So far, then, as we have to modify Prescott's chapters which describe the Mexico of Cortés, this modification consists largely in a mere change of terminology. Following the Spanish records, he has accurately reproduced just what the Spaniards saw, or thought they saw, in old Tenochtitlan. He has looked at all things through their eyes; and such errors as he made were the same errors which they had made while they were standing in the great _pueblo_ which was to them the scene of so much suffering and of so great a final triumph. When Prescott wrote, there lived no man who could have gainsaid him. His story represents the most accurate information which was then attainable. As Mr. Thorpe has well expressed it: "No historian is responsible for not using undiscovered evidence. Prescott wrote from the archives of Europe ... from the European side. If one cares to know how the Old World first understood the New, he will read Prescott." Even Morgan, who goes further in his destructive criticism than any other authoritative writer, admits that Prescott and his sources "may be trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Spaniards, and to the acts and personal characteristics of the Indians; in whatever relates to their weapons, implements and utensils, fabrics, food and raiment, and things of a similar character." Only in what relates to their government, social relations, and plan of life does the narrative need to be in part rewritten. It is but fair to note that Prescott himself, in his preliminary chapters on the Aztecs, is far from dogmatising. His statements are made with a distinct reserve, and he acknowledges alike the difficulty of the subject and his doubts as to the finality of what he tells. Even in his descriptive passages, he is solicitous lest the warm imagination of the Spanish chroniclers may have led them to throw too high a light on what they saw. Thus, after ending his account of Montezuma's household and the Aztec "court," drawn from the pages of Bernal Diaz, Toribio, and Oviedo, he qualifies its gorgeousness in the following sentence:[47] "Such is the picture of Montezuma's domestic establishment and way of living as delineated by the Conquerors and their immediate followers, who had the best means of information; too highly coloured, it may be, by the proneness to exaggerate which was natural to those who first witnessed a spectacle so striking to the imagination, so new and unexpected." And in a foot-note on the same page he expressly warns the student of history against the fanciful chapters of the Spaniards who wrote a generation later, comparing their accounts with the stories in the _Arabian Nights_.