nvented. And this theory
is to be swallowed in one solid and indigestible lump, unleavened with
logic, unmoistened with grammar, unsweetened with rhetoric. Let those
whose appetites are strong, and whose olfactory nerves are not too
delicate, sit down to the repast.

For our own part, we are quite satisfied with the bare contemplation of
the fare. Our readers, also, we suspect, have long ago been satiated.
They have dropped off, one by one, and left us alone with our kind
entertainer. What more we have to say must therefore be bestowed upon
his private ear. We shall speak with the greater freedom. We know
the exquisite pleasure we have given him. We are sure that he is not
ungrateful. When his book comes to a second edition,--with a _change of
title-page_ corresponding to some change in the popular sentiment,--we
shall have to submit to the same honors which he has inflicted on Mr.
Prescott and "Rousseau de St. Hilaire"; he will reprint our article
as "a flattering notice,"--as the "Atlantic Monthly's estimate of his
researches." We beg to call his attention to our closing remarks, which,
indeed, may serve as a digest of the whole. When he has "translated
them into Indian phraseology," (we regret that we cannot save him this
trouble,) and "reduced them to reality," we shall take our leave of
him, not without a mournful presentiment that the separation is to be
eternal.

There are many points of difference between his work and Mr. Prescott's
"History of the Conquest of Mexico"; but the chief distinction, we
think, may be thus stated. If the foundations on which Mr. Prescott's
narrative is built should ever be overthrown,--a contingency which as
yet we do not apprehend,--that narrative would still rank among the
masterpieces of our literature. It could no longer be received as a
truthful relation of what had actually happened in the past; but it
would be received as a most faithful and graphic relation of what had
been asserted, of what was once universally _believed_, to have so
happened. If the reality appears strange, how much stranger would
appear the fiction! The truth of such a story may seem improbable;
the invention of such a story would be little short of miraculous.
Prescott's work, if removed from its place among histories, must stand
in the first rank among works of imagination,--must be classed with the
"Odyssey" and the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments."

But this book of Wilson's must, under all condition