fanciful garments, various kinds of manufactures, the relics of which
still strangely interest the student of the past, filled the invaders
with surprise. There was much that was curious and startling in their
mythology, and the capital of the Mexican empire presented a singular
and fascinating spectacle to the eyes of Cortez. The rocky amphitheatre
in the midst of which it was built still remains unchanged, but the vast
lake which surrounded it, traversed by causeways, and covered with
floating gardens, laden with flowers and perfume, is gone. The star of
the Aztec dynasty set in blood. In vain did the inhabitants of the
conquered city, roused to madness by the cruelty and extortion of the
victors, expel them from their midst. Cortez refused to flee further
than the shore; the light of his burning galleys rekindled the desperate
valor of his followers, and Mexico fell, as a few years after did Peru
under the perfidy and sword of Pizarro, thus completing the scheme of
conquest, and giving Spain a colonial empire more splendid than that of
any other power in Christendom.

Of the agents in this vast scheme of territorial aggrandizement, we see
Cortez dying in obscurity, and Pizarro assassinated in his palace, while
retributive justice has overtaken the monarchy at whose behests the
richest portions of the western continent were violently wrested from
their native possessors. If "the wild and warlike, the indolent and the
semi-civilized, the bloody Aztec, the inoffensive Peruvian, the fierce
Araucanian, all fared alike" at the hands of Spain, it must be confessed
that their wrongs have been signally avenged. "The horrid atrocities
practised at home and abroad," says Edward Everett, "not only in the
Netherlands, but in every city of the northern country, cried to Heaven
for vengeance upon Spain; nor could she escape it. She intrenched
herself behind the eternal Cordilleras; she took to herself the wings of
the morning, and dwelt in the uttermost parts of the sea; but even there
the arm of retribution laid hold of her, and the wrongs of both
hemispheres were avenged by her degeneracy and fall."

So rapid a fall is almost without a parallel in the history of the
world. Less than three centuries from the time when she stood without a
rival in the extent and wealth of her colonial possessions, she beheld
herself stripped, one by one, of the rich exotic jewels of her crown.
Her vice-regal coronet was torn from her grasp. Mexic