122 
EXTINCTION' OF THE GUANCHES. 
race perished mostly in 1491, in the terrible pestilence called 
the modorra, which was attributed to the quantity of dead 
bodies left exposed in the open air by the Spaniards after the 
battle of La Laguna. The nation of the Guanches was 
extinct at the beginning of the seventeenth century; a few 
old men only were found at Candelaria and Guimar. 
It is, however, consoling to find that the whites have not 
always disdained to intermarry with the natives; but the 
Canarians of the present day, whom the Spaniards familiarly 
call Islenos (Islanders), have Very powerful motives for 
denying this mixture. In a long series of generations time 
effaces the characteristic marks of a race ; and as the de- 
scendants of the Andalusians settled at Teneriffo are them- 
selves of dark complexion, we may conceive that intermar- 
riages cannot have produced a perceptible change in the 
colour ot the whites. It is very certain that no native of 
pure race exists in the whole island. It is true that a few 
Canarian families boast of their relationship to the last shep- 
herd-king of Guimar, but these pretensions do not rest on 
very solid foundations, and arc only renewed from time to 
time when some Canarian of more dusky hue than his coun- 
trymen is prompted to solicit a commission in the service of 
the king of Spain. 
A short time after the discovery c-f America, when Spain 
was at the highest pinnacle of her glory, the gentle character 
of the Guanches was the fashionable topic, as we in mu- 
tinies laud the Arcadian innocence of the inhabitants of 
Otaheite. In both these pictures the colouring is more 
vivid than true. When nations, wearied with mental enjoy- 
ments, behold nothing in the refinement of manners but’ the 
germ of depravity, they are pleased with the idea, that in 
some distant region, in the first dawn of civilization, infant 
society enjoys pure and perpetual felicity. To this seuti- 
ment lacitus owed a. part of his success, when ho sketched 
for the Homans, subjects of the Ciesars, a picture of the 
manners of the inhabitants of Germany. The same senti- 
ment gives an ineffable charm to the narrative of those tra- 
vellers who, at the close of the last century, visited the 
South Sea Islands. 
The inhabitants of those islands, too much vaunted (and 
previously anthropophagi), resemble, under more than one 
point of view, the Guanches of Teneriffe. Both nations 
