No name better deserves to be first mentioned in the list of modern Mexican writers than that of JoaquÍn GarcÍa Icazbalceta. He was born in the City of Mexico Aug. 25, 1825. His father was a Spaniard, his mother a Mexican. On account of the disorders connected with the Revolution, his parents left Mexico, going first to the United States and later to Spain, where they remained until 1836. In that year they returned to Mexico. The boy showed early earnestness in study and was well instructed by private tutors. He was acquainted with and encouraged by the great historian, Lucas Alaman, who no doubt had much to do with his decision, about 1846, to devote himself to historical study.

The list of his works is a long one. He translated Prescott’s Conquest of Peru into Spanish and enriched it with valuable notes. To the well known Diccionario Universal de Historia y GeografÍa (Universal Dictionary of History and Geography) he contributed the biographical sketches of many personages of the sixteenth century. In 1858 he began publishing the Coleccion de Documentos para la Historia de MÉxico (Collection of Documents for the History of Mexico), two volumes of ancient, and for the most part unknown, matter of the highest value. This was continued by the publication in 1870 of Mendieta’s Historia Ecclesiastica Indiana (Ecclesiastical History of the Indians). Still later in 1886-1892 these volumes were followed by four similar volumes under the name Nueva Coleccion de Documentos para la Historia de MÉxico (New Collection of Documents for the History of Mexico). These papers were all original works, many of them from the sixteenth century, of the greatest importance and interest, and most, if not all, of them would have been lost or never known but for Icazbalceta’s care