self as chorus. We do not think, for example, that the pictorial effect of the narrative of the conquest is heightened by the author's informing us that some of it was composed during the troubles of the year 1848. Such intimation of a totally dissimilar crisis strikes us as an anachronism not unlike the presence of a figure essentially modern in a representation of the schools of Athens or the garden of Gethsemane. And much more startling is it to find the writer occasionally acting as interlocutor or eye-witness in a council-chamber three hundred years ago. Mr. Carlyle set this evil precedent in his Life and Letters of Cromwell: but his powers of word-painting are so peculiar, that we forgive in him a practice which in any other narrative we must regard as blemishes. And we are the more inclined to regret in the present instance these occasional departures from the precedents of classical historians, because in the greater portion of his narrative Mr. Helps's diction possesses many of the striking excellencies of historical composition. His language is generally perspicuous and idiomatic, free from all the current tricks and devices of style, free from bravura and epigram, and remarkably pregnant in sense and picturesque in form. In a second edition a very slight amount of excision will render his narrative inferior in vigour and grace to none of modern date, and entitle the accomplished author to rank beside the very foremost of those who, in the present century, have added permanent works to the historical library of England. Our official growl is soon uttered; and while reading the passages which we shall presently bring forward from the volumes before us, the reader may very probably wonder that it should have been uttered at all. A much more difficult task now remains for us, that of conveying to our readers such a general view of the conquest of America as will justly represent the learning, the thoughtfulness, the practical wisdom, and the pictorial beauty of the narrative. So far as the present volumes extend, the course of events group themselves around three principal figures, Columbus, Las Casas, and Cortes; and around two capital ethnological subjects, the characters of the conquered and their conquerors. Immediately belonging to these, and essentially interwoven with them, are numerous important questions upon colonial government and commerce, opposite aspects of civilisation, the meeting of the two great floods of European and Indian life, and the almost inevitable destiny of certain races of mankind to sink, to die away, to disappear, when brought into contact with stronger forms of social and religious life. Neither is the interest of Mr. Helps's volumes confined to the first encounter between the white and the red man. The Negro race plays no unimportant part in the scene; the discovery of America being fraught with incalculable misery for those who, drinking the waters of the Niger and the Gambia, seemed to be severed from the interests of Europe by insurmountable barriers of sand, by inhospitable shores, and by the beasts which it is not granted to man to harness to his chariot or to pen within his folds. One of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Helps's volumes is that in which, under the somewhat quaint title of an "Imaginary Voyage," he has reviewed the aspect of the Indian races as they would have appeared to European eyes a generation before their invasion by the Spaniards. The voyage is imaginary; but the facts from which the review is constructed are collected from the journals of the first explorers with indefatigable pains. Of all the sections of his work, this has probably cost the author the most care and anxiety. He has admitted nothing unwarranted; he has carefully winnowed and sifted his authorities-bushels of chaff often returning to him but a few grains of wheat-and, like a dexterous worker in mosaic, he has set in a new frame, and arranged with rare pictorial skill, whatsoever he found scattered through printed or manuscript documents illustrative of the population, opinions, institutions, and civilisation of the various races of the new continent. The history of the human race, its derivation, and its migrations, is no longer consigned to the hands of the mere speculator. Buffon and Lord Kaimes would not obtain a hearing at the present time. The questions of race and dispersion have been rescued from their hands by the severe investigations of the philologer and the physiologist. And so far as these fellowlabourers have proceeded hitherto, their conclusions seem to point to an original stock and cradle of the human race; and so far support equally the most ancient of records and of legends. Until better evidence has been adduced than that which satisfied Dr. Knox and some recent inquirers, we shall adhere to the belief that the high lands of Armenia sent forth the first detachment of emigrants to the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, "to Arachosia and Candaor east," and westward, through the Transcaucasian regions, to the central plateau of Europe between the Balkan and Carpathian Hills. But the very restriction of the area of dispersion, and the implied derivation of mankind from a common stock-the question of a single pair is immaterial-only render more difficult the problem of the population of the new continent. The parentage of America, indeed, has nearly as many claimants as that of the oldest patrician house in Europe. It has been derived from the Phoenicians, whose known but unrecorded voyages seem to give them some title to be regarded as the progenitors of the nations west of the Pillars of Hercules. It has been traced to the dispersed Hebrews, who assuredly, centuries before E their place as a nation was made void, had permeated to nearly every corner of the civilised world, and who were found alike on the banks of the Tagus and of the Amour. But in the strict sense of the word the Jews founded no colonies, since they drifted over the earth, in pursuit of gain or shelter, only as families or individuals. Nor, in spite of some startling religious ideas contained in the creed of the Aztecs, is there any reason or necessity for assuming that the descendants of Abraham ever visited, before the conquest, either the eastern or western flank of the new continent. Mr. Helps indulges in no premature speculations on this question, although he intimates his general agreement with Humboldt and other sound inquirers, that the oceanitic races were probably the first peoplers of America. Even then, however, the curtain of the mystery is scarcely lifted. For, whatever may have been the source of either Mexican or Peruvian civilisation, it is certain, not only that each was of comparatively recent date, and, had we the documents, might probably be brought within chronological limits, but also that the Aztec and Capac dynasties had reared themselves upon nations older and mightier than themselves, and whose antiquity and power are attested by monuments no less striking than the pyramids of the Pharaohs, and by the ruins of cities