formation as was consistent with their theory of the narrative art. But in order to attain the simplicity and smoothness of their models, it was necessary to reject many subjects which the recent historian includes in his story as indispensable to his delineations of an age or a people. At social problems they could barely afford to hint, and relinquished them to the ethical speculator; the dry details of finance were either wholly passed over, or relegated to an appendix; the domestic life and manners of a nation were consigned to the antiquary; and art, science, and literature, were glanced at in the briefest of summaries. They succeeded in what they proposed to themselves-their pictures are deftly foreshortened and delicately coloured; and if history has since enlarged its domain, and multiplied its duties, the classical concinnity of the historians of Charles V. and the Stuarts is hitherto unrivalled, and will probably never be surpassed.

Its eminence, indeed, will perhaps never be directly assailed, since the ambition of historians has taken quite another direction. In the eighteenth century the best narrators aspired to be as clear and sparkling as their French exemplars; in the present we propose to ourselves instead the exhaustive method of Ranke and Von Raumer, and are not content with a story unless it contains all that can be said collaterally as well as directly upon a subject. Fortunately, with a few exceptions, our writers have not thought it requisite to emulate their Teutonic brethren in the art of packing into a sentence whatsoever may in any way be thrust into it -condition, qualification, exception, and inference; but in all other respects they seem to regard their narratives as a proper receptacle of the omne scibile. Mr. Macaulay is as much a historian of the manners and customs of the English as of the intrigues of courts or the proceedings of parliaments; Sir Archibald Alison deluges the reader on the one hand with financial returns, and on the other with geographical descriptions; and Mr. Grote has written a history of the religion and philosophy as well as of the civil and military affairs of the Greeks. The cause of truth, or at least of information, is perhaps better served by this wholesale mode of dealing with history, than it was by the select and separate sketches of the last century. But the task and responsibility of the historian are immeasurably increased. He has ceased to be an essayist, and has become, and is expected to be, an encyclopædist.

Fortunate, accordingly, is the writer whose story, being episodical in its character, admits of isolation without injury to its completeness, and who can pour the full stream of his knowledge into certain limited and shapely reservoirs. The history of the conquest of Spanish America is one of these felicitous themes.

It does not form part and parcel of the universal history of Europe, and yet is connected with it by a few filaments sufficiently strong to invest the subjugation and colonisation of the New World with European interest. Its area is limited; for so soon as the red man and his empires have finally yielded to the invader, the catastrophe is reached, and the fortunes of the various colonies alone afford any topic of interest. The move

ment of the drama is rapid: but it does not pass beyond the fifth act; nor is its proper peripeteia, as is so often the case with the convulsions of the Old World, only the commencement of a new series of changes and intrigues.

We would not, however, undervalue the real difficulties which are inherent in his subject, and with which Mr. Helps has so successfully grappled. The ease, or rather the natural limitations of his subject, affect his work as a whole, but not its component portions. The conquest of America was the work of so many separate adventurers; and, although springing from one centre, its radii are so numerous, the geographical area is so wide, and the character of the conquered nations so diversified, that it demands no ordinary skill to portray them without confusion, or to afford each scene its proper time and place, without incurring a risk of wearying the reader. And this perhaps is among the least of the difficulties which Mr. Helps has encountered. No one who has read his essays attentively can fail to have perceived that he is richly endowed with that analytic function which readily extracts order from apparent confusion, and amid an undigested mass of materials detects those alone of which the architect has actually need. It was to be expected, therefore, that his narrative, however complicate in its movements, would be lucid in its course, and that the discriminative essayist would possess in large measure the ordonnance of the historian.

The difficulties of his task are of different kind, and arise from two principal sources; in the first place from a certain imperfection in his materials, and in the next from his inevitable repetition of an oft-told tale. It will be the object of the following brief analysis of the volumes before us to show that he has overcome both these disadvantages satisfactorily; the one by the extent of his researches, the other by occupying a new point of view in his narrative, both as regards its scope and its illustra

tions.

The Spaniards themselves are the principal narrators of the conquest of America; and whether we consider that the same hand which guided the pen held also the sword, or the prejudices with which as an invading race they beheld their subjects, or as devout Catholics the abominations of paganism, it is not to be expected that they would afford any very full or direct in

formation respecting the natives of the New World. This their ignorance and their pride alike forbade. As regards the historian, the Spanish writers on this theme are in the position of reluctant witnesses, requiring no ordinary force of cross-examination. Of their own hardships and heroism, of their hunger and thirst and nakedness, in the illimitable forest and the dismal swamp, how ten put a thousand to flight, how often the saints aided them in their strife with the heathen and the elements, even in the very valley of the shadow of death, they speak willingly enough, and not without such pomp and bravery of words as became the hidalgos of Castile. Equally diffuse are they respecting the cowardice and treachery of the Indians, their indolence and evil heart of unbelief, their apathy towards the preachers of the Catholic faith, their contempt of the saints and the Virgin, their unclean ritual, and their ignorance of the laws and usages of civilised men. Neither are they silent touching the signs and wonders which they beheld; the strange aspect of the planets, the fruits, the animals, the cities, the temples; the great arterial rivers, in comparison with which the Tagus and Guadalquivir were but as trenches that gird an olive-yard; the everlasting mountains, beside which their sierras were as mole-hills; or the sheeted lakes, in comparison with which the inundations of the Ebro, "when the sun rides in Taurus" melting the Cantabrian snows, were but a mill-pool. Of all these marvels they speak sufficiently at times; for the Spaniards of that day were not an inapprehensive race, and often write as men awed by the mystery and the majesty around them. But, as will be seen presently, what regards the conquered rather than what affected the conqueror is the object of Mr. Helps's researches; and of this the reapers of the harvest left but scanty gleanings here and there. Luckily for the historian and ourselves, the moral and social phenomena of the red man were objects of deep interest to their earliest and most unwearied advocate; and the memorials of Las Casas supply some of the information which we seek vainly in the chronicles of Oviedo and Bernal Diaz. Yet the observations of the good clerigo were necessarily confined to a few districts, and principally to the island races. He beheld not, even in spirit,

