concerned in the affair than was her feminine imagination. Had she known
more, she would have done less. But so, for that matter, would Columbus.

Almost as little is known of the personal character of this man as of
Shakespeare's; and the portraits of him, though much more numerous than
those of the poet, are even less compatible with one another. The
estimates and conjectures of historians also differ; some describe a pious
hero and martyr, others a dissolute adventurer and charlatan. We are
constrained, in the end, to construct his effigy from our own best
interpretation of the things he did. Some little learning he had; just
enough, probably, to disturb the balance of his judgment. He could read
Latin and make maps, and he had ample experience of practical navigation.
His life as a mariner got him the habit of meditation, and this favored
the espousal of theories, which, upon occasion, he could expound with
volubility or defend with passion, as his Italian temperament prompted.
His imagination was portentous, and the Fifteenth Century was hospitable
to this faculty; there was nothing--except plain but unknown facts--too
marvelous to be believed; and that Columbus was even more credulous than
his contemporaries is proved by the evidence that even facts were not
exempt from his entertainment. An ordinary appetite for the marvelous
could swallow stories of chimeras dire, and men whose heads do grow
beneath their shoulders; but nothing short of the profligate capacity of a
Columbus could digest such a proposition as that the earth was round and
could be circumnavigated. The type of half-educated fanatics to which he
belonged has always been common; there is nothing exceptional or
remarkable in this fanatic except the fortune which finally attended his
lifelong devotion to the most improbable hypothesis of his time. It has
been our custom to eulogize his courage and his constancy to the truth;
but if he had adopted perpetual motion, instead of the rotundity of the
earth, as his dogma, he would have deserved our praises just as much. His