ed with the best
vines in Italy. How quick, how unexpected, how terrible was the change!
All was at once overwhelmed with ashes, cinders, broken rocks, and fiery
torrents, presenting to the eye the most dismal scene of horror and
desolation!

_Pliny the Elder_.--You paint it very truly. But has it never occurred
to your philosophical mind that this change is a striking emblem of that
which must happen, by the natural course of things, to every rich,
luxurious state? While the inhabitants of it are sunk in
voluptuousness--while all is smiling around them, and they imagine that
no evil, no danger is nigh--the latent seeds of destruction are
fermenting within; till, breaking out on a sudden, they lay waste all
their opulence, all their boasted delights, and leave them a sad monument
of the fatal effects of internal tempests and convulsions.

DIALOGUE VIII.

FERNANDO CORTEZ--WILLIAM PENN.

_Cortez_.--Is it possible, William Penn, that you should seriously
compare your glory with mine? The planter of a small colony in North
America presume to vie with the conqueror of the great Mexican Empire?

_Penn_.--Friend, I pretend to no glory--the Lord preserve me from it. All
glory is His; but this I say, that I was His instrument in a more
glorious work than that performed by thee--incomparably more glorious.

_Cortez_.--Dost thou not know, William Penn, that with less than six
hundred Spanish foot, eighteen horse, and a few small pieces of cannon, I
fought and defeated innumerable armies of very brave men; dethroned an
emperor who had been raised to the throne by his valour, and excelled all
his countrymen in the science of war, as much as they excelled all the
rest of the West Indian nations? That I made him my prisoner in his own
capital; and, after he had been deposed and slain by his subjects,
vanquished and took Guatimozin, his successor, and accomplished my
conquest of the whole empire of Mexico, which I loyally annexed to the
Spanish Crown? Dost thou not know that, in doing these wonderful acts, I
showed as much courage as Alexander the Great, as much prudence as Caesar?
That by my policy I ranged under my banners the powerful commonwealth of
Tlascala, and brought them to assist me in subduing the Mexicans, though
with the loss of their own beloved independence? and that, to consummate
my glory, when the Governor of Cuba, Velasquez, would have taken my
command from me and sacrificed me to his envy and jeal