The circumstances of Spanish and Portuguese America were very different in every stage. In Mexico, in Peru, in Chili, the conquerors encountered a people civilised and humane; acquainted with many of the arts of polished life; agriculturists and mechanics; knowing in the things belonging to the altar and the throne, and waging war for conquest and for glory. But the savages of Brazil were hunters and cannibals; they wandered, and they made war for food: few of the tribes knew even the cultivation of the mandioc, and fewer still had adopted any kind of covering, save paint and feathers for ornament. The Spanish conquests were more quickly made, and appeared more easily settled, because in states so far advanced in civilisation the defeat of an army decides the fate of a kingdom, and the land already cultivated, and the mines already known and worked, were entered upon at once by the conquerors. In Brazil the land that was granted by leagues was _to be won by inches_ from the hordes of savages who succeeded each other in incalculable multitudes, and whose migratory habits rendered it a matter of course for one tribe immediately to occupy the ground from which its predecessors had been driven. Hence the history of the early settlers in Brazil presents none of those splendid and chivalresque pictures that the chronicles of the Corteses, and Pizarros, and Almagros furnish. They are plain, and often pathetic scenes of human life, full of patience, and enterprise, and endurance; but the wickedness that stains even the best of them, is the more disgusting as it is more sordid. But the very circumstances that facilitated the settling of the Spanish colonies were also likely to accelerate their liberation. A sense and a remembrance of national honour and freedom, remained among the polished Mexicans and Peruvians. Their numbers indeed had been thinned by the cruelties of the conquerors, but enough were left to perpetuate the memory of their fathers, to hand down the prophecies uttered in the phrenzy of their dying patriots; and the Peruvian, when he visited Lima, looked round the chamber of the viceroys, as he saw niche after niche filled up with their pictures, till the fated number should be accomplished, with no common emotion[1]; and many a dreamer on the Peruvian coast, when he saw the Admiral of the Chilian squadron, was ready to hail him as the golden-haired son of light who was to restore the kingdom of the Incas.[2] [Note 1: The hall with the pictures of the viceroys was filled: there would be no room in it for Lacerna.] [Note 2: This prophecy was recorded by Garcelaço de la Vega; and it is said, that the copies of his Incas were bought up, and an edition printed, omitting the prophecy.]