Hernando De Soto: Together With an Account of One of His Captains, Gonçalo Silvestre (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Hernando De Soto: Together With an Account of One of His Captains, Gonçalo Silvestre

Mankind, that dearly loves a scapegoat to bear the burden of its sins, has made the Spanish Conquest of America one of its favourite episodes at which to raise its eyes in horror to that Heaven that it tries vainly to deceive.

Pious historians, Protestant in creed, self-righteous, and agog to intensify the sins of other faiths, SO that their co-religionists' withers may escape the pressure of their well-earned pack-saddles, have written of Pizarro and Cortés, describing them as fiends when they were merely conquerors at worst. Others, by piling adjectives on adjectives, have harrowed both our senses and our taste, filling the middle distance of their canvases so full that the whole picture seems less like a portrait than a brilliant palette, left ostentatiously about SO that the unwary visitor to the studio may stand amazed and say, This is indeed a colourist before the Lord.

They have succeeded well, so that to-day the Conquest of America is the stock whetting-block on Which all those who touch it sharpen up their Wits.

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