mpty
hands. If there be, in the compass of what the author calls "these
volumes,"--though to us, perhaps from inability to distinguish between
unity and duality, his work appears to be comprised in a single tome,--a
sentence decently constructed, a foreign name correctly spelt, a
punctuation-mark rightly placed, a fact clearly and accurately stated,
or an argument that is not capable of an easy reduction to the absurd,
we have not been so unfortunate as to discover it. Mr. Wilson is a man
who, to use Carlyle's favorite expression, has "swallowed all formulas."
The principles that have generally been held to govern the use of
language appear to him mere arbitrary rules, invented by the "sevenfold
censorship" and the Spanish Inquisition, for the purpose of preventing
the free communication of ideas. All such trammels he rejects; and,
accordingly, we have to thank him, so far as mere style is concerned,
for an uninterrupted flow of pleasure in the perusal of his book,
adorned as it is with "graces" that are very far indeed "beyond the
reach of Art."

We come now to those important questions which Mr. Wilson was not,
indeed, the first to agitate, but which he has awakened from their
profound slumbers in the bosom of the Hon. Lewis Cass and the pages
of the "North American Review." We are not to be tempted into writing
another "New History of the Conquest of Mexico"; but we shall endeavor
to state with clearness those points on which the world has had the
temerity to differ from the "high authorities" we have named. It has
been, then, commonly asserted, and is, we fear, by the great mass of
our readers still superstitiously believed, that, at the time of the
discovery of this continent, there existed, in certain portions of it,
nations not wholly barbarous, and yet not civilized, according to our
notions of that term,--nations which had regular governments and
systems of polity, many correct notions in regard to morals, and some
acquaintance with Art and with the refinements of life,--but which were
yet, in a great measure, ignorant of the true principles of science,
little skilled in mechanics, and addicted to the practice of idolatrous
rites. This assertion would seem to have some _prima-facie_ evidence in
its favor. The regions in which these nations are said to have existed
lie within the tropics; and it is a well-established principle, that a
genial climate, a fertile soil, the consequent facilities for obtaining
a sub