passed
by anything ever perpetrated in prose or rhyme, by Grecian bard or
mediaeval monk.

He appears to think himself justified in taking these liberties with the
Muse of History by his anxiety to construct a narrative that should not
overstep the bounds of probability. As if all history were not a chain
of improbabilities, and what is most improbable were not often that
which is most certain! But if, at Mr. Wilson's summons, we reject as
improbable a series of events supported by far stronger evidence than
can be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or the
Norman conquest of England, what is it, we may ask, that he calls upon
us to believe? His skepticism, as so often happens, affords the measure
of his credulity. He contends that Cortes, the greatest Spaniard of the
sixteenth century, a man little acquainted with books, but endowed with
a gigantic genius and with all the qualities requisite for success in
warlike enterprises and an adventurous career, had his brain so filled
with the romances of chivalry, and so preoccupied with reminiscences
of the Spanish contests with the Moslems, that he saw in the New World
nothing but duplicates of those contests,--that his heated imagination
turned wigwams into palaces, Indian villages into cities like Granada,
swamps into lakes, a tribe of savages into an empire of civilized
men,--that, in the midst of embarrassments and dangers which, even on
Mr. Wilson's showing, must have taxed all his faculties to the utmost,
he employed himself chiefly in coining lies with which to deceive his
imperial master and all the inhabitants of Christendom,--that, although
he had a host of powerful enemies among his countrymen, enemies who were
in a position to discover the truth, his statements passed unchallenged
and uncontradicted by them,--that the numerous adventurers and explorers
who followed in his track, instead of exposing the falsity of his
relations and descriptions, found their interest in embellishing the
narrative,--that a similar drama was performed by other actors and on a
different stage,--that the Peruvian civilization, so analogous to that
of the Aztecs and yet so different from it, was, like that, the baseless
fabric of a vision,--that the whole intellect, in short, of the
sixteenth century was employed in fashioning a gorgeous fable, and that
to this end continents were discovered, nations exterminated, countries
laid waste, evidences forged, and witnesses i