[342] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 67.—The Tezcucan historian records several appalling examples of this severity,—one in particular, in relation to his guilty wife. The story, reminding one of the tales of an Oriental harem, has been translated for the Appendix, Part 2, No. 4. See also Torquemada (Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 66), and Zurita (Rapport, pp. 108, 109). He was the terror, in particular, of all unjust magistrates. They had little favor to expect from the man who could stifle the voice of nature in his own bosom in obedience to the laws. As Suetonius said of a prince who had not his virtue, “Vehemens et in coercendis quidem delictis immodicus.” Vita Galbæ, sec. 9.
[343] Torquemada saw the remains of this, or what passed for such, in his day. Monarch. Ind., lib. 2, cap. 64.
[344] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 73, 74.—This sudden transfer of empire from the Tezcucans, at the close of the reigns of two of their ablest monarchs, is so improbable that one cannot but doubt if they ever possessed it,—at least to the extent claimed by the patriotic historian. See ante, chap. 1, note 25, and the corresponding text.
[345] Ibid., cap. 72.—The reader will find a particular account of these prodigies, better authenticated than most miracles, in a future page of this history.
[346] Ixtlilxochitl, Hist. Chich., MS., cap. 75.—Or, rather, at the age of fifty, if the historian is right in placing his birth, as he does in a preceding chapter, in 1465. (See cap. 46.) It is not easy to decide what is true, when the writer does not take the trouble to be true to himself.
[347] His obsequies were celebrated with sanguinary pomp. Two hundred male and one hundred female slaves were sacrificed at his tomb. His body was consumed, amidst a heap of jewels, precious stuffs, and incense, on a funeral pile; and the ashes, deposited in a golden urn, were placed in the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, for whose worship the king, notwithstanding the lessons of his father, had some partiality. Ixtlilxochitl.
[348] [Ixtlilxochitl (born about 1568) wrote in the early part of the seventeenth century. A certificate which he presented to the viceroy bears the date of November 18, 1608. The error is apparently a clerical one; though a previous passage in the text seems to indicate some confusion on the author’s part.]
[349] [Señor Ramirez objects to this remark, on the ground that, however obscure the hieroglyphics may now seem, at the time of Ixtlilxochitl they were, in his language, “as plain as our letters to those who were acquainted with them.” Notas y Esclarecimientos, p. 10.—K.]
[350] The names of many animals in the New World, indeed, have been frequently borrowed from the Old; but the species are very different. “When the Spaniards landed in America,” says an eminent naturalist, “they did not find a single animal they were acquainted with; not one of the quadrupeds of Europe, Asia, or Africa.” Lawrence, Lectures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History of Man (London, 1819), p. 250.
[351] Acosta, lib. 1, cap. 16.