and pyramidal temples, reposing, as it were, on the bosom of the waters-the far-famed 'Venice of the Aztecs.' High over all rose the royal hill of Chapoltepec, the residence of the Mexican monarchs, crowned with the same grove of gigantic cypresses which at this day fling their broad shadows over the land. In the distance, beyond the blue waters of the lake, and nearly screened by intervening foliage, was seen a shining speck, the rival capital of Tezcuco; and still further on, the dark belt of porphyry, girdling the valley around, like a rich setting which nature had devised for the fairest of her jewels. Such was the beautiful vision which broke on the eyes of the conquerors. And even now, when so sad a change has come over the scene; when the stately forests have been laid low, and the soil, unsheltered from the fierce radiance of a tropical sun, is in many places abandoned to sterility; when the waters have retired, leaving a broad and ghastly margin white with the incrustation of salts, while the cities and hamlets on their borders have mouldered into ruins: even now that desolation broods over the landscape, so indestructible are the lines of beauty which nature has traced on its features, that no traveller, however cold, can gaze on them with any other emotions than those of astonishment and rapture.

What, then, must have been the emotions of the Spaniards, when, after working their toilsome way into the upper air, the cloudy tabernacle parted before their eyes, and they beheld these fair scenes in all their pristine magnificence and beauty! It was like the spectacle which greeted the eyes of Moses from the summit of Pisgah, and in the warm glow of their feelings they cried out: 'It is the promised land!'

Storming the Temple of Mexico.

Cortés, having cleared a way for the assault, sprung up the lower stairway, followed by Alvarado, Sandoval, Ordaz, and the other gallant cavaliers of his little band, leaving a file of arquebusiers and a strong corps of Indian allies to hold the enemy in check at the foot of the monument. On the first landing, as well as on the several galleries above, and on the summit, the Aztec warriors were drawn up to dispute his passage. From their elevated position they showered down volleys of lighter missiles, together with heavy stones, beams, and burning rafters, which, thundering along the stairway, overturned the ascending Spaniards, and carried desolation through their ranks. The more fortunate, eluding or springing over these obstacles, succeeded in gaining the first terrace, where, throwing themselves on their enemies, they compelled them, after a short resistance, to fall back. The assailants pressed on, effectually supported by a brisk fire of the musketeers from below, which so much galled the Mexicans in their exposed situation, that they were glad to take shelter on the broad summit of the teocalli.

Cortés and his comrades were close upon their rear, and the two parties soon found themselves face to face on this aerial battle field, engaged in mortal combat in presence of the whole city, as well as of the troops in the courtyard, who paused, as if by mutual consent, from their own hostilities, gazing in silent expectation on the issue of those above. The area, though somewhat smaller than the base of the teocalli, was large enough to afford a fair field of fight for a thousand com- | batants. It was paved with broad flat stones. No impediment occurred over its surface, except the huge sacrificial block, and the temples of stone which rose to the height of forty feet, at the further extremity of the arena. One of these had been consecrated to the cross; the other was still occupied by the Mexican war-god. The Christian and the Aztec contended for their religions under the very shadow of their respective shrines; while the Indian priests, running to and fro, with their hair wildly streaming over their sable mantles, seemed

hovering in mid-air, like so many demons of darkness urging on the work of slaughter.

The parties closed with the desperate fury of men who had no hope but in victory. Quarter was neither asked nor given; and to fly was impossible. The edge of the area was unprotected by parapet or battlement. The least slip would be fatal; and the combatants, as they struggled in mortal agony, were sometimes seen to roll over the sheer sides of the precipice together. Cortés himself is said to have had a narrow escape from this dreadful fate. Two warriors, of strong muscular frames, seized on him, and were dragging him violently towards the brink of the pyramid. Aware of their intention, he struggled with all his force, and, before they could accomplish their purpose, succeeded in tearing himself from their grasp, and hurling one of them over the walls with his own arm. The story is not improbable in itself, for Cortés was a man of uncommon agility and strength. It has been often repeated, but not by contemporary history.

