I shall be obliged to enter hereafter into his literary merits, in connection with the narrative of the Conquest; for which he is a prominent authority. His earlier annals—though no one of his manuscripts has been printed—have been diligently studied by the Spanish writers in Mexico, and liberally transferred to their pages; and his reputation, like Sahagun’s, has doubtless suffered by the process. His Historia Chichimeca is now turned into French by M. Ternaux-Compans, forming part of that inestimable series of translations from unpublished documents which have so much enlarged our acquaintance with the early American history. I have had ample opportunity of proving the merits of his version of Ixtlilxochitl, and am happy to bear my testimony to the fidelity and elegance with which it is executed.
Note.—In a note which has heretofore appeared at the end of this first book Mr. Prescott states that it had been his intention to conclude the introductory portion of the work with an inquiry into the origin of the Mexican civilization. But because he agreed with Humboldt, that “the general question of the origin of the inhabitants of a continent is beyond the limits prescribed to history,” and with Livy, that “for the majority of readers the origin and remote antiquities of a nation can have comparatively little interest,” he had decided, on further consideration, to throw his observations on this topic into the Appendix. A man of extraordinary modesty, he feared lest the reader should become so wearied with his presentation of the story of the earlier civilization, in the first book, that he would not have energy enough left for the proper consideration of the tale of the Conquest, set forth with such conscientious care in the succeeding chapters. The essay has now been taken from the Appendix and placed in its proper position.—M.