This gives to his narrative a value to which it could
have no pretensions on the score of its literary execution.
Pizarro was a soldier, with as little education, probably, as
usually falls to those who have been trained from youth in this
rough school, - the most unpropitious in the world to both mental
and moral progress. He had the good sense, more over, not to
aspire to an excellence which he could not reach. There is no
ambition of fine writing in his chronicle; there are none of
those affectations of ornament which only make more glaring the
beggarly condition of him who assumes them. His object was
simply to tell the story of the Conquest, as he had seen it. He
was to deal with facts, not with words, which he wisely left to
those who came into the field after the laborers had quitted it,
to garner up what they could at second hand.
Pizarro's situation may be thought to have necessarily exposed
him to party influences, and thus given an undue bias to his
narrative. It is not difficult, indeed, to determine under whose
banner he had enlisted. He writes like a partisan, and yet like
an honest one, who is no further warped from a correct judgment
of passing affairs than must necessarily come from preconceived
opinions. There is no management to work a conviction in his
reader on this side or the other, still less any obvious
perversion of fact. He evidently believes what he says, and this
is the great point to be desired. We can make allowance for the
natural influences of his position.
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