noted represented in the European calendar the accumulated error of upwards of sixteen centuries; so that the approximation of Mexican computation to true solar time is probably only a proof of the recent adjustment of their calendar; and so confirms the probability of the founding of the Mexican capital within two centuries of its overthrow. But the founders of Tenochtitlan, as the new capital was called, were a vigorous, enterprising, and ferocious race. The later name of Mexico was derived from the Aztec war-god Mexitli, whose favours to his votaries enabled them to form a powerful state by conquest, to enrich themselves with spoil, and to replace the rude structures of their city’s founders with substantial and ornate buildings of stone. Whatever gloze of mild paternal absolutism may linger around our conceptions of the prehistoric chronicles of Peru, a clearer light illuminates the harsh realities of Mexican sovereignty. The god of war was the supreme deity of the Aztecs, worshipped with hideous rites of blood. Their civil and military codes, according to the narrative of their conquerors, were alike cruel as that of Draco; and their religious worship was a system of austere fanaticism and loathsome butchery, which seemed to refine the cruelties of the Red Indian savage into a ritual service fit only for the devil. But besides their hideous war-god, the Mexican mythology was graced by a beneficent divinity, named Quetzalcoatl, the instructor of the Aztecs in the use of metals, in agriculture, and in the arts of government. This and similar elements of Mexican mythology have been regarded as traces of a milder faith inherited from their Toltecan predecessors. The idea is one supported by many probabilities, as well as by some evidence. The early history of the Northmen, however, in which we witness the blending of a rich poetic fancy, wherein lay the germ of later Norman romance and chivalry, with cruelties pertaining to a creed little less bloody than that of the Mexican warrior, shows that no such theory is needed to account for the incongruities of the religious system of the Aztecs. In truth, the ferocity of a semi-barbarous people is often nothing more than its perverted excess of energy; and, as has been already noted in reference to the Caribs, is more easily dealt with, and turned into healthful and beneficent action, than the cowardly craft of the slave. It is only when such hideous rites are consciously engrafted on the usages of a people already far in advance of such a semi-barbarous childhood, as in the adoption of the Inquisition by Spain at the commencement of its modern history, that they prove utterly baneful; because the nation is already past that stage of progress in which it can naturally outgrow them.