word of those fearful spectacles which struck horror to the hearts of the Spaniards in their visit to the teocallis,—­the pyramidal mound garnished with human skulls, the hideous idols and the blood-stained priests, the chapels drenched with gore, and other evidences of a diabolical worship.  Not unfrequently he fills up what he considers as gaps in the ordinary narratives.  Thus, he pictures the dying Cuitlahua as “stoically wrapping himself in his feathered mantle,” and “rejoicing at his expected welcome to the celestial hunting-grounds,” where he “felt that he was worthy a name among the immortal braves.”  This “wild figment” from Mr. Wilson’s “fertile fancy” was, perhaps, suggested by Theobald’s famous emendation in the description of Falstaff’s death-scene,—­“a babbled o’ green fields.”  On such occasions, Mr. Wilson explains that he is relating the occurrences “as they are understood by one familiar with Indian affairs.”  A remarkable example of this method of narration shall close our citations from his work.

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