more facility the fatal incision, and to remove the heart of the victim. The heart was then presented to the idol, being laid within his uncouth hand, or placed upon his altar.

"It was a beautiful day on which the explorers beheld this scene. The emeralds worn by the chief priest glittered in the sun, and his feathers fluttered lightly with the breeze. The bright pyramidal temples were reflected in the lake, and in a thousand mirrors formed by the enclosed waters in the water-streets. A busy pleasant noise from the adjacent market-place was heard throughout the great square. The victim had uttered no sound. He knew the inutility of any outcry. Priests, victims, and people were alike accustomed to view such ceremonies, and this was one of the ordinary sacrifices. The expression of the faces in the crowd was calm and almost self-satisfied. All around was beautiful and serene; and it was hardly until the mangled body, hurled down from the upper area of the temple, had come near to the feet of the astounded voyagers, that they could believe they had really seen what passed before their eyes.'"

In a subsequent chapter Mr. Helps contrasts, though in no spirit of extenuation, the savage sacrifices of Mexico with the savage games of pagan Rome. He supposes an inversion of time and incidents-that Christianity had arisen in the New instead of the Old World; that some Peruvian Columbus had discovered lands east of the Atlantic, and penetrated the great Mediterranean instead of the great Mexican Gulf. Then, in the first centuries of the Christian era, American missionaries might have gazed from the benches of the Coliseum upon combats of men with men between whom no enmity existed, or of men with beasts without the pretext or pleasures of the chase. "These spectators are truly savages," the strangers might have exclaimed ; "they butcher one another not for any cause so respectable as superstition, but from a morbid love of amusement. And there are women sitting and applauding amongst them, and with wild outcries urging the populace to refuse the petition of the kneeling gladiator, and giving the sign of murder to the guards of the arena."* The golden palaces, the marble colonnades, the distant capital, and the adjacent pillar of Trajan, rock and reel before their eyes as through a crimson mist, and the envoys depart bewildered by the mingled civilisation and barbarism of imperial Rome.

The parallel, in our opinion, is incomplete, and even unnecessary. We need not resort to imagination or inversion of ages and events to produce a spectacle that shall equal, if it does not transcend, the horrors of an Aztec sacrifice to Tezcatlipeck. Among the caciques who were transported to Spain as tokens and trophies of the conquest, many survived long enough to

et verso pollice vulgi Quemlibet occidunt populariter."

become familiarised with the sportive or solemn recreations of their Spanish lords. They would behold a bull-fight in the lists at Seville, or an auto-da-fé in the great square of Toledo. They would gaze upon an amphitheatre thronged with spectators; sheltered from the Andalusian sun by awnings of silk or the fine linen of Syria; cooled by artificial fountains drawn from the Guadalquivir; refreshed by showers of perfume; leaping, shouting, and applauding, as horse and man rolled down, or as the Biscayan bull fell headlong on the sand soaked and slippery with blood. They would behold a yet ghastlier spectacle, awakening a yet more absorbing interest in the spectators. The king is on his throne; Torquemada sits beside him on the dais; the banners of the Inquisition float beside those of Arragon and Castile; the cathedral has sent its chapter and its choir; the monastery its sable or white-robed brethren; the grandees are surrounded by their suite; the beauty and the chivalry of the realm are sitting side by side; and in the outer circle is an indiscriminate crowd, eager, jubilant, and incontrollable. The vacant space in the midst is occupied by five upright stakes, to which are bound, in quaint flame-coloured garments, a Moriscoe, three Jews, and one who, though neither Jew nor Moriscoe, has been reading feloniously an ancient book written 1500 years before by certain fishermen of Galilee.

