There is something suggestive of doubt relative to much else that is greatly more modern, to find the historian of the Conquest of Mexico tracing down the migrations and conquests of the Toltecs from the seventh till the twelfth century, when the Acolhuans or Tezcucans, the Aztecs, and others, superseded them in the Great Valley. We turn to the foot-notes, so abundant in the carefully elaborated narrative of Prescott, and we find his chief or sole authority is the christianised half-breed Don Fernando de Alva, or Ixtlilxochitl, who held the office of Indian interpreter of the Viceroyalty of New Spain in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Compared with such an authority, Bede should be indisputable as to the details of Hengist and Horsa’s migrations, and Geoffrey of Monmouth may be quoted implicitly for the history of Arthur’s reign. But the Aztecs, at any rate, are no mythic or fabulous race. The conquest of their land belongs to the glories of Charles V., and is contemporary with what Europe reckons as part of its modern history. The letters of its conqueror are still extant; the gossiping yet graphic marvels of his campaigns, ascribed to the pen of Bernal Diaz, a soldier of the Conquest, have been diligently ransacked for collation and supplementary detail; and the ecclesiastical chroniclers of Mexican conquest and colonisation, have all contributed to the materials out of which Prescott has woven his fascinating picture of Hernando Cortes and his great life-work. It is a marvellous historical panorama, glittering with a splendour as of the mosques and palaces of Old Granada. But a growing inclination is felt to test the Spanish chroniclers by surviving relics of that past which they have clothed for us in more than oriental magnificence; and, for this purpose, to relume that curious phase of native civilisation which the Conquest abruptly ended. Yucatan and Central America still reveal indisputable memorials of an era of native architectural skill, to which attention must be directed. But, meanwhile, it is important to note that an assumed correspondence between the architecture of Central America and that which is affirmed to have existed in Mexico at the time of the Conquest constitutes the basis of many fallacious arguments on the nature and extent of Aztec civilisation in the era of the second Montezuma. Again, the conflicting elements apparent between the barbarous rites and cannibalism ascribed to the Aztecs, and the evidences of their matured arts and high civilisation, have been the plentiful source of theories as to Toltecan and other earlier derivations for all that pertained to such manifestations of intellect and inventive genius. It is important, therefore, to determine the actual character of Mexican architecture. The remains of the extinct Mound-Builders are full of wonder for us; but the reputed magnificence of Montezuma’s capital throws their earthworks into the shade, as things pertaining to America’s childhood.