In the sixteenth century the Spanish race conquered the various kingdoms of America. It founded new societies, destroyed ancient empires, and created cities in the wilderness; and in the following century it made innumerable laws and sent forth innumerable warlike expeditions. Between one period and the next--the rude epic of conquest and the tame existence of the civilised colonies--a strange contrast is to be observed. In the first period cupidity may be said to be the _deus ex machina_ of the great epic acted by the conquerors: there is a bloody and barbarous conflict with the unknown territory, the hostile Indians, the mysterious forests, the enormous rivers, and the desert that swallows whole legions. This marvellous age is followed, in the silent cities, by a monotonous, pious, puerile existence. Exhausted by heroism, the race declines, mingles itself with the Indians, imports black slaves from Africa, and obeys its Inquisitors and viceroys. The obscure events of its lamentable existence take place in a veritable wilderness. Grey and unrelieved is this period, the period known as "the Colony," for the unstable societies of America reflect the life of Spain; while the first, that of the Conquest, is an age of greed and bloodshed, in {45} which the impetuous adventurers of the Peninsula roam from Mexico to Patagonia, realising, in the words of de Heredia's sonnet, their "brutal and heroic dream." The Spaniard and the Portuguese of the sixteenth century were men of the Renaissance; of that age which was perturbed by the restored spectacle of the life of the world. Voyages, discoveries, Greek myths and classic poems, which filled the past with legends and heroic deeds, gave the Latins of the Mediterranean the longing to explore lands and seas unknown. Individuality developed with an energy that often merged in crime. Tyrants or conquerors longing for power and adventure lived in regions far removed from ideals of good and evil. Mystics--for the mediæval gloom still hung over Europe--they joined cupidity to faith, and renounced a life of contemplation in order to push back the limits of the world. Heirs of the Phoenician ambition, the Portuguese encircled Africa before discovering America; and many a Spanish captain, before invading the regions oversea, had fought in Flanders, pillaged Rome, and repeated the journey of Don Quixote across La Mancha.