The battle lasted with unintermitting fury for three hours. The number of the enemy was double that of the Christians; and it seemed as if it were a contest which must be determined by numbers and brute force, rather than by superior science. But it was not so. The invulnerable armour of the Spaniard, his sword of matchless temper, and his skill in the use of it, gave him advantages which far outweighed the odds of physical strength and numbers. After doing all that the courage of despair could enable men to do, resistance grew fainter and fainter on the side of the Aztecs. One after another they had fallen. Two or three priests only survived to be led away in triumph by the victors. Every other combatant was stretched a corpse on the bloody arena, or had been hurled from the giddy heights. Yet the loss of the Spaniards was not inconsiderable it amounted to forty-five of their best men; and nearly all the remainder were more or less injured in the desperate conflict.

The victorious cavaliers now rushed towards the sanctuaries. The lower story was of stone, the two upper were of wood. Penetrating into their recesses, they had the mortification to find the image of the Virgin and Cross removed. But in the other edifice they still beheld the grim figure of Huitzilopotchli, with his censer of smoking hearts, and the walls of his oratory reeking with gore-not improbably of their own countrymen. With shouts of triumph the Christians tore the uncouth monster from his niche, and tumbled him, in the presence of the horror-struck Aztecs, down the steps of the teocalli. They then set fire to the accursed building. The flame speedily ran up the slender towers, sending forth an ominous light over city, lake, and valley, to the remotest hut among the mountains. It was the funeral pyre of paganism, and proclaimed the fall of that sanguinary religion which had so long hung like a dark cloud over the fair regions of Anahuac.

Fatal Visit of the Inca to Pizarro and his Followers in the City of Caxamalca.

It was not long before sunset when the van of the royal procession entered the gates of the city. First came some hundreds of the menials, employed to clear the path from every obstacle, and singing songs of triumph as they came, 'which in our ears,' says one of the conquerors, 'sounded like the songs of hell!' Then followed other bodies of different ranks, and dressed in different liveries. Some wore a showy stuff, checkered white and red, like the squares of a chess-board; others were clad in pure white, bearing hammers or maces of silver or copper; and the guards, together with those in immediate attendance on the prince, were distinguished by a rich azure livery, and a profusion of gay ornaments, while the large pendants attached to the ears indicated the Peruvian noble.

him, with the consciousness that he can do nothing to avert his fate. At length, weary with the work of destruction, the Spaniards, as the shades of evening grew deeper, felt afraid that the royal prize might, after all, elude them; and some of the cavaliers made a desperate attempt to end the affray at once by taking Atahuallpa's life. But Pizarro, who was nearest his person, called out with stentorian voice: 'Let no one, who values his life, strike at the Inca;' and, stretching out his arm to shield him, received a wound on the hand from one of his own men-the only wound received by a Spaniard in the action.

The struggle now became fiercer than ever round the royal litter. It reeled more and more, and at length, several of the nobles who supported it having been slain, it was overturned, and the Indian prince would have come with violence to the ground, had not his fall been broken by the efforts of Pizarro and some other of the cavaliers, who caught him in their arms. The imperial borla was instantly snatched from his temples by a soldier named Estete, and the unhappy monarch, strongly secured, was removed to a neighbouring building, where he was carefully guarded.

All attempt at resistance now ceased. The fate of the Inca soon spread over town and country. The charm which might have held the Peruvians together was dissolved. Every man thought only of his own safety. Even the soldiery encamped on the adjacent fields took the alarm, and, learning the fatal tidings, were seen flying in every direction before their pursuers, who in the heat of triumph shewed no touch of mercy. At length night, more pitiful than man, threw her friendly mantle over the fugitives, and the scattered troops of Pizarro rallied once more at the sound of the trumpet in the bloody square of Caxamalca.

DR ARNOLD.

