen. Dr. Robertson, the 
Historian, and “principal of the University [High School] of Edin- 
burgh,” takes ‘“‘as his authority a Jesuitical author,” and writes 
“unmitigated nonsense about the Iroquois.” The bracketed explana- 
tion that the University of Edinburgh and its High School, are identi- 
cal is also the author’s own! And finally, he thus settles the merits 
of the greatest of America’s Historians: ‘‘Thus stand the literary 
monuments Mr. Prescott has constructed. They are castles resting 
upon a cloud, which reflects an eastern sunrise upon a western horizon !”” 
So far, then, we see that Mr. R. A. Wilson is an unmitigated 
doubter; nay, an open and avowed unbeliever in all the canonized 
worthies of the Calendar of Letters. But it must not be supposed 
he is therefore devoid of all faith. On the contrary, he has a very 
decided creed of his own. He believes in an extinct Phoenician Em- 
pire in Central America; finds in the cruciform ornaments of the 
ruins of Palenque, the emblem of Astarte ; in the Turtles sculptured 
at Uxmal, a Tyrian symbol; in the river-wall of Copan, a counter- 
part of the famous sea-wall of Tyre; recognizes in one of the sculp- 
tures figured in Stephens’ Central America, “the patron of the city 
of Palenque, the Phcenician Hercules ;” and in another, engraved by 
Dupaix, the “ American Isis or Astarte ;’’ and, m short, proves once 
more that nobody is so credulous as your unbeliever. 
As a new History of the Conquest of Mexico, we cannot commend 
