of Spain. Torquemada copies him for the most part, though he adds much native testimony from Sahagun, from a Tezcucan writer, and others, making his account of the conquest the most complete up to that time. Solis elaborates with little critique, and with a verboseness and grandiloquence that tire. Vetancurt’s version is comparatively brief, with few additions, and Robertson’s is a brilliant summary; but Clavigero, while adding not much to Torquemada’s bulky account, presents it in quite a new form, pruned of verboseness, re-arranged in a masterly manner, and invested with a philosophic spirit altogether superior to anything presented till Prescott’s time. On the above historians and some of Cortés’ letters are founded the immense array of minor accounts and summaries on the conquest, both in separate and embodied form, some of them provided with occasional observations, but for the great part they contain nothing of any value to the student. Those after Prescott’s time follow him as a rule. Mexican accounts might naturally be expected to present useful features, but such is hardly the case. Alaman, Ramirez, Icazbalceta, Orozco y Berra, Bustamante, and certain writers in the Boletin of the Mexican Geographical Society, have brought to light several documents and monographs bearing on particular incidents and features; but no complete account of real value has been written, Carbajal’s pretentious version being almost wholly a plagiarism from Clavigero, Mora’s a hasty compilation, and so on. As for the new bulky Spanish version by Zamacois, it is not only verbose but superficial and narrow in its research, blundering even where Prescott points the way, and representing more a feuilleton issue than a history.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo is, as I have said, the main historian of the conquest, from the exhaustive thoroughness of his material, as compared with other original writers, and from his participation in all its leading scenes, including the discovery voyages. For about half a century he survives, and sees comrade after comrade disappear from the field till but five of