as expressive of departed might as Thebes, or Babylon, or Hecatompolis. Mr. Helps "imagines" a voyage undertaken by navigators well qualified to observe and record what they beheld, and sufficiently acquainted with the diversified nations and institutions of Europe in the fifteenth century to comprehend at once the points of resemblance and difference between the old and the new continent. They depart, too, as the real discoverers did after them, deeply imbued with the religious or superstitious prejudices of their age, eager to bring within the pale of the church whatsoever forms of unbelief they might encounter, and disposed to regard all that was not of "the household of faith" as an unclean and abominable thing. In two respects only they differ from the actual explorers; they did not go forth in quest of gold or pearls, nor to render the red man their tributaries and slaves. To the supposed or the actual discoverers at once presented itself a palpable difference between the inhabitants of the islands which, like so many ante-chambers, stud the eastern coast of America, and the inhabitants of the continent. Various degrees and discrepancies in civilisation were also perceptible in the population of the mainland itself. The seat of the great empires was either, like Mexico, drawn deep within the mainland and radiated towards the sea, or, like Peru, it was seated on the west flank of that gigantic spine of the continent which, even at a distance of 150 miles, casts the shadow of its peaks and ridges upon the Pacific. At Paria, "the earthly paradise of Columbus," they are greeted for the first time with the aspect of that tropic vegetation that has afforded Humboldt occasion for wedding so much eloquence to so much science. "By night," says Mr. Helps, "sweet odours, varying with every hour of the watch, were wafted from the shore to the vessel lying near; and the forest-trees, brought together by the serpent-tracery of myriads of strange parasitical plants, might well seem to the fancy like some great design of building, over which the lofty palms, a forest upon a forest, appeared to present a new order of architecture. In the background rose the mist, like incense. These, however, were but the evening fancies of the mariner, who had before him fondly in his mind the wreathed pillars of the cathedral of Burgos, or the thousand-columned Christian mosque of Cordova, or the perfect fane of Seville; and when the moon rose, or the innumerable swarms of luminous insects swept across the picture, it was but a tangled forest after all, wherein the shaping hand of man had made no memorial to his Creator "* As yet they would discover neither temple nor image, nor any trace of those dark and cruel superstitions which are only less awful because they are less ancient, and have thereby inflicted on mankind fewer centuries of dread and degradation than the dark, cruel, ancestral creeds of central Asia. Occasionally, indeed, grand and elaborate dances of men would be visible through the trees; but whether they were meant to express joy, or sorrow, or devotion, would be moot-points to the mariners. And this absence of visible creed and cultus throughout the long and sinuous range of shore from Araya to Darien, would be the more remarkable to men (and it actually moved the first explorers to wonder) accustomed at home to rapid successions of cathedraltowers, and church-spires, and oratories and crosses, to the pomp and circumstance of devotion on nearly every occasion of joy or woe connected with human life, or to those more august commemorations of the church which ranged indifferently from the manger at Bethlehem to the martyrdom of the Saint of Com * The supposed and the real "Ophir" of the fifteenth century presented many features in common. The above description may recall to the reader a passage in Paradise Lost, composed by a poet who studied voyages and travels with as much zest as he did the Romaunts of Charlemagne and his Peerage, and the severer fictions of both the Greek and Roman muse. 66 now gentle gales, Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole These balmy spoils. As when to them who sail Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow Sabean odours from the spicy shore Of Araby the blest with such delay Well pleased, they slack their course, and many a league, postella. The natives, however, although their ritual was of the simplest order, knew that there was one God, and offered some sacrifices to him. But beyond the isthmus, "sailing northward," they came within the verge and ken of a cultus, which would remind the more instructed of what was told in ancient books of the abominations of Egypt and Canaan, and to the ignorant might recall the great square at Seville or Toledo drest for an auto-da-fé. "White buildings would be seen among the trees, bearing some likeness to truncated pyramids; and, in the setting sun, dark figures would be seen against the horizon on the tops of these pyramids, from whose gestures it would be sadly and reluctantly admitted by the horror-stricken crew that they were looking upon a human sacrifice." In the Bay of Honduras another marvel greeted the eyes of the explorers. They had already seen and heard enough to assure them that they were in the neighbourhood of empires as advanced in some elements of civilisation as Castile and Arragon themselves, and occupying a range of territory vaster and more opulent than the dominions of Spain and Portugal and their Neapolitan and African provinces combined. Hard was it to persuade the Spaniard of that age that any monarchy equalled or surpassed his own; that any cities were fairer than Seville, or any plains more teeming and pleasant to the eye than those of Andalusia. But they now discerned that the living empires rested upon the ruins of states "older and mightier than they." For they had now come upon some buried city, buried so long ago, that huge trees had risen among its ruins, and gigantic parasites had twisted their lithe arms around columns, and thrown their shoots along peristyles, playing with the strange faces in stone, overshadowing winged symbols of power and sacrificial instruments, and embracing the carved imagery of fruits and flowers their kindred. No living creatures are to be seen there: the burdens of Babylon and Nineveh seem to have been re-acted in the western world; and the explorers, comparing old things with new, and measuring what they saw by the standard of the most Catholic creed, depart awe-struck from these buried mounds, surely believing that these buildings have been sacred to no good purpose, and that the cities have been condemned of God for their inhuman and bloody idolatries. To the real discoverers the spectacle of these desolate places would but confirm their original misconception that they had reached the India of Ptolemy; for the narratives of medieval travellers also told of cities deserted by man and reclaimed by the animals lying in the heart of Asia, the ancient lairs of Nimrod and Belshazzar, or the more recent palaces of "the great kings" of Persia and Parthia. |