HONOR TO WHOM HONOR IS DUE.
Manoel Francisco de Barros y Souza, Viscount Santarem, a noted Portuguese diplomatist and writer. Born at Lisbon, 1790; died, 1856.
If Columbus was not the first to discover America, he was, at least, the man who rediscovered it, and in a positive and definite shape communicated the knowledge of it. For, if he verified what the Egyptian priest indicated to Solon, the Athenian, as is related by Plato in the Timœus respecting the Island of Atlantis; if he realized the hypothesis of Actian; if he accomplished the prophecy of Seneca in the Medea; if he demonstrated that the story of the mysterious Carthaginian vessel, related by Aristotle and Theophrastus, was not a dream; if he established by deeds that there was nothing visionary in what St. Gregory pointed at in one of his letters to St. Clement; if, in a word, Columbus proved by his discovery the existence of the land which Madoc had visited before him, as Hakluyt and Powell pretended; and ascertained for a certainty that which for the ancients had always been so uncertain, problematical, and mysterious—his glory becomes only the more splendid, and more an object to command admiration.