To all those who may yet be disposed to consider our account of the strength and splendour of the empire of Montezuma as fabulous, we recommend no better study than the honest, worthy, and single-minded historian, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who lived to complete his _Historia Verdadera_, fifty years afterwards, in the loyal city of Guatimala, in which he held the honourable post of Regidor, the venerable, and, at that period, almost the sole survivor of the followers of Cortes. He has recorded one striking proof of the vast multitudes of pagans that had been concentrated within the island of Mexico. After averring, with a solemn oath, that, after the fall of the city, the streets, houses, squares, courts, and canals, were so covered with dead bodies, that it was impossible to move without treading upon them, he relates, that, Cortes having ordered all who survived, principally women and children, and the wounded, to evacuate the city, preparatory to its purification, 'for _three days and three nights_, all the causeways were full of the wretched fugitives, who were so weak and sickly, so squalid and pestilential, that it was misery to behold them.' Three broad highways, covered, for the space of three days and nights, by a moving mass of widows and orphans, the trophies of a gallant achievement! the first fruits of the ambition of a single individual! As Bernal Diaz retained, to the last, a jealous regard for the honour of his leader, this friendly weakness, taken into consideration along with the infirmities of memory incident to his advanced age, may perhaps account for his failure to complete the story of Juan Lerma. He may have recollected, as is often the case with an old man, the earliest facts of the story, while the later ones slipped entirely from his mind. Of Cortes himself, it is scarce necessary to apprize the reader, that he lived to subdue other empires, and experience the ingratitude of a monarch, whose favour he had so amply merited. He fought for renown, for his king, and for heaven. Heaven alone can judge the merit of his acts, for men are yet unwilling to sit in judgment upon the brave; his king requited him with insults and positive oppression; and fame has placed him among those who have trodden out the wine-press of human desolation, and live in marble. As for the young Count of Castillejo, his claims to the inheritance of his father were too well substantiated to be resisted; and the crimes of Gregorio had left none to oppose. As a subordinate in the work of conquest, there was nothing in him to be feared; and when he bore from a land he could only remember with sorrow, a bride whose father had borne the witching name of king, he was received with as much favour, and distinguished by as many honours, as any other _Conquistador_, who transplanted among the dames of Castile, a wife wooed within the palaces of Montezuma.