to great perfection the art of working in gold and silver, and were well skilled in other mechanical arts. Every fifth day fairs were held in the market-places of the principal cities, where the people from the neighbourhood met to sell and buy. They traded partly by barter and partly by means of a rude but regulated currency. Trade was greatly respected as a means of livelihood, but the mechanical arts were held in esteem, and, as there were no castes, the nobles were expected to have a useful calling as well as the lowly born. The merchants who went trading into other countries, went with large bodies of servants well armed, and they acted as spies for the government, and any indignity offered them would easily furnish a pretext to the Aztec rulers for a war, when the stock of victims for sacrifice was low. In their domestic life, women mingled unreservedly among the men in social festivities and entertainments, and were always tenderly treated. They were somewhat fastidious in their cooking, and when the body of a sacrificed victim was given to the warrior who had captured him, to be eaten, the repast was served up with many beverages and viands of delicacy, and the feast was conducted with all the decorum of civilized life.

Such was the strangely compounded character of the people whose

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

arms were to be vainly dashed against the mail-clad adventurers under Cortes, who now came to overturn their whole social system, and replace it with another, which, though it was almost equally crushing from the weight of its own superstition on one hand, still held to the Bible on the other, the sublime truths of which, the reign of fanaticism ended, could not fail to expel the many forms of evil which had infested the fair plain of Anahuac.

B

it, however summary.

EFORE proceeding to our account of the conquest of Mexico, by Cortes, we will notice some of the remarkable remains of antiquity with which this country abounds. Our limits are narrow, and our notice of these remains must necessarily be slight and general; but the ancient ruins present altogether too remarkable a feature in the aspect of the country to be passed over in any account of

We have already observed that Mexico is a country of which comparative little is known. The jealous policy of the Spaniards rendered its geography and history almost a sealed book, during their domination; and perpetual disturbances, since the revolution, have rendered explorations, by foreign travellers, almost impracticable. Until Baron Humboldt visited the country very little was

(48)

ANCIENT MONUMENTS.

49

known of the antiquities which are so numerous in Mexico proper, while the wonderful treasures of art, which lie mouldering in Centra. America and Yucatan, were not fully revealed to us until our owr countrymen, Stephens and Norman, explored, delineated, and described them.

These remains, as well as many of those in Mexico proper, re generally referred to a people more ancient than any of those which are known even to the earliest historians of Anahuac. They cannot be the work of the Aztecs, who founded the city of Mexico, in 1325, nor is there much better ground for referring their origin to the earlier visiters from the north, the Acolhuans, Chichemecs, Toltecs, or their predecessors, the Ulmecs. They are apparently the work of a people whose existence is not recorded in any history, the cotemporaries, perhaps, of those giant architects, the shepherd kings of Egypt, the founders of those massy monuments which astonish the traveller in Memphis and Thebes.

Of the origin of the pyramid of Cholula, which we have already noticed, the Aztec chroniclers give a circumstantial account; but their date of its origin is at that remote period when the Mexicans, like the Greeks, Egyptians, and all other ancient nations, had their gods dwelling among them, the mythological age, fruitful in marvels of every kind. The great temple of Mexico, already noticed, was comparatively modern. Its existence began with the priests of the bloody religion of the Aztecs, and ended with their empire.

For an account of some of the more remarkable ruins in Mexico proper, which we subjoin, we are indebted to the lively and entertaining work of Brantz Mayer, Esq., of Baltimore, entitled, "Mexico, As it Was and As it Is." The following is extracted from his description of the ruins of the pyramid of Xochicalco.

"AT the distance of six leagues from the city of Cuernavaca lies a cerro, three hundred feet in height, which, with the ruins that crowr it, is known by the name of Xochicalco, or the "Hill of Flowers." The base of this eminence is surrounded by the very distinct remains of a deep and wide ditch; its summit is attained by five spiral terraces; the walls that support them are built of stone, joined by cement, and are Ancient Mexican, from still quite perfect; and at regular distances, as if to buttress these terraces, there are remains of bulwarks shaped like the bastions of a fortification. The summit of the hill is a wide esplanade, on the eastern side of which are stil! perceptible three truncated cones, resembling the tumuli und

the Monuments.

among many similar ruins in Mexico. On the other sides there are also large heaps of loose stones of irregular shape, which seem to have formed portions of similar mounds or tumuli, or, perhaps, parts of fortifications in connection with the wall that is alleged by the old writers to have surrounded the base of the pyramid, but of which I could discern no traces.

"The stones forming parts of the conical remains, have evidently been shaped by the hand of art, and are often found covered with an exterior coat of mortar, specimens of which I took away with me, as sharp and perfect as the day it was laid on centuries ago.

"Near the base of the last terrace, on which the pyramid rises, the esplanade is covered with trees and tangled vines, but the body of the platform is cultivated as a corn-field. We found the Indian owner at work in it, and were supplied by him with the long-desired comfort of a gourd of water. He pointed out to us the way to the summit of the terrace through the thick brambles; and rearing our horses up the crumbling stones of the wall, we stood before the ruins of this interesting pyramid, the remains of which, left by the neighbouring planters after they had borne away enough to build the walls of their haciendas, now lie buried in a grove of palmettoes, bananas, and forest-trees, apparently the growth of many hundred years

"Indeed, this pyramid seems to have been (like the Forum and Colliseum at Rome,) the quarry for all the builders in the vicinity