Each century writes the literature it reads. This is especially true of historical literature. It is also true that each century, in the various forms of its literature, writes its own history; and it is to this literature, not to the later critical writings that one must refer, who would know how any given period of the past appeared to those then living. It was once said of a distinguished modern historian of Rome that he knew more about the affairs of Rome than the Romans themselves knew; which was to say, that his works presented a view of Rome such as no Roman ever had. The critical history of the society of any given period of the past is so completely an artificial creation that it would hardly be recognized by a member of that society. It takes its character, in a considerable part, from knowledge, ideas, and emotions that were foreign to him. Therefore, in order to know a nation’s life as known at any given epoch, or to visualise the worldly show that passed before the thoughtful contemporary mind, one should refer, not to the artificial creation of the modern historian, with its twentieth-century atmosphere, but to what men wrote of their own times or times near their own. Our ancestors’ vision of the world and the reaction which the world produced in their minds are revealed in the various forms of their literature. The material for an intellectual reconstitution of the view of their society entertained by the Spanish colonists of South America is much less abundant than that which the twenty-third-century historian will have for reproducing our view of our times. There were in the Spanish colonies no congressional or parliamentary debates, no popular orators describing social conditions and setting forth economic and political doctrines, no discussion of social programmes, and, more significant than all else, no periodical press recording from day to day and from month the events and ideas of the period in question. But in the books, the reports, and the relaciones there is a larger mass of written evidence than the comparatively rude state of colonial society would lead one to expect; and it is the purpose of this book to point out the principal documents of this colonial literature, and to introduce the reader to the men of letters in the colonies who wrote under the inspiration of their experience in the New World, whether their contributions were in the realm of poetry, history, geographical description, or ecclesiastical discussion. All this is brought together under a general title in which the term “literature” is consciously expanded from its narrower meaning to cover whatever was written on any of these general subjects; and by helping the reader to a knowledge of this literature it is believed that through it he will be enabled to acquire a more or less distinct view of the colonial society as it appeared in any period to men of that period.