Page:Vol 1 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/176

56 most gentlemanly and kind-hearted pirate. Grijalva, though second to Cortés in talents and fame, was far before him in honesty. During the preparations which quickly followed the appointment of Cortés, the inherent qualities of the man developed to a degree alarming alike to friends and enemies, and astonishing to himself. He found his nature a strong one, with magnetic attractions, and an affinity with danger. He found himself possessed of that higher courage of the mind which begets self-confidence, breeds the hero, and ends in the achievement of the uttermost. And genius was there; he began to feel it and to know it: the genius of ambition and egotism, whose central figure was himself, an all-prevailing sentiment, before which right, religion, humanity, and even life itself, must be subservient. His rapidly evolving will was becoming ponderous, overwhelming. Fame was becoming to him what ambition was to Columbus; only he possessed his idea instead of being possessed by it. Sufficiently educated for the purposes of statecraft, opportunity alone was needed to enable him to turn every weapon to the furtherance of his own designs. Without attempting to pry into the occult, he now began to see things with a large and liberal eye. Life was assuming tremendous realities, which bridled impulse; yet it was an ordeal he believed he could face. While in sophistry he found himself equal to Euripides, he began to put on bombast such as Æschylus could not have scorned, and to display an energy as sublime as that of Archilochus; yet all this time his good sense was supplemented by graceful courtesy. All who worship the bright wit and intellectual versatility that flatter ambition and yield unscrupulous success may henceforth bow the knee to Hernan Cortés.

No sooner was his commission sealed than Cortés set himself about the task of collecting his many requirements. His own few thousand pesos of ready money