The reader is, doubtless, acquainted with the tradition, said to have been preserved among the Mexicans, of a fair-complexioned deity, with flowing beard, who had once ruled over them and taught them the arts of peace, and, being subsequently driven from the country, promised to return at some future time. Predictions of his reappearance lingered amongst them, and were supposed to be accomplished in the arrival of the Spaniards. Mr. Wilson tells us that "too much stress" has been laid on this tradition; but we know of no modern writer who has laid any stress on it except himself. It has been usually supposed to be one of those myths in which nations partially civilized embalm the memory of their heroes. Mr. Wilson does not believe the Mexicans to have been partially civilized. He regards them merely as a horde of savages. Nevertheless, he believes that among these savages "tradition [in the form here noticed] had handed down, through untold generations, from a remote antiquity," the establishment in America of Phoenician colonies, their history, and their subsequent extinction. Nor is this the whole story. In order to strengthen his argument, he gives a new and corrected version of this tradition. "It told," he writes, "that _pale faces_ had once before occupied the _hot country_, coming from beyond the _great water_. _Perhaps_ with this were coupled also tales of suffering and wrongs; _perhaps_ how cruelly they, the natives, had been forced, by these hard task-masters, to labor upon the truncated pyramids and their crowning chapels. With unrequited Indian toil, these men had builded cities and public works which still preserved their memory, though they themselves had long since perished, having fulfilled their allotted centuries. But with their decaying monuments they left a fearful prophecy, and thus it ran: that _floating houses_ would again return to the eastern coast, wafted by like winds, and filled with the same race, to teach the same religion, and to practise the same cruelties, until they again finished their cycle, and gave place to others, such as the laws of climate and population might determine." When the reader, after perusing this extraordinary relation, recovers his breath, he naturally casts his eye towards the bottom of the page, in the hope of finding some explanation of it. He accordingly discovers a note, in which Mr. Wilson states that he has "given a _little different shading_ to the famous tradition," but that "such, _translated into Indian phraseology_, would be the popular accounts." Now he had a perfect right to _interpret_ the tradition as he pleased. He was at liberty to conjecture that it related to the Phoenicians, as the Spaniards were at liberty to conjecture that it related to St. Thomas. Of the two interpretations, we prefer the latter. Mr. Wilson, were he consistent, would have done so too; for how could the Aztecs, when they saw the Spaniards desecrating