CHAPTER X. 

 1521. 



DUTY OF A HISTORIAN. MOTIVES OF THE CONQUEST. CHAR- 

 ACTER AND DEEDS OF CORTEZ. MATERIALS OF THE CON- 

 QUEST. ADVENTURERS PRIESTS INDIAN ALLIES. HIS- 

 TORICAL ASPECTS OF THE CONQUEST. 



It is perhaps one of the most difficult duties of a historian, who 

 desires to present a faithful picture of a remote age, to place himself 

 in such a position as to draw the moral from his story with justice 

 to the people and the deeds he has described. He is obliged to 

 forget, not only his individuality and all the associations or preju- 

 dices with which he has grown up surrounded, but he must, in 

 fact, endeavor to make himself a man and an actor in the age of 

 which he writes. He must sympathize justly, but impartially, with 

 the past, and estimate the motives of his fellow beings in the epoch 

 he describes. He must measure his heroes, not by the standard of 

 advanced Christian civilization under which he has been educated, 

 but by the scale of enlightened opinion which was then acknow- 

 ledged by the most respectable and intellectual classes of society. 



When we approach the Conquest of Mexico with these impartial 

 feelings, we are induced to pass lighter judgments on the prominent 

 men of that wonderful enterprise. The love of adventure or glory, 

 the passion of avarice, and the zeal of religion, — all of which 

 mingled their threads with the meshes of this Indian web, were, 

 unquestionably, the predominant motives that led the conquerors 

 to Mexico. In some of them, a single one of these impulses was 

 sufficient to set the bold adventurer in motion ; — : in others, perhaps, 

 they were all combined. The necessary rapidity of our narra- 

 tive has confined us more to the detail of prominent incidents than 

 we would have desired had it been our task to disclose the won- 

 drous tale of the conquest alone ; but it would be wrong, even in 



