The spectacle of this day, the eighth of November, 1519, has not its parallel in the annals of history, and will probably never be repeated in the history of man. The sovereign and absolute monarch of a populous and powerful empire, stooping from his imperial throne, flinging wide open the gates of his capital, and condescending to go out, and receive with an apparent welcome an invading foe, whom he had in vain attempted to keep out, but whom he had now the power to crush under his feet in a moment. That invading foe consisted only of a few hundred adventurers, three thousand miles from home, in the heart of the country they had ravaged, and surrounded by countless thousands of exasperated foes, burning to revenge the injuries and insults they had received at the hands of the strangers, and only held back from rushing upon them, like herds of ravening tigers, by the strong arm of the royal prohibition. Their position was like that of a group of children in a menagerie, amusing themselves with teasing and exasperating the caged animals around them. The furious creatures glare on them with looks of rage, growling fiercely, and gnashing their teeth. The keeper sympathizes with his enraged subjects, burning to let them loose upon their annoyers, but restrained by that mysterious agency, in which the divine hand is every where moulding and subduing the natural impulses of humanity, and working out its own wise ends by the wrath and passions of men. Let the keeper but raise the bar of that cage for a moment, and not one of the bright group would be left to tell the tragic issue of their sport. Let the terror-stricken Montezuma put on once more the air of a monarch, and raise his finger as a signal for the onset, before the enemy has become entrenched in his fortress, and few, if any, of that brave band would be left to tell the world of their fate--the marvellous story of the Conquest would never be told; the Aztec dynasty would outlive the period assigned it by those mystic oracles; and Montezuma, recovered from the dark dreams of an imagination disordered by superstition--the long dreaded crisis of his destiny passed--would have swayed again the sceptre of undisputed empire over the broad and beautiful realms of Anahuac. Having once vanquished and destroyed the terrible strangers, and stripped them of that supernatural defence, which the idea of their celestial origin threw around them, he would never again have yielded his soul to so unmanly a fear. If such had been the issue of the invasion of Cortez and his band, it is doubtful whether the Aztec dynasty would ever have been overthrown. The civilization of Europe would soon have been engrafted upon its own. Christianity would have taken the place of their dark and bloody paganism; which, with a people so far enlightened as they were, could not have endured for a moment the noon-day blaze of the gospel; and the terrible power of that heathen despot would have been softened, without