Even without the intervention of the Spanish iconoclasts, the more cruel forms of Aztec superstition would probably in a few generations have become obsolete. The bulk of the people called to mind with regret the simpler ritual of their ancestors, when fruits and flowers were sin-offerings or thank-offerings; the higher class of nobles had begun to resent the predominance of the hierarchy, and even the monarchs themselves chafed occasionally at their bondage to the spiritual powers. And beyond the immediate circle of Mexico itself its theological system did not extend. It was not, according to all appearance, a proselytizing religion; and its sovereigns were content with the tribute, and did not insist on the orthodoxy of their subjects. Montezuma also, though like Agamemnon he were "king of Argos," was not, like him, "king of the islands." His dominion, indeed, hardly extended to the verge of the mainland, and the character of the natives who were beyond the shadow of Aztec despotism differed materially from that of the Mexicans proper. It scarcely admits of a doubt, that the Mexicans stood in a relation to their subjects similar to that which Dietrich of Berne or Alboin the Lombard stood to the Roman provincials. They occupied the land as masters, but they were not kith or kin with their subjects. The character of the islanders generally, and of the races which inhabited the sea-coast, resembled that of the natives of Otaheite when

they were discovered by Cooke. Neither the Otaheitans nor the Indians were capable, without foreign admixture, of any strong or progressive form of civilisation; yet it was an evil destiny, evil as the nemesis which in ancient belief was attached to the Pelasgian and Achæan races, that consigned a people so generally docile and humane to the discipline of the Spaniard.

Of their gentle, winning, and guileless disposition there is a chain of evidence from the epoch of their discovery. Columbus describes them as 66 a loving, uncovetous people, so docile in al' things, that he believed in all the world there was not a better people or a better country; they love their neighbours as themselves, and they have the sweetest and gentlest way of talking in the world, and always with a smile." Their outward appearance was prepossessing, the expression of their countenance was mild, their form beautiful, their complexion good, and their movements graceful. Of their moral qualities, as of their religious dogmas, it is difficult to judge, since our knowledge of them is derived from those whose interest it was to represent both as inconsistent with the ethics of Europe and the doctrines of the most Catholic church. Mr. Helps believes them to have been less treacherous than most other uncultivated people. But even of their inclination to deccive we have but suspicious evidence. Fraud is the weapon of the weak, and the imputation of fraud is never more frequent than when the oppressor and his victims have no language in common. The Indian of North America is, indeed, both fraudulent and ferocious. But the Huron and the Blackfoot had, before their intercourse with Europe commenced, attained almost to the proficiency of civilised man in the arts of war and diplomacy. He was, in Lear's phrase, "man sophisticated," not "the simple native of the new-found isle." Indolence, again, is a staple charge brought by the Spaniards against the Indians; and to those who have beheld the vis inertia of the modern descendants of the conquerors the charge will appear about as reasonable as the proverbial reproof of the devil to sin. The charge, however, even if well-grounded, resolves itself into a very simple form. The Indian had few wants, a genial climate, and a sufficient, if not an abundant, supply of fruits good for food. Gold he prized only as a personal ornament, but its possession conveyed neither rank nor power. For himself, therefore, he had few motives to toil; and it demanded casuistry beyond the subtlety of the Salamancan professors to convince him that it was meet and right and his bounden duty to delve in the mine or to moil in the maize-field, in order that his Spanish lords might have bread enough and gold enough to satiate their greed. Lastly, he Indian's deficiency in courage may be treated with the same loubt as his imputed idleness. What alacrity could be expected

from any man who, under a tropical sun, is employed in gathering gold for other people? or what extraordinary valour is to be looked for from races who fought naked against men clad in steel, used lances of wood sharpened in the fire or pointed with stones or fish-bones, against antagonists provided with iron weapons and fire-arms; regarded the horse and the bloodhound with equal awe and superstition, and who knew as much of the rudiments of military discipline as the Spaniards of that day knew of the shells and mortars employed against the Redan and Malakhoff towers?

We have regarded the two extremes of Indian civilisation as it was seen by the first explorers: that of the islanders and of portions of the continent, a saturnian realm; and that of the Aztecs, advanced in some respects beyond that of Christendom in the fifteenth century, inferior to it only in the muniments of war, and equal to it in the ferocity of its political feuds, and the strength and rigour of its church-establishment. A second and more interesting question now opens upon us-the sources of that civilisation, as displayed in the empires of Peru and Mexico, or in the races which, independently of these, had begun to ascend in the scale of political life.

