had in vain attempted
to keep out, but whom he had now the power to crush under his feet in a
moment. That invading foe consisted only of a few hundred adventurers,
three thousand miles from home, in the heart of the country they had
ravaged, and surrounded by countless thousands of exasperated foes,
burning to revenge the injuries and insults they had received at the
hands of the strangers, and only held back from rushing upon them, like
herds of ravening tigers, by the strong arm of the royal prohibition.
Their position was like that of a group of children in a menagerie,
amusing themselves with teasing and exasperating the caged animals
around them. The furious creatures glare on them with looks of rage,
growling fiercely, and gnashing their teeth. The keeper sympathizes with
his enraged subjects, burning to let them loose upon their annoyers, but
restrained by that mysterious agency, in which the divine hand is every
where moulding and subduing the natural impulses of humanity, and
working out its own wise ends by the wrath and passions of men.

Let the keeper but raise the bar of that cage for a moment, and not one
of the bright group would be left to tell the tragic issue of their
sport. Let the terror-stricken Montezuma put on once more the air of a
monarch, and raise his finger as a signal for the onset, before the
enemy has become entrenched in his fortress, and few, if any, of that
brave band would be left to tell the world of their fate--the marvellous
story of the Conquest would never be told; the Aztec dynasty would
outlive the period assigned it by those mystic oracles; and Montezuma,
recovered from the dark dreams of an imagination disordered by
superstition--the long dreaded crisis of his destiny passed--would have
swayed again the sceptre of undisputed empire over the broad and
beautiful realms of Anahuac. Having once vanquished and destroyed the
terrible strangers, and stripped them of that supernatural defence,
which the idea of their celestial origin threw around them, he would
never again have yielded his soul to so unmanly a fear. If such had
been the issue of the invasion of Cortez and his band, it is doubtful
whether the Aztec dynasty would ever have been overthrown. The
civilization of Europe would soon have been engrafted upon its own.
Christianity would have taken the place of their dark and bloody
paganism; which, with a people so far enlightened as they were, could
not have endured for a mom