Page:Vol 2 History of Mexico by H H Bancroft.djvu/504

484 In finally reviewing the character of Hernan Cortés, after our long acquaintance, and comparing him with his contemporaries, we find conspicuous a supreme worldly ambition, love of power, of wealth, of fame, united to intense religious zeal and loyalty to the king. In the combination there was much that might be called remarkable. This union of the spiritual and the sensual, a selfishness as broad and deep in heavenly as in earthly affairs, an all-abiding, heart-felt loyalty to the sovereign of Spain, paramount even to self-love or to church devotion, seems here more evenly balanced than in any person of note among those who came early to the Indies. Though his religious zeal was so fervid, he seldom permitted it to stand in the way of worldly advancement; but there was ever present a fighting piety which might have adorned a member of the house of Hapsburg. Love of gold was usually subordinate to love of glory; and yet we have seen him decline a coveted title because of a real or pretended lack of means to support it. Further, after having had set apart for him lands, and vassals, and revenues befitting a king, he rendered the latter part of his life miserable by reason of vain importunities to his sovereign for more. A tithe of what he possessed he might with contentment have enjoyed, but in his later mood half the planet would have been too small for him while the other half remained to be coveted.

But in this it was more what he considered his due that he desired, than the gratification of an all-absorbing avarice, such as that which possessed Nuño de Guzman, and men of similar stamp. When an humble navigator discovered a new world, or a nameless cavalier conquered a considerable portion of it at his own