e
driven to infidelity."_ [The printer may venture to italicize the
closing prediction, as we wish to bring it under the particular notice
of school-committees and superintendents of education, who will see
the fearful responsibility they incur by placing copies of Prescott's
Histories, bound in sheep, in their school-libraries.]

But we interrupt the flow of our author's bile by these irrelevant
remarks. Let him have a full hearing: "Before closing this chapter, the
status of our literature suggests an apology is necessary, for having
opened it in conformity with the, now neglected, rules of history--that
we should try and snatch something from the wreck of antiquity." [We
cheerfully offer a reward of one copy of the present number of the
"Atlantic" to any person who will parse the last sentence, explain the
punctuation of it, and interpret its meaning.] "In other countries, the
standard of history has been steadily rising for centuries; but with
us, it has been so lowered, as to sink every other qualification in the
single one of turning faultless periods; and a gentleman possessing
this, has been adjudged fully capable of purging the annals of Spain and
her quondam colonies, from the mass of modern fable and forgery which
now disfigure them. Incapable of submitting Cortez' statement to
the test, he assumes it to be true, even in those parts where it is
impossible. Unable to detect the counterfeit in Diaz--he pronounces him
the 'child of nature,' but does not on the testimony of this natural
child reject the still more monstrous falsifier, _Gomora_; but adopts
them both, according to the custom of novelists; and not the slightest
objection is raised. Then descending lower and still lower; disregarding
alike the warning of Lord Bacon 'a credulous man is a deceiver,' and
of Tacitus _fingunt simul creduntque_--he rakes up even a devotee,
Boturini, and makes him also an historic authority, without overtaxing
public credulity; though this wretch, as we have seen, out-Munchausens
Pietro himself, and as he may have surpassed every other man in Spain in
drawing the long bow, was justly selected for historiographer, at a time
when death was the penalty for possessing a book not licensed by the
Inquisition. Thus are discarded and disgusting impostures brought up
from the literary cesspools of Spain to form for us the history of
events that, transpired on this continent hardly more than three hundred
years ago!" (pp. 263, 264.)