"It was uncommonly large and covered with hair; and, as Montezuma gazed on the ferocious features, rendered more horrible by death, he seemed to read in them the dark lineaments of the destined destroyers of his house. He turned from it with a shudder, and commanded that it should be taken from the city, and not offered at the shrine of any of his gods."[35]
The contrast between this dreamy, superstitious, half-hearted, and almost womanish prince and his successor Guatemozin is splendidly worked out. Guatemozin's fierce patriotism, his hatred of the Spaniards, his ferocity in battle, and his stubborn unwillingness to yield are displayed with consummate art, yet in such a way as to win one's sympathy for him without estranging it from those who conquered him. A touch of sentiment is delicately infused into the whole narrative of the Conquest by the manner in which Prescott has treated the relations of Cortés and the Indian girl, Marina. Here we find interesting evidence of Prescott's innate purity of mind and thought, for he undoubtedly idealised this girl and suppressed, or at any rate passed over very lightly, the truth which Bernal Diaz, on the other hand, sets forth with the blunt coarseness of a foul-mouthed old soldier.[36] No one would gather from Prescott's pages that Marina had been the mistress of other men before Cortés. Nor do we get any hint from him that Cortés wearied of her in the end, and thrust her off upon one of his captains whom he made drunk in order to render him willing to go through the forms of marriage with her. In Prescott's narrative she is lovely, graceful, generous, and true; and the only hint that is given of her former life is found in the statement that "she had her errors."[37] To his readers she is, after a fashion, the heroine of the Conquest,--the tender, affectionate companion of the Conqueror, sharing his dangers or averting them, and not seldom mitigating by her influence the sternness of his character. Another instance of Prescott's delicacy of mind is found in the way in which he glides swiftly over the whole topic of the position which women occupied among the Aztecs, although his Spanish sources were brutally explicit on this point. There were some things, therefore, from which Prescott shrank instinctively and in which he allowed his sensitive modesty to soften and refine upon the truth.