porticoes.”[97] In this style the native historian describes the glory of ancient Tezcuco. A lordly pile, provided for the fitting accommodation of the sovereigns of Mexico and Tlacopan, contained three hundred apartments, including some fifty yards square. Solid materials of stone and marble were liberally employed both on this and on the apartments of the royal harem, the walls of which were incrusted with alabasters and richly tinted stucco, or hung with gorgeous tapestries of variegated feather-work. Some two leagues distant, at Tezcotzinco, was the favourite residence of the sovereign; on a hill, “laid out in terraces, or hanging-gardens, having a flight of five hundred and twenty steps, many of them hewn in the natural porphyry. In the garden on the summit was a reservoir of water, fed by an aqueduct carried over hill and valley for several miles on huge buttresses of masonry. A large rock stood in the midst of this basin, sculptured with hieroglyphics representing the years of Nezahualcoyotl’s reign, and his principal achievements in each. On a lower level were three other reservoirs, in each of which stood a marble statue of a woman, emblematic of the three estates of the empire. Another tank contained a winged lion,”—but here the modern historian grows incredulous, and appends a (?) before proceeding in accordance with his authorities to add—“cut out of the solid rock, bearing in his mouth the portrait of the emperor.” The authority for all this wrote in the beginning of the seventeenth century; but his narrative receives some confirmation from architectural remains still visible on the hill of Tezcotzinco. They are referred to by Latrobe and Bullock as relics of an era greatly more remote than that of Aztec civilisation; and more recently Mr. Tylor describes the hill of Tezcotzinco as terraced, and traversed by numerous roads and flights of steps cut in the rock. It is connected with another hill by an aqueduct of immense size constructed with blocks of porphyry, and with its channel lined with a hard stucco, still very perfect. Baths also remain, cut out of the solid rock; and on the summit of the hill, overlooking the ancient city, sculptured blocks of stone furnish evidence that the tales of architectural magnificence are not wholly fabulous. Mr. Christy, his travelling companion, made excavations in the neighbouring mounds, and was rewarded by the discovery of some fine idols of hard stone, and “an infinitude of pottery and small objects.” But the spirit of Spanish romance still asserts its influence. Bullock, in his _Six Months in Mexico_, describes the remains of the royal fountain of Tezcotzinco as a “beautiful basin, twelve feet long by eight wide, having a well five feet by four deep in the centre”; while Latrobe, in his _Rambles in Mexico_, reduces the dimensions of the royal bath to “perhaps two feet and a half in diameter, not large enough for any monarch bigger than Oberon to take a duck in!”