vision; yet it is their outward bearing and their visible acts that he makes us know, rather than the interplay of motive and temperament which impelled them. His taste, indeed, is decidedly for the splendid and the spectacular. Kings, princes, nobles, warriors, and statesmen crowd his pages. Perhaps they satisfied the starved imagination of the New Englander, whose own life was lived amid surroundings antithetically prosaic. Certain it is, that, in dwelling upon a memorable epoch, he omitted all consideration of a stratum of society which underlay the surface which alone he saw. A few more years, and the fifteenth-century _picaro_, the common man, the trader, and the peasant were destined to emerge from the humble position to which the usages of chivalry had consigned them. The invention of gunpowder and the use of it in war soon swept away the advantage which the knight in armour had possessed as against the humble foot-soldier who followed him. The discovery of America and the opening of new lands teeming with treasures for their conquerors roused and stimulated the consciousness of the lower orders. Before long, the man-at-arms, the musketeer, and the artilleryman attained a consequence which the ordinary fighting man had never had before. After these had gone forth as adventurers into the New World, they brought back with them not only riches wrested from the helpless natives whom they had subdued, but a spirit of freedom verging even upon lawlessness, which leavened the whole stagnant life of Europe. Then, for the first time, such as had been only pawns in the game of statesmanship and war became factors to be anxiously considered. Even literature then takes notice of them, and for the first time they begin to influence the course of modern history. A philosophical historian, therefore, would have looked beyond the _ricos hombres_, and would have revealed to us, at least in part, the existence and the mode of life of that great mass of swarming humanity with which the statesman and the feudal lord had soon to reckon. As it was, however, Prescott saw the obvious rather than the recondite. Within the field which he had marked out, his work was admirably done. He delineated clearly and impartially the events of a splendid epoch wherein the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were united under two far-seeing sovereigns, and wherein the power of Spanish feudalism was broken, the prestige of France and Portugal brought low, the Moors expelled, and Spain consolidated into one united kingdom from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, while a new and unknown world was opened for the expansion and enrichment of the old. He well deserved the praise which a Spanish critic and scholar[29] gave him of having written in a masterly manner one of the most successful historical productions of the century in which he lived. CHAPTER VIII THE "CONQUEST OF MEXICO" AS LITERATURE AND AS HISTORY