vassal of the Spanish crown. They divided the Mexican treasures amongst them; and finally drove the Mexicans to desperation.
The arrival of the armament from Cuba under Narvaez, sent by Velasquez to punish Cortez for his treason, and his victory over Narvaez, and the union of those troops with his own, belong to the general historian—my task is to exhibit his treatment to the natives; and his next exploit, is that of exposing Montezuma to the view of his exasperated subjects from the battlements of his house, in the hope that his royal puppet might have authority enough to appease them; a scheme which proved the death of the emperor—for his own subjects, indignant at his tame submission to the Spaniards, let fly their arrows at him. The fury of the Mexicans on this catastrophe, the terrible nocturnal retreat of Cortez from the city, still called amongst the inhabitants of Mexico, La Noche Triste, the sorrowful night,—the strange battle of Otumba, where Cortez, felling the standard-bearer of the army, dispersed in a moment tens of thousands like a mist,—the flight to Tlascala, and the return again to the siege,—the eight thousand Tamenes, or servile Indians, bearing through the hostile country to the lake the brigandines in parts, ready to put together on their arrival,—Father Olmedo blessing the brigandines as they were launched on the lake in the presence of wondering multitudes,—and the desperate siege and assault themselves, all are full of the most stirring interest, and display a sort of satanic grandeur in the man, amidst the horrors into which his ambitious guilt had plunged him, that are only to be compared to that of Napoleon in Russia, beset, in
