And now, should Mr. Kauffman, or any other artist, desirous of painting a great picture without pandering to a taste as false in art as in history, desire to select a striking incident from the history of Columbus, we beg leave to suggest that, without flying in the face of truth, he may find it among the following historical incidents:
First. Pedro Gonzalez de Mendoza, in appearance lofty and venerable, of generous and gentle deportment, pleading the cause of Columbus before the queen.
Second. The friar Diego de Deza aiding Columbus in sore necessity from his own scant purse.
Third. Juan Perez, prior of the convent of La Rabida, remonstrating with Columbus against abandoning his great enterprise and quitting Spain.
Fourth. The same prior saddling a mule at midnight to confront the dangers of mountain passes, and an enemy's country, in order to intercede for Columbus with the queen at Santa Fé.
Fifth. The same noble monk pleading the cause of Columbus before the queen with such chivalrous enthusiasm that "Isabella never heard the proposition urged with such honest zeal and impassioned eloquence."
Sixth. Another noble ecclesiastic, Luis de St. Angel, who, rivalling Isabella's magnanimity, met the queen's noble offer to pledge her crown jewels to raise the necessary funds for Columbus's expedition with the assurance that she need not, for he would advance the money.
But to return to the "council of Salamanca." The word council presents the idea of a solemn ecclesiastical assemblage: not a committee, not a board, not a junto; but something grand, elevated in dignity and large in numbers. When you say "council," every one, instinctively, imagines a crowd of mitres and episcopal croziers.
With that "fatal facility" which is the bane of historical composition Irving has given us an entire chapter of nine pages describing this famous "council," its debates, and its proceedings, and from this chapter has gradually, although—we must in justice to Mr. Irving say—unwarrantably, grown up a story that, by dint of thirty years' repetition, has almost acquired the dignity of an historical fact. That Prescott should have followed Irving is not surprising. That Lamartine should have disdained reference to historical sources and spoken of Spain of the fifteenth century with that wonderful sans gêne that improvises both form and substance, that writes an apotheosis of Robespierre and calls it a history of the Girondins, in which there is, of course, a florid description of "the last banquet," (which never took place,) is still less surprising. But that a Spaniard and a serious historian, Don Modesto Lafuente, should have written an important page in the history of his country on the word of an entire stranger is astounding.