upper surface only is exposed to view, which seems to have been done designedly, to impress upon the populace an abhorrence of the horrible and sanguinary rites that had once been performed on this very altar. It is said by writers that 30,000 human victims Kirwan, in the were sacrificed at the coronation of Montezuma. preface to his Metaphysics, states the annual number of human I have seen the victims immolated in Mexico to be 25,000. Indians themselves throw stones at it; and I once saw a boy jump upon it, clench his fist, stamp with his foot, and use other gesticuAs I had been informed that lations of the greatest abhorrence. the sides were covered with historical sculpture, I applied to the clergy for the farther permission of having the earth removed from around it, which they not only granted, but, moreover, had it performed at their own expense. I took casts of the whole. It is twenty-five feet in circumference, and consists of fifteen various groups of figures, representing the conquests of the warriors of Mexico over different cities, the names of which are written over them.

But the largest and most celebrated of the Mexican deities was known to be buried under the gallery of the university. It was liberally disinterred at the expense of the university in a few hours; and Mr. Bullock had the pleasure of seeing the resurrection of this horrible deity, before whom tens of thousands of human victims had been sacrificed.

It is scarcely possible (observes our author) for the most ingenious artist to have conceived a statue better adapted to the intended purpose; and the united talents and imagination of Brughel and Fuseli would in vain have attempted to improve it.

The idol was hewn out of one solid block of basalt, nine feet high, its outlines giving an idea of a deformed human figure, uniting all that is horrible in the tiger and rattle-snake.

Instead of arms it is supplied with two large serpents, and its drapery is composed of wreathed snakes, interwoven in the most disgusting manner, and the sides terminating in the wings of a vulture. Its feet are those of the tiger, with claws extended in the act of seizing its prey, and between them lies the head of another rattle-snake, which seems descending from the body of the idol. Its decorations accord with its horrid form, having a large

necklace composed of human hearts, hands, and skulls, and fastened together by the entrails. It has evidently been painted in natural colours, which must have added greatly to the terrible effect it was intended to inspire in its votaries.

If that grim stone could have spoken, what agonizing scenes it might have described:

The heart still panting was taken by the priest from the breast, and deemed the more acceptable to the deity if it smoked with life; and the mangled limbs of the victim were then divided amongst the crowd as a feast worthy of the goddess. In the night of desolation, called by the Spaniards Noche Triste, in which many were made prisoners by the Mexicans, the adventurous Cortez, and his few remaining companions in arms, were horror-stricken by witnessing the cruel manner in which their captive fellow-adventurers were dragged to the sacrificial stone, and their hearts, yet warm with vitality, presented by the priests to the gods; and the more the separated seat of life teemed with animation, the more welcome was the offering to the goddess, the more heartrending the cries of the victims, the more grateful the sacrifice to this monster representative of deformity and carnage.'

February, 1851.

*Six Months in Mexico.

*

Those who saw, as I did, the cast of

this infernal deity in Mr. Bullock's Exhibition, in 1824, will acknowledge that his description is not overcharged.

374

EV

CHAPTER XIV.

VENTS come round in cycles. In 1750, the winter was as mild as that which has just passed, and the spring very early. In Sweden, the 'steel nights,' which are generally felt in all their rigour somewhere about the last week in February, were so entirely absent, that lands were sown in Upland in that week; the usual time for sowing in Sweden seldom arriving before April. Harald Barck, who records this unusual mildness and its consequences, adds, that he is not ignorant that the lands in some of the northern provinces, especially those which abound in clay, require early sowing, that the ground may be broken with less trouble, and that the first shoots of the barley may make their way through it before it grows stiff. He adds, that the people of Schonen, and others that dwell near the sea, sow late, whether the spring be early or not; and that sometimes to their great loss, for no other reason, than that they received this custom from their ancestors. The most northern inhabitants of Sweden find it necessary to sow as soon as the frost breaks up, that the short summer may perfectly ripen the grain before the winter approaches. For as eggs require a fixed time for the exclusion of the young, so the barley does in different provinces to ripen the seed.* Harald then gives a table of the times of sowing in different localities, in different years, the latest time being the 18th of June, and the earliest the 16th of April. He concludes from these observations, that the sowing of barley nearly coincides with the foliation of the

*Aman. Acad.

birch, at least in Upland, and other places adjacent. He remarks, that it is a popular error, that less time passes between the sowing and ripening of wheat in their northern provinces than at Upsal, and that this happens, because the summer days are longer in the north, and there is scarcely any night to retard its growth. But this error is made evident by the grain ripening in as short a time in Schonen as in Lapland; for barley, in the champain part of Schonen, is sown about the 29th of May, and reaped sooner than in Upland. But why barley ripens later in Upland and Wessmania than in the other provinces of Sweden, he confesses to be an absolute secret to him.*

With us, though Aquarius has been predominant, there has been hardly any freezing-none of any consequence -though, so late as the 12th of February, I saw ice on the water in St. James's Park, as if Jack Frost was determined to show that his power was not utterly extinct. But the yellow aconite and primroses were in bloom early in January; and on the 10th of that month, baskets full of them were exposed for sale in Covent Garden Market. On the 12th, posies of wallflowers, polyanthuses, and garden anemones, were hawked about the streets; and on the 19th, wallflowers, with some of the blossoms expanded, which had been dug up for planting in the suburbs, and in the broken pan of the artisan, to remind him that there is such a place as the country, which he is beginning to forget, were pitched there in full panniers. On the 11th and 12th of February, crocuses were to be seen expanding their golden chalices in some of the miniature London gardens-gardens which, as the late Lord Canterbury said of poor dear Theodore Hook's, at Fulham, look as if they might be kept in order with a pair of scissors and a tooth-pick; but I saw those welcome

*Aman. Acad.

heralds of spring, decked with their glowing tabards, as early as the 2nd of that month some few years since.

The Frost-genius takes his opportunities of convincing mortals that his reign has not passed away, by a demonstration of more than ordinary severity, as he did in 1783-4, when Paris especially was frozen to her very marrow, and the greatest distress prevailed; nor did the thaw permanently take place till late in February. Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette put forth all their benevolent powers to relieve the pinching misery of that icy grasp, and the blessings of the people were inscribed on obelisks of snow-as durable as their gratitude.

19th January.-A genial afternoon, with a good spice of an old May day in it, led me to the Zoological Gardens, where a tapir was lounging about in the open air, as comfortable apparently as if it had been in South America. Hippo very much grown, and thriving admirably. His food still oatmeal and milk, and it must be told-as the well-bred Hamet informed me in a whisper-' many horse-dung,' of which latter condiment he consumes a great deal, and has long done so. This reminded me of a passage in Sparrman, in which he anticipates the possibility of bringing one of these animals to Europe. Speaking of the sucking hippopotamus which he captured and dissected, the Swedish doctor says, ' I am apt to suppose that one a little older than this would not be very nice in its food; as that which we caught was induced by hunger, as soon as it was let loose near the waggon, to put up with something not extremely delicate, which had been just dropped from one of our oxen.'

It is not at all improbable that the animal took this, not from pressure of hunger, but as a corrective to the milk, the curd of which was found in its stomach; and it is possible that the sucking hippopotamus, in a state of nature, may have recourse to the droppings of the parent for that purpose. This does not seem to have occurred