Early Roman history has of late formed the subject of investigation and discussion. The celebrated work of Niebuhr, the Prussian historian (1776-1831), was published in 1811, and again, much modified and enlarged, in 1827. For some time it attracted little attention in this country, but gradually followers and disciples sprung up. The leading theory of Niebuhr (derived from James Perizonius, an antiquary of the seventeenth century) was, that the commonly received history of the early centuries of Rome was in great part fabulous, founded on popular songs or lays chanted at the Roman banquets. Greece had her rhapsodists, the Teutonic nations their bards, and Rome, he concluded, had also her poetical chroniclers. To eliminate whatever portion of truth was contained in the stories of the mythic period-and Niebuhr believed that they did contain many authentic facts-was the chosen task of the learned Prussian, and of all those who adopted his ballad theory' as a sound historical hypothesis. One of the most enthusiastic of his admirers was DR THOMAS ARNOLD (1795-1842), the well-known and popular master of Rugby School. Arnold was a native of East Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, where his father resided as collector of customs. He was educated at Winchester, and afterwards at Oxford, being elected a Fellow of Oriel College in 1815. He remained at Oxford four more years, employed in instructing pupils; and in his twenty-fifth year he settled at Laleham, near Staines, in Middlesex. At Laleham he took pupils as before, married, and spent nine years of happiness and study. He took priest's orders in 1828, and in that year occurred the great turning-point of his life-he was appointed to

Rugby School. He longed to 'try whether our public school system has not in it some noble elements which may produce fruit even to life eternal,' and his exertions not only raised Rugby School to the highest popularity, but introduced a great change and improvement into all the public schools in England. He trusted much to the 'sixth form,' or elder boys, who exercise a recognised authority over the junior pupils, and these he inspired with love, reverence, and confidence. His interest in his pupils was that of a parent, and it was unceasing. On Sunday he preached to them; 'he was still the instructor and the schoolmaster, only teaching and educating with increased solemnity and energy.' All'unpromising subjects,' or pupils likely to taint others, he removed from the school. 'It is not necessary,' he said, 'that this should be a school of three hundred, or one hundred, or of fifty boys; but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christian gentlemen.' His firmness, his sympathy, his fine manly character, and devotion to duty, in time bound all good hearts to him. Out-of-doors, Arnold had also his battles to fight. He was a Liberal in politics, though not a partisan, and a keen church reformer. To the High Church party he was strenuously opposed. The Church, he said, meant not the priesthood, but the body of believers.

brethren.

the whole body of believers were equally Christianity recognised no priesthood Nothing, he conceived, could save the Church but a union with the Dissenters; and the civil power was more able than the clergy, not only to govern, but to fix the doctrines of the Church. These Erastian views, propounded with his usual zeal and earnestness, offended and alarmed many of Arnold's own friends, especially those of the clergy, and he also failed to conciliate the Dissenters. The Whig government, in 1835, appointed him a Fellow in the Senate of the new university of London. Arnold, convinced that Christianity should be the basis and principle of all education in a Christian country, proposed that every candidate for a degree in the university should be examined on the Scriptures. This was resisted-at least to the extent that the examination should not be compulsory, but voluntary— and Arnold afterwards resigned his appointment. In 1841, he obtained one more congenial to his tastes and pursuits-he was nominated Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. His inaugural lecture was attended by a vast concourse of students and friends, for the popular tide had now turned in his favour, and his robust health promised a long succession of professorial triumphs, as well as of general usefulness. He had purchased a small property in Westmoreland-Fox How, situated in one of the most beautiful portions of the Lake country, with the now classic river Rotha, purior electro,' winding round his fields. At Fox How he spent his vacations; and he was preparing to return thither in the summer of 1842, when one night he was seized with spasms of the heart, and died ere eight o'clock next morning, June 12, 1842. The works of Dr Arnold give but a faint idea of what he accomplished. He was emphatically a man of action. His writings, however, are characteristic of the man-earnest, clear in conception and style, and independent in thought. His History of Rome, which he intended to carry down to the fall of the Western Empire, was completed only to the end of the Second Punic

6

Grote.

Character of Scipio.

