Like whatever else is strikingly original, it cannot be
described; we can only hope to convey a faint idea of it by some random
illustrations. To nearly every statement which he notices in the works
before him Mr. Wilson offers a flat contradiction. When these statements
relate to numbers, his method of treating them is a systematic one.
He has picked out of Bernal Diaz, who wrote in an avowed spirit of
hostility to Gomara, a pettish remark, that the exaggerations of the
latter are so great, that, when he says eighty thousand, we may read
one thousand. This piece of rhetoric Mr. Wilson receives literally,
and makes it a rule of measurement, applying it with more or less
exactness,--not, however, to the statements of Gomara, with whose work
he is acquainted only at second hand, but to those of Cortes and of
Bernal Diaz himself! Thus, in every computation of the number of the
enemy's forces, or of the Indian allies who joined the Spaniards in
their contest with the Aztecs, Mr. Wilson "takes the liberty," to use
his own phrase, of "dropping" one or more ciphers from the amount. This
mode of adapting the narrative to his own conceptions he calls "reducing
it to reality.
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