"As the army was climbing the mountain steeps which shut in the Valley of Otompan, the vedettes came in with the intelligence that a powerful body was encamped on the other side, apparently awaiting their approach. The intelligence was soon confirmed by their own eyes, as they turned the crest of the sierra, and saw spread out, below, a mighty host, filling up the whole depth of the valley, and giving to it the appearance, from the white cotton mail of the warriors, of being covered with snow.... As far as the eye could reach, were to be seen shields and waving banners, fantastic helmets, forests of shining spears, the bright feather-mail of the chief, and the coarse cotton panoply of his follower, all mingled together in wild confusion and tossing to and fro like the billows of a troubled ocean. It was a sight to fill the stoutest heart among the Christians with dismay, heightened by the previous expectation of soon reaching the friendly land which was to terminate their wearisome pilgrimage. Even Cortés, as he contrasted the tremendous array before him with his own diminished squadrons, wasted by disease and enfeebled by hunger and fatigue, could not escape the conviction that his last hour had arrived."[33] But it is not merely in vivid narration and description of events that the _Conquest of Mexico_ attains so rare a degree of excellence. Here, as nowhere else, has Prescott succeeded in delineating character. All the chief actors of his great historic drama not only live and breathe, but they are as distinctly differentiated as they must have been in life. Cortés and his lieutenants are persons whom we actually come to know in the pages of Prescott, just as in the pages of Xenophon we come to know Clearchus and the adventurous generals who, like Cortés, made their way into the heart of a great empire and faced barbarians in battle. The comparison between Xenophon and Prescott is, indeed, a very natural one, and it was made quite early after the appearance of the _Ferdinand and Isabella_ by an English admirer, Mr. Thomas Grenville. Calling upon this gentleman one day, Mr. Everett found him in his library reading Xenophon's _Anabasis_ in the original Greek. Mr. Everett made some casual remark upon the merits of that book, whereupon Mr. Grenville holding up a volume of _Ferdinand and Isabella_ said, "Here is one far superior."[34]