What beautiful pictures of a primitive age! what a more than realization of the age of gold! and what a dismal fall to that actual _age of gold_ which was coming upon them! To turn from these delightful scenes to the massacres and oppressions of millions of these gentle and kind people, and then to the groans of millions of wretched Africans, which through three long centuries have succeeded them, is one of the most melancholy and amazing things in the criminal history of the earth; nor can we wonder at the feelings with which Bryan Edwards reviews this awful subject:—“All the murders and desolations of the most pitiless tyrants that ever diverted themselves with the pangs and convulsions of their fellow-creatures, fall infinitely short of the bloody enormities committed by the Spanish nation in the conquest of the New World—a conquest, on a low estimate, effected by the murder of ten millions of the species! After reading these accounts, who can help forming an indignant wish that the hand of Heaven, by some miraculous interposition, had swept these European tyrants from the face of the earth, who like so many beasts of prey, roamed round the world only to desolate and destroy; and more remorseless than the fiercest savage, thirsted for human blood without having the impulse of natural appetite to plead in their defence!” CHAPTER VII. THE SPANIARDS IN MEXICO. And he knew their desolate palaces, and he laid waste their cities.—_Ezekiel_ xix. 7. How Cortez conquered,—Montezuma fell.—_Montgomery._ Much of a Southern Sea they spake, And of that glorious city won, Near the setting of the sun, Throned in a silver lake: Of seven kings in chains of gold, And deeds of death by tongue untold,— Deeds such as breathed in secret there, Had shaken the confession-chair!—_Rogers._