vening."

But we have omitted to make mention of the letters "preliminary" which
he has printed with the "advance notices." He indulges in frequent
sneers at the "weight of authority" to which Mr. Prescott was accustomed
to attach some importance in the discussion of a doubtful point.
Nevertheless, in his extreme eagerness to obtain for his own opinions
the sanction of an authoritative name, he publishes, as "Mr. Prescott's
estimate of his researches," a letter which he had received from that
gentleman, and, quite incapable of appreciating its quiet irony,
evidently supposes that the historian of the Conquest of Mexico was
prepared to retire from the field of his triumphs at the first blast of
his assailant's trumpet. Next comes a letter from a gentleman whom Mr.
Wilson calls "_Rousseau_ St. Hilaire, author of 'The History of Spain,'
&c., and Professor _of the_ Faculty of Letters in the University of
Paris." This, we suppose, is the same gentleman who is elsewhere
mentioned in the book as Rousseau _de_ St. Hilaire, and as _Rosseau_ St.
Hilaire. Now we might take issue with Mr. Wilson as to the existence of
his correspondent. It would be easy to prove that no person bearing the
name is connected with the University of Paris. Adopting the same line
of argument by which our author endeavors to convert the old Spanish
chronicler, Bernal Diaz, into a myth, we might contend that the
Sorbonne--the college to which M. St. Hilaire is represented as
belonging--has been almost as famous for its efforts to suppress
truth and the free utterance of opinion as the Spanish Inquisition
itself,--that it would not hesitate at any little invention or disguise
for the furtherance of its objects,--and hence, that the professor in
question is in all probability a "myth," a mere "Rousseau's Dream," or
rather, a "Wilson's Dream of Rousseau." But we disdain to have recourse
to such evasions. We admit that there is in the University of Paris
a professor "agrege a la faculte des lettres," who bears the name of
_Rosseeuw_ St. Hilaire; we admit Mr. Wilson's incapacity to decipher
foreign names or words, even when they stand before him in the clearest
print,--an incapacity of which his book affords numerous examples,--and
that this incapacity, and not any mental hallucination, has been the
cause of the blunder which we have corrected. But we must add that he
does evidently labor under an hallucination when he calls this letter
of M. St. Hilaire a "fl