dominant voices on his stage. Irving
made them subordinate, and made Columbus the chief player, which mode
Prescott reverses. The union of Castile and Aragon, and the subsequent
wars against the Moriscoes, which virtually put the knife in their
heart and concluded that triumph which had been begun by Charles Martel
at Tours, is an attractive portion of history. In Prescott, as in
Motley, is a wealth of research which fairly bewilders. Nothing is
extemporaneous. Archives are ransacked. Moldy correspondence is made
to tell its belated story. Certainly Prescott is abundant in
information. I do not recall, save in Gibbon's, a series of histories
where so much new knowledge is retailed as in Prescott. In seeming
looseness of phrase, I have used the term "new knowledge," but these
words are happily descriptive of "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of
Peru," because the fields were practically untrodden to the ordinary
reader. Everything is new, like a college to the freshman. We see a
New World in more senses than one. The freshness of the facts is
exhilarating. We march with Cortes; we conquer with Pizarro; we
inspect Montezuma's palace; we become interested in the industrial
system of the Incas, a system which should have given Henry George and
Edward Bellamy a delight without alloy; we perceive the incredible
valor and perseverance and endurance of Cortes; we front "new faces,
other minds;" we discover the Amazon through perils and hardships so
multitudinous and so severe as to tempt us to think these narrations a
myth; we see rapacity insatiable as death, a bloody idol-worship
pitiless and terrible; we read Prescott's history with growing avidity
and increasing information; read Prescott, and become wiser concerning
the aborigines of the Americas and the possibilities of human fortitude
and prowess. A study of the Spanish era of discovery and conquest
naturally led to a study of Charles V, grandson of Ferdinand and
Isabella, and Prescott has accordingly brought up to date "Robertson's
Life of Charles V," appending a biography of Charles V subsequent to
his abdication; and as a certificate of indefatigable industry in
historical research is an incomplete but exhaustive memoir, entitled,
"The Life of Philip II." This work is written with such fairness of
spirit and such wealth of information and investigation, such vivid
presentation of a reign which had more of the movement of the universal
dominion than any