The writer of historical works, like the present, must claim the privilege of the poet, and be allowed, while expatiating on events of interest so inferior that they have been almost rejected by his predecessors, to leave many others of manifest importance to be supplied, not indeed by the imagination, but by the learning of the reader. Our only desire is to follow the adventures of two individuals, so obscure and so unfortunate, that the worthy and somewhat over-conscientious Bernal Diaz del Castillo has despatched the whole history of the first in the few vague fragments which we have prefixed to the story; while he has scrupulously abstained from saying a single word of the second. If the reader will turn to the pages of this conscientious historian, of De Solis, or of Clavigero, he will be made acquainted with the stirring exploits of the eight or nine weeks that followed after the arrest of Juan Lerma. In this time, the Captain-General, at the head of all the Spaniards, save those who were left in garrison at Tezcuco, and the few sailors and shipwrights who remained in the dock-yards, to preside over Indian artificers, compelled to work at the brigantines--in this time, we say, and at the head of this force, assisted by many thousand Tlascalans, Cortes commenced and completed the circuit of the whole valley, storming and burning cities and towns without number, resisted valiantly in all that were not disaffected, and sometimes, as at the city of Tacuba, repulsed with great loss and no little dishonour. The whole campaign abounds with singular and exciting incidents, of which, however, it does not suit our purpose to mention any but one, and that almost in a word. At the city of Xochimilco, or the Garden of Flowers, (for this is the signification of the word,) where the resistance was sanguinary and noble, though, in the end, ineffectual, Cortes was wounded, surrounded, struck down from his horse, which was killed, and he himself, for a moment, a prisoner; and he owed his life and liberty only to the extraordinary valour of Gaspar Olea of the Red Beard, who, with the help of a few resolute Tlascalans, succeeded in bringing him off. The aid thus rendered by Olea was the more remarkable, since, from the moment of Juan's arrest, he had become sullen, morose, and was sometimes even charged to be mutinous. In this last imputation, however, as far as it implied any treasonable thoughts or practices, the rude Gaspar was wronged. His dissatisfaction was caused solely by the fall and anticipated fate of his young captain. The heinousness of Juan's crime--the drawing his sword upon an officer in the execution of his duty, as Guzman had been, and, worse yet, the aiming of that at the breast of the General--had left it, apparently, impossible to be forgiven. It was universally expected that Juan would expiate the crime with his life; and the only wonder was, that he had not been immediately tried, condemned, and executed.