One of the most famous disciples of the lyre was Nezahualcoyotl, himself sovereign of Tezcuco about the year 1460. He left seventy odes on philosophical and religious subjects, which were borne in memory and repeated after the Conquest. Translations of a few of them have come down to us, but my inquiries as to the whereabouts of the originals, if, indeed, they exist, have been fruitless.[75] The Jesuit, Horatio Carochi, published some ancient verses in his grammar of the Nahuatl (Mexico, 1645). Several which appear in later works do not seem to merit the credit of antiquity. They are more like those which Sahagun wrote and published, in Nahuatl, at a very early period,[76] Christian songs, intended to take the place of the ditties of love and chants of war, which the natives had such a passion for singing. Under the title _Cantares de los Mexicanos_, there was long preserved in the library of the University of Mexico a manuscript of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, with a large number of supposed ancient Aztec songs; but what has become of it now, nobody knows.[77] Thus it is that these precious monuments of antiquity are allowed to lie uncared for, through generations, until, at length, they fall a prey to ignorance or theft. A few other fragments of Nahuatl poetry, all probably modern, but some of them the versification of native bards, might be named; but the whole of it, as now existing, could give us but a faint idea of the perfection to which the art appears to have attained in the palmy days of the great Tezcucan poet-prince. In the literature of the Maya group of dialects, there have been preserved various sacred chants, some in the _Books of Chilan Balam_, others in the Kiche _Popol Vuh_. What are known as the "Maya Prophecies" are, as I have said, evidently the originals, or echoes of the mystic songs of the priests of Kukulkan and Itzamna, deities of the Maya pantheon, who were supposed to inspire their devotees with the power of foretelling the future. The modern Maya lends itself very readily both to rhyme and rhythm, and I have in my possession some quite neat specimens of versification in it, from the pen of the Yucatecan historian, Apolinar Garcia y Garcia. When we reach Peru we find a race not less poetical in temperament than the cultured Mexicans. Nothing but their ignorance of an alphabet, and the indifference or fanatical hatred of the early explorers for the productions of the native intellect, prevented the perpetuation of a Qquichua literature, both extensive and noble. As it is, we may expect many valuable examples of it when the learned Peruvian scholar, Senor Gavino Pacheco Zegarra, shall publish his long promised _Tresor de la Langue des Incas_. Among them he has announced the first appearance of a number of _Yaravis_, or elegiac chants, composed by the Indians themselves, and sung in memory of their departed friends.