Page:The Conquest of Mexico Volume 1.djvu/25

 HEN William Hickling Prescott wrote the Conquest of Mexico he gave to literature something more than the vivid and polished narrative of one of the most romantic episodes in the world's history. The comparatively high stage of cultural development attained by the Mexicans, together with their traditions of a still more glorious past, fired his imagination, and he attempted to give also a critical survey of their civilisation and to trace its rise and source. To this subject he devoted his first six chapters and a long appendix, and it is with that portion of his work that this introductory note is in the main concerned. As regards his narrative, comparatively little has come to light during the last eighty years which would tend to modify his account of the operations of the Spaniards in Mexico and the adjoining countries to the south. The discovery by Mrs. Zelia Nuttall of the Crónica de la Nueva España by Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, a personal friend of Cortés, in the Biblioteca Nacional of Spain (a work which had been used by the historian Herrera, but to which Prescott had not direct access), indicates that the account of the siege of Mexico city is not always correct in detail. Moreover, A. P. Maudslay, who has devoted much study to the vexed question of the topography of the city, has been able to prove that the camp of Alvarado was pitched, not in the vicinity of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan, but close to that of Tlaltelolco. But, however important such details may be for the intensive study of a single episode, they should be viewed in their proper proportion to the whole work. From this aspect it may be claimed that few historical treatises have stood the test of time so triumphantly. The achievement becomes the more remarkable, and it is in no sense of apology that this point of view is introduced, when the work is regarded as a compilation from an enormous mass of material, much of it biassedbiased [sic], by a man who was practically blind.

With the archæological and ethnological chapters of Prescott's work, however, the case is somewhat different. The remarkable