whilst a student in the temple."[12] It is thus, perhaps, that the virtuoso rather than the historical student has been the sufferer by the superstitious conflagrations of Zumarraga and the Spanish soldiers. We have unquestionably lost most of the minute events of early Aztec history. We have remained ignorant of much of the internal policy of the realm, and have been obliged to play the antiquarian in the discussion of dates and epochs, whose perfect solution, even, would not cast a solitary ray of light upon the grand problem of this continent's development or population. But amid all this obscurity, ignorance, and diffuseness, we have the satisfaction to know that some valuable facts escaped the grasp of these destroyers, and that the grand historical traditions of the empire were eagerly listened to and recorded by some of the most enlightened Europeans who hastened after the conquest to New Spain. The song, the story, and the anecdote, handed down from sire to son in a nation which possessed no books, no system of writing, no letters, no alphabet,--formed in reality the great chain connecting age with age, king with king, family with family;--and, as the gigantic bond lengthened with time, some of its links were adorned with the embellishments of fancy, whilst others, in the dim and distant past, became almost imperceptible. Nor were the conquerors and their successors men devoted to the antiquities of the Mexicans with the generous love of enthusiasts who delight in disclosing the means by which a people emerged from the obscurity of a tribe into the grandeur of a civilized nation. In most cases the only object they had in magnifying, or even in manifesting the real character, genius and works of the Mexicans, is to be found in their desire to satisfy their country and the world that they had indeed conquered an empire, and not waged exterminating war against naked but wealthy savages. It was, in fact, a species of self laudation; and it has, therefore, not been without at least a slight degree of incredulity that we read the glowing early accounts of the palaces, the state and the power of the Mexican emperors. The graphic works of Mr. Stephens on Yucatan and Central America, seem, however, to open new authorities upon this vast problem of civilization. Architecture never lies. It is one of those massive records which require too much labor in order to record a falsehood. The men who could build the edifices of Uxmal, Palenque, Copan and Chichen-Itza, were far removed from the aboriginal condition of Nomadic tribes. Taste and luxury had been long grafted on the mere _wants_ of the natives. They had learned not only to build for protection against weather, but for permanent homes whose internal arrangements should afford them comfort, and whose external appearance should gratify the public taste. Order, symmetry, elegance, beauty of ornament, gracefulness of symbolic imagery, had all combined to