"Rich Mexico, the seat of Montezume,

And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat

Of Atabalipa, and yet unspoiled

Guiana, whose great city Geryon's sons

Call El-dorado.

And when these empires had become Spanish vice-royalties, the documents of their past history were sedulously destroyed, partly because the conquerors were rude men and cared not for them,

and partly because they were, after their manner, religious men, and thought they did God service by destroying all the muniments of the synagogue of Satan. Their zeal was ill-directed; the loss is irreparable: yet so our puritan ancestors broke down the carved work of the sanctuary; and scattered to the winds and the rains inexhaustible treasures of learning, in the same spirit which gave to the fire the records of the Aztecs. We may not cast a stone against the Spaniards: they knew not what they did.

The second difficulty is that of repeating, so as to attract the reader, in the first place, and afterwards to win his grace and favour, a thrice-told tale. For, setting aside all intermediate versions of the story of Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro,—and even such portions of it as have percolated into fiction are no mean disadvantages to the fourth historical narrator,-Robertson, Washington Irving, and Prescott are no ordinary "Richmonds in the field." He should be a hardy writer who, with all the means and appliances of recent investigation to boot, would undertake to re-write the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Southey, writing to his friend Beresford respecting his own forthcoming History of Brazil, observes, that if Robertson's other histories be no better than his History of America, his worth as a chronicler is of the slenderest. This may be so; but it is very difficult, even if it be meet, to demolish an established reputation; and zeal for "very truth" will never eat up the general reader. Mr. Helps's present work, however, does not essentially affect the reputation of any one of these established authors. It regards the subject from an opposite point of view. It is a correlate, not a rival. It deals rather with the issues and the victims of the conquest than with the conquest of America itself. We hear as much of the bondmen as of the bondholders:

"Victrix causa Deis placuit, sed victa Catoni." Mr. Helps is more on Cato's side than on Cæsar's, as his own words testify. He purposes He purposes "to bring before the reader not conquest only, but the results of conquest: the mode of colonial government which ultimately prevailed, the extirpation of native races, the introduction of other races, the growth of slavery, and the settlement of the encomiendas, on which all Indian society depended, has been the object of this history."

The conception of his present work, however, had an ethnological basis, which should be kept in mind by the reader.

"Some years ago," Mr. Helps informs us, "being much interested in the general subject of slavery, and engaged in writing upon it, I began to investigate the origin of modern slavery. I soon found that the works commonly referred to gave me no sufficient insight into the matter. Questions, moreover, arose in my mind not immediately con

nected with slavery, but bearing closely upon it, with respect to the distribution of races in the New World. Why,' said I to myself,' are there none but black men in this island? why are there none but copper-coloured men on that line of coast? how is it that in one town the white population predominates, while in another the aborigines still hold their ground? There must be a series of historical events which, if brought to light, would solve all these questions; and I will endeavour to trace this out for myself.""

Having thus stated the particular aspect from which Mr. Helps's volumes are to be regarded, and accordingly shown that, in spite of his many precursors, he is not repeating an oft-told tale, we proceed to consider his execution of the task which he has now undertaken. It is not often that a rifacimento of a previous work is successful. The bloom of a first conception is apt to pass away; the critical faculty often becomes too potent for the well-being of the conceptive and pictorial powers. Akenside and Tasso marred the freshness of their original poems by recasting them; and we imagine that there are few readers of Clarendon and Johnson who do not regret that the former did not adhere to his intention of composing a biography instead of a history, or that the latter congealed in a stately journal the spirit and familiarity of his Letters from the Hebrides. Although, how.. ever, the History of the Spanish Conquest of America is based upon the well-known Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen, and is an enlargement of the earlier essay, we have no reason to regret in this instance that the plan has been expanded, and the subject submitted to a complete revision.

So far, indeed, from regretting that Mr. Helps has foregone his earlier undertaking, we are rather disposed to lament that, as regards the form of his present work, he has occasionally retained so many vestiges of that essay. We conceive the functions of the essayist to be essentially distinct from those of the historian. In the one case, it is not only allowable, but also becoming, that the writer should frequently appear in his own person, admit us to the conclave of his own meditations, and discuss, as it were, with his readers such social and ethical questions as may come in his way. But as regards history, it can hardly be, in our opinion, too pictorial and apart from the author himself. In the colouring of his narrative there must always be abundant opportunities for expressing his own sentiments, but the expression should flow naturally from the events recorded and from the characters introduced, and not from the personal interposition of the author him

*We are not willing to forget the thoughtful essayist in the picturesque historian. Mr. Helps, in a former work, has expressed the same idea more briefly and quaintly; he wishes to show "how the black people came to the New World, how the brown people faded away from certain countries in it, and what part the white people had in these doings."