Our ethnological data are scarcely sufficient to justify us in pronouncing whether the inhabitants of the New World, at the time of its discovery, should be regarded as one race of men, or as a congeries of separate emigrations from the eastern shores of Asia. The Aztecs were certainly distinct from their subjectpopulation; but the difference between them may not have been greater than that which is ordinarily perceived between mountain and valley tribes, for example, between the Dorians and the subject Achæans, or between the Franks and the Gauls. Whether, however, one or many emigrations from Asia successively peopled America, it appears that there were two principal centres from which the development of the Indians proceeded, one radiating to the north, the other to the south of the Isthmus of Darien, and represented respectively in the civilisation of Mexico and Peru. It is remarkable also, that in both these nations the first epoch or seed of higher cultivation was attributed to the sudden appearance among them of persons differing from themselves in aspect and origin. Among the Peruvians, Mango Capac, accompanied by his sister, Mama Oello, first introduced a form of polity and a code of laws, and then ascended to his father the sun; among the Mexicans the same good offices were rendered "by a white and bearded man, of broad brow," and dressed in strange garb, bearing the appellation of Quetzalcohuatl, or "green-feathered snake," who, after his mission was fulfilled, went away into a far country and was never heard of more. The traditions

of both nations accord in ascribing their earliest legislation to an extraneous, if not, indeed, to a supernatural author.

Of the region from which these benevolent sages descended there is no record, and it is a fruitless speculation to consider whether their laws were a transcript of any great oriental code, contained in the sacred books of the Brahmins, the Bhuddists, or the Chinese. The effects of their legislation were, however, different; for whereas the Peruvians never departed from the laws of the first Inca, and abstained from human sacrifices, offering only the blood of rams and sheep to the sun,—the Mexicans carried the severe penances ordained by Quetzalcohuatl to a higher stage, and offered human victims as the ordinary expiations of the nation and the king. As their great legislator had forbidden such sacrifices, "stopping his ears when spoken to of war, and prescribing flowers and fruits as the only acceptable tribute to the gods," it seems probable, either that some later dispensation superseded that of Quetzalcohuatl, or that a priestcaste rivetted its chains on a race of warriors by imposing upon them a formal, elaborate, and bloody ritual.

Had not the killing frost of European invasion nipped in the bud the civilisation of the Aztecs and the Peruvians alike, it is probable that each of them would have gradually absorbed all the feebler forms of Indian polity, such as that of the inhabitants of the plains of Bogota, and even that of Araucana; and while the warriors of Anahuac would have spread themselves over the Texas and Florida until they encountered, in the red men of the north, tribes as puissant as themselves, the Peruvians would have extended their milder laws and their agricultural enterprise over the south, until they also met in the nomades of the pampas with races, like those of Scythia and Sarmatia in the Old World, intolerant of repose and local habitation, and prizing beyond wealth and security their freedom to go and come. We conclude this imperfect sketch of the Indian races with the following suggestive passage from the volumes before us:

"Those who wish to study this people must turn to the ruins of the temples, or the tombs at Mitla, Palenque, and Copan; must investigate the primeval remains of buildings to be found on the borders of the vast lake of Titicaca, and the adjacent plain of Tiahuaco; must consider well the pyramids of Papantla and Cholula; and still further, ponder over the clear signs of an early and considerable civilisation which seems to have existed in a somewhat similar form in places so widely asunder as Canada and the banks of the Orinoco. It has been said, that little will be learnt to advance art or increase our knowledge of beauty from a study of any American monuments; an assertion which I think is completely contradicted by the Grecques on the temple or palace at Mitla, and still more by the recently discovered ruins of Copan.

"Putting aside, however, all questions of beauty, I have no doubt