The march of Cortes across the grand plateau of "New Spain" has been rendered familiar to the reader by the works of Robertson and Prescott. We shall therefore not follow Mr. Helps's imaginary voyage further than may be sufficient to illustrate the social condition of the native races at the time of their conquest. Before, however, we close this chapter of his book, we shall forestall the chronological sequence of the narrative, and introduce in this place a portion of Mr. Helps's description of Mexico. The anachronism will not be excessive, since such as Cortes beheld it from the broad causeway at Iztaparapa, such it would have presented itself to the European eye before the voyage of Columbus.

"Who shall describe Mexico, the Mexico of that age? It ought to be one who had seen all the wonders of the world; and he should have for an audience those who had dwelt in Venice and Constantinople, who had looked down upon Granada from the Alhambra, and who had studied all that remains to be seen of the hundred gates of Thebes, of Babylon, and of Nineveh.

"The especial attributes of the most beautiful cities in the world were here conjoined; and that which was the sole boast of many a world-renowned name formed but one of the charms of this enchantress among cities. Like Granada, encircled but not frowned upon by mountains; fondled and adorned by water, like Venice; as grand in its buildings as Babylon of old; and rich with gardens, like Damascus,— the great city of Mexico was at that time the fairest in the world, and has never since been equalled.

"Neither was hers a beauty, like that of many cities, which gratifies the eye at a distance, but which diminishes at each advancing step of the beholder, until it absolutely degenerates into squalidity. She was beautiful when seen from afar; she still maintained her beauty when narrowly examined by the traveller; she was the city not only of a great king, but of an industrious and thriving people.

"Mexico was situated in a great salt lake communicating with a fresh-water lake. It was approached by three principal causeways of great breadth, constructed of solid masonry two lances in breadth. The length of one of these causeways was two leagues, and that of another a league and a half; and these two ample causeways united in the middle of the city, where stood the great temple. At the ends of these causeways were wooden drawbridges, so that communication could be cut off between the causeways and the town, which would thus become a citadel. There was also an aqueduct which communicated with the mainland, consisting of two separate lines of work in masonry, in order that if one should need repair, the supply of water for the city might not be interrupted.

"The streets were the most various in construction that have ever been seen in any city in the world. Some were of dry land, others wholly of water; and others, again, had pathways of pavement, while

in the centre there was room for boats. The foot-passengers could talk with those in the boats.

"The abodes of the Mexican kings were not like the petty palaces of northern princes. One of the most observant of those Spaniards who first saw these wonders speaks of a palace of Montezuma's in which there was a room where three thousand persons could be well accommodated, and on the terrace-like roof of which a splendid tournament might have been given.

"There was a market-place twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, surrounded with porticos in which there was room for fifty thousand people to buy and sell.

"The great temple of the city maintained its due proportion of magnificence. In the plan of the city of Mexico, which is to be found in a very early edition of the Letters of Cortes, the space allotted to the temple is twenty times as great as that allotted to the marketplace. Indeed, the sacred enclosure was in itself a town; and Cortes, who seldom stops in his terrible narrative to indulge in praise or in needless description, says, that no human tongue could explain the grandeur and the peculiarities of this temple. Cortes uses the word temple;' but it might rather be called a sacred city, as it contained many temples, and the abodes of all the priests and virgins who ministered at them, also a university and an arsenal.

"It was enclosed by lofty stone walls, and was entered by four portals, surmounted by fortresses. No less than twenty truncated pyramids, probably cased with porphyry, rose up from within that enclosure. High over them all towered the great temple dedicated to the god of war. This, like the rest, was a truncated pyramid, with ledges round it, and with two small towers upon the highest surface, in which were placed the images of the great god of war (Huitzilopochtli), and of the principal deity of all (Tezcatlipeck), the Mexican Jupiter."

Without inferring from the exterior magnificence or the internal arrangements of Mexico a degree of civilisation corresponding to that of London or Paris, or even Vienna at the present moment, we cannot fail to discern that the Europeans conquered a people in many respects more civilised than themselves. In the Europe of that day it would have been in vain to look for canals or roads like those of the Aztecs; equally vain to have looked for such provisions for the sanitary condition of the inhabitants, or for so efficient a system of police. The mention of a university at Mexico should have elicited some explanation from the historian. We may, however, infer from other portions of his narrative the science and the literature there cultivated. As in Rome before the introduction of Greek literature, the learning of the Mexicans consisted of theology and history. Their ritual was complex, the ranks of the priesthood were numerous, the attributes of the deities were diversified, and there was apparently in their theo

logical system a mixture of two very opposite creeds,-one of simple nature-worship, in which the sacrifices were the fruits and flowers of the earth; and the other, and doubtless the later in date, the ghastly doctrine of expiation by human victims. The events of war and peace were scrupulously recorded by the Mexican chroniclers, and in a fashion much less rude than that originally employed by the Roman pontiffs, since it argues a more refined taste, and demands greater skill to describe events by symbolic pictures than to drive nails into the wall of a temple. From certain known portions of Aztec divinity we shall probably not err in ascribing to it no small measure of ethical and metaphysical subtlety, at least we may infer that in these respects the Mexican priests were not inferior to the Celtic Druids, who for many ages were ignorant of, or disdained the art of writing. The Mexicans had attained the religious belief or delusion that severance from the common relations of life was an acceptable service to the gods. They had their sacred virgins and their peculiar priesthood, the practices of confession and absolution, their inner mysteries, and the symbolic apparatus which in all ages has been provided by those within the veil for the instruction or bewilderment of those without. Among the most curious pages in Mr. Helps's volumes is that on which he has inscribed the following Mexican forms of prayer and absolution. We could almost suspect that the doctors of the university of Salamanca denounced and demolished the liturgies of the Aztecs out of jealousy, and that the Spanish priesthood were justly alarmed at a system of theology as subtle, but more indulgent to human infirmity than their own.

The first of these prayers was used after auricular confession, which, however, it appears, occurred once only in a lifetime. The Mexican priesthood had still to learn the lesson of converting the remorse and alarm of a sinner into a life-long instrument of torture and influence. It ran thus:

"Our Lord most gracious, the defender and favourer of all: you have just heard the confession of this poor sinner, in which he has made known in your presence his rottenness and filthiness." The confessor then went on to say-it may be remarked, that the priest is the vicarious spokesman here, as in other more religious latitudes-that "the sinner might have concealed some of his sins, in which case dire will be his punishment; but perchance he has spoken the whole truth, and now feels dolour and discontent' for all that is past, and firm resolve never to sin more." He then proceeded: "I speak in presence of your majesty who knowest all things, and knowest that this poor wretch did not sin with entire liberty of free will, but was helped and inclined to it by the natural condition of the sign under which he was born. And since it is so, O most gracious Lord, defender and favourer of all men, even if this poor man has grievously offended against you,

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peradventure will you not cause your anger and your indignation to depart from him?" Continuing in this strain, the confessor besought pardon and remission of sins, " a thing which descends from heaven as clearest and purest water, with which your majesty washes away and purifies all the stains and filthiness which sins cause in the soul."

What follows is even more curious. For the priest then addressed the penitent, and told him that he had come to a place of much danger and labour and dread, where there is a ravine from which no one who had once fallen in could make his escape; also, he had come to a place where snares and nets are set one with another, and one over against another. All this is said metaphorically of the world and of sin. He then proceeded to speak of the judgment to come in another world, and of the lake of miserics and intolerable torments. "But now, here you are," he said to the penitent; "and the time is arrived in which you have had pity on yourself to speak with our Lord, who sees the secrets of hearts." And he then told the penitent there was a new birth for him, but he "must look to his ways well, and see that he sinned no more." No priest regular or secular could so far have shriven him better; but there follows an ugly blot, forming, in our opinion, no part of the original form of confession; for the penitent, finally, must cleanse his house and himself, and seek a slave to sacrifice before God; and he must work a year or more in the house of God, and undergo penitential exercises, " piercing his tongue for the injurious words it had uttered; and he must give in charity even to the depriving himself of sustenance; for, look," said the priest, speaking of the poor, "their flesh is as thy flesh, and they are men as thou art, especially the sick; for they are the image of God. There is no more to say to thee: go in peace; and I pray God that he may help thee to perform that which thou art bound to do, for he is gracious to all men."

Scarcely less remarkable is the prayer appointed to be said by a Mexican king, or governor, upon his election, wherein a spirit of devotion is singularly blended with a spirit of despotism. After celebrating the greatness of God, it proceeds in a vein of humiliation, saying that he (the king) deserves blindness of his eyes and crushing of his body, that it is he who requires to be governed, and that the Lord must know many to whom he could confide this charge of government; "but since you are determined to put me forward as an object of scandal and laughter for the world, let your will be done." The conclusion, however, is in a higher tone: "Although," he proceeds to say, "I am a poor creature, I wish to say that unworthily I am your image, and represent your person; and the words which I shall speak have to be held as your words, and my countenance to be esteemed as your countenance, and my hearing as your hearing,

and the punishments that I shall ordain have to be considered as if you ordained them; wherefore I pray you, put within me your spirit and your words, that all may obey, and that none may be able to contradict."

Such a prayer, with all its moral grandeur, might have been offered up indifferently by the Commander of the Faithful, prompted by the chief of the Ulemas; by Philip II., at the dictation of his confessor; or by Charles I., with the sanction of Laud. The connection between kingcraft and priestcraft was not confined to the Old World, and is indeed found wherever a theocracy, as in Judæa or Egypt, is the supreme power in the state, or where religion is a state-machine. The barbarian Aztecs were not inferior to the civilised Castilians in cementing the alliance between the worlds temporal and spiritual. In reading of the cruel and gross superstitions of the Mexicans, we are tempted to hail, as Mr. Helps seems to do, the advent of Cortes, as the epoch of deliverance from a creed which, like that of the worshippers of Moloch, offered the fruit of the body for the sin of the soul. It was indeed the dawning of a better day when scenes like the following, so well described by the historian, were no longer enacted in the great city of Anahuac. We again borrow from his "imaginary voyage;" but such a spectacle was actually beheld by Alvarado, whom, from his ruddy complexion, the Mexicans called "Tonatiuh, the sun-faced man," while acting, in the absence of Cortes, as commander of the Spanish garrison in Mexico.

"Once being detained in a dense crowd in the square of the great temple, they became unwilling spectators of a human sacrifice. At first they see six priests, five of them clothed in white, and the sixth or chief priest in red and otherwise richly attired. Inquiring his name, they are answered, Tezcatlipeck, or Huitzilopechtli, and are astonished, knowing these to be the names of Mexican divinities, and not being aware that the chief priest assumed for the day the name of the god who was honoured by the sacrifice."

This identification of the Deity with his priest is a stride beyond the assumption of the successor of St. Peter to be accounted as God's vicegerent on earth. Sometimes, indeed, even a greater mystery was shadowed forth; for on some occasions "the victim also represented the Deity to whom the sacrifice was offered."

"Scanning this group of priests more closely, the Spanish explorers discover that the priests are carrying to the upper area of the temple the body of a naked and living man. The long flights of steps are slowly mounted, and the unfortunate victim placed upon a large, convex, green stone. Four of the attendant priests hold him down by the arms and legs, while a fifth places a wooden instrument, of a serpent form, across his throat. The convex altar raises the body of the victim into an arched shape, and enables the chief priest to make with