The mention of this circumstance leads one to consider the much-mooted question as to how far the _Conquest of Mexico_ may be accepted as veracious history. Is it history at all or is it, as some have said, historical romance? Are we to classify it with such books as those of Ranke and Parkman, whose brilliancy of style is wholly compatible with scrupulous fidelity to historic fact, or must we think of it as verging upon the category of romances built up around the material which history affords--with books like _Ivanhoe_ and _Harold_ and _Salammbô_? In the years immediately following its publication, Prescott's great work was accepted as indubitably accurate. His imposing array of foot-notes, his thorough acquaintance with the Spanish chronicles, and the unstinted approval given to him by contemporary historians inspired in the public an implicit faith. Then, here and there, a sceptic began to raise his head, and to question, not the good faith of Prescott, but rather the value of the very sources upon which Prescott's history had been built. As a matter of fact, long before Prescott's time, the reports and narratives of the conquerors had in parts been doubted. As early as the eighteenth century Lafitau, the Jesuit missionary, in a treatise published in 1723,[38] had discussed with great acuteness some questions of American ethnology in a spirit of scientific criticism; and later in the same century, James Adair had gathered valuable material in the same department of knowledge.[39] Even earlier, the Spanish Jesuit, José de Acosta, had published a treatise which exhibits traces of a critical method.[40] Again, Robertson, in his _History of America_ (a book, by the way, which Prescott had studied very carefully), shows an independence of attitude and an acumen which find expression in a definite disagreement with much that had been set down by the Spanish chroniclers. Such criticism as these and other isolated writers had brought to bear was directed against that part of the accepted tradition which relates to the Aztec civilisation. Prescott, following the notices of Las Casas, Herrera, Bernal Diaz, Oviedo, Cortés himself, and the writer who is known as the _conquistador anonimo_, had simply weighed the assertions of one as against those of another, striving to reconcile their discrepancies of statement and following one rather than the other, according to the apparent preponderance of probability. He did not, however, perceive in these discrepancies the clue which might have guided him, as it subsequently did others, to a clearer understanding of the actual facts. Therefore, he has painted for us the Mexico of Montezuma in gorgeous colours, seeing in it a great Empire, possessed of a civilisation no less splendid than that of Western Europe, and exhibiting a political and social system comparable with that which Europeans knew. The magnificence and wealth of this fancied Empire gave,