mercifully induced them to forgive him, in comparing him with the heroes of pagan antiquity, whose grandeur did not exempt them from paying tribute to human frailty. Under the pretext of erudition, of the impartiality of historic criticism, this Coterie of Four Writers has denaturalized the inmost facts of the life of Columbus.
After having exhumed all the accusations repeated against him during his lifetime, they have known how to aggravate them with a calumny of which his cotemporaries could have had no idea. In the most envenomed persecutions he endured, never did any enemy of Columbus attack his purity of manners. The breath of hatred never dared to tarnish this mirror of chastity. Such an imposture was reserved for our days.
Is it not time to dissipate this calumny, conceived in Piedmont, born at Genoa, nourished in Spain, and adopted with ardor by Protestantism, — to oppose to it the Catholic grandeur of the man who was providentially charged with raising the veil that during six thousand years hid from us the totality of the terrestrial globe? Let the piety of the faithful be reassured; let the admirers of Columbus have no fear; the herald of the Cross was always without reproach, as he was always without fear. And if he should have participated in our imperfections, — our almost involuntary oversights, — at least he never forgot the obligations he owed for the honor the Divine Majesty deigned to confer on him. Nevertheless, for those who have at heart the integrity of history as much as the glory of Columbus, we ought, before relating the life of this great Servant of God, to expose, in a few lines, the calumny which is the ground of the different imputations directed against him.
We are going to show how this calumny was impudently brought forward, accepted, accredited, and imposed on the learned of Europe.
In 1805, Galeani Napione, an erudite, but cavilling and opinionative writer, who held out against all evidence that Columbus was born at the chateau of Cuccaro, in Mont-