A mind like Scipio's, working its way under the peculiar influences of his time and country, cannot but move irregularly-it cannot but be full of contradictions. | Two hundred years later, the mind of the dictator, Cæsar, acquiesced contentedly in epicureanism; he retained no more of enthusiasm than was inseparable from the intensity of his intellectual power, and the fervour of his courage, even amidst his utter moral degradation. But Scipio could not be like Cæsar. His mind rose above the state of things around him; his spirit was solitary and kingly; he was cramped by living among those as his equals whom he felt fitted to guide as from some higher sphere; and he retired at last to Liternum, to breathe freely, to enjoy the simplicity of his childhood, since he could not fulfil his natural calling to be a hero-king. So far he stood apart from his countrymen-admired, reverenced, but not loved. But he could not shake off all the influences of his time: the virtue, public and private, which still existed at Rome-the reverence paid by the wisest and best men to the religion of their fathers were elements too congenial to his nature not to retain their hold on it: they cherished that nobleness of soul in him, and that faith in the invisible and divine, which two centuries of growing unbelief rendered almost impossible in the days of Cæsar. Yet how strange must the conflict be when faith is combined with the highest intellectual power, and its appointed object is no better than paganism! Longing to believe, yet repelled by palpable falsehood -crossed inevitably with snatches of unbelief, in which hypocrisy is ever close at the door-it breaks out desperately, as it may seem, into the region of dreams and visions, and mysterious communings with the invisible, as if longing to find that food in its own creations which no outward objective truth offers to it. The proportions of belief and unbelief in the human mind in such cases, no human judgment can determine-they are the wonders of history; characters inevitably misrepresented by the vulgar, and viewed even by those who, in some sense, have the key to them as a mystery not fully to be comprehended, and still less explained to others. The genius which conceived the incomprehensible character of Hamlet would alone be able to describe with intuitive truth the character of Scipio or of Cromwell. With all his greatness there was a waywardness in him which seems often to accompany genius; a self-idolatry, natural enough where there is so keen a consciousness of power and of lofty designs; a self-dependence, which feels even the most sacred external relations to be unessential to its own perfection. Such is the Achilles of Homer-the highest conception of the individual hero relying on himself, and sufficient to himself. But the same poet who conceived the character of Achilles has also drawn that of Hector; of the truly noble, because unselfish hero-who subdues his genius to make it

Character of Hannibal.

Hannibal's genius may be likened to the Homeric god, who, in his hatred of the Trojans, rises from the deep to rally the fainting Greeks, and to lead them against the enemy; so the calm courage with which Hector met his more than human adversary in his country's cause, is no unworthy image of the unyielding magnanimity displayed by the aristocracy of Rome. As Hannibal utterly eclipses Carthage, so, on the contrary, Fabius, Marcellus, Claudius, Nero, even Scipio himself, are as nothing when compared to the spirit and wisdom and power of Rome. The senate, which voted its thanks to its political enemy, Varro, after his disastrous defeat, because he had not despaired of the commonwealth, and which threatened either to solicit, or to reprove, or to threaten, or in any way to notice the twelve colonies which had refused their accustomed supplies of men for the army, is far more to be honoured than the conquerer of Zama. This we should the more carefully bear in mind, because our tendency is to admire individual greatness far more than national; and as no single Roman will bear comparison with Hannibal, we are apt to murmur at the event of the contest, and to think that the victory was awarded to the least worthy of the combatants. On the contrary, never was the wisdom of God's providence more manifest than in the issue of the struggle between Rome and Carthage. It was clearly for the good of mankind that Hannibal should be conquered; his triumph would have stopped the progress of the world. For great men can only act permanently by forming great nations; and no one man, even though it were Hannibal himself, can in one generation effect such a work. But where the nation has been merely enkindled for a while by a great man's spirit, the light passes away with him who communicated it; and the nation, when he is gone, is like a dead body, to which magic power had for a moment given an unnatural life; when the charm has ceased, the body is cold and stiff as before. He who grieves over the battle of Zama should carry on his thoughts to a period thirty years later, when Hannibal must, in the course of nature, have been dead, and consider how the isolated Phonician city of Carthage was fitted to receive and to consolidate the civilisation of Greece, or by its laws and institutions to bind together barbarians of every race and language into an organised empire, and prepare them for becoming, when that empire was dissolved, the free members of the commonwealth of Christian Europe.

Sufferings during the Siege of Genoa.

In the autumn of 1799, the Austrians had driven the French out of Lombardy and Piedmont; their last victory of Fossano or Genola had won the fortress of Coni or Cuneo, close under the Alps, and at the very extremity of the plain of the Po; the French clung to Italy only by their hold of the Riviera of Genoa, the narrow strip of coast between the Apennines and the sea, which extends from the frontiers of France almost to the mouth of the Arno. Hither the remains of the French force were collected, commanded by General Massena, and the point of chief importance to his defence was the city of Genoa. Napoleon had just returned from Egypt, and was become First Consul; but he could not be expected to take the field till the