390 



Scythians and Africans. Led by these travel- 

 lers into another hemisphere, we fancy ourselves 

 going over past times; for the hordes of Ame- 

 rica, in their primitive simplicity, display to 

 Europe " a sort of antiquity, of which we are 

 almost the contemporaries What was then 

 but an ornament of style, and a pleasure of the 

 mind, is become in our days the subject of grave 

 discussions. In a memoir published at Louisi- 

 ana, the whole of Grecian fable is explained, 

 without excluding the Amazons, by a knowledge 

 of the localities of lake Nicaragua, and of some 

 other American scenes ! 



If Oviedo, in addressing his letters to Cardinal 

 Bembo, believed he ought to flatter the taste of 

 a man so familiar with the study of antiquity, 

 the navigator Sir Walter Raleigh had a less 

 poetic aim*. He sought to fix the attention of 

 Queen Elizabeth on the great Empire of Guy- 

 ana, the conquest of which he proposed to her 

 government. He gave the description of the 

 rising of that gilded king {el dorado)*^, whose 

 chamberlains, furnished with long sarbacans, 

 blew powdered gold every morning on his body, 

 after having rubbed it over with aromatic oils : 



* This is the opinion of Mr. Southey. (History of Brazil, 

 vol. i, p. 608 and 653.) See also Cayley's Life of Raleigh, 

 vol. i, p. 163, 198, and 226. 



+ The word dorado is not the name of a country ; it sig- 

 nifies simply the gilded, el rey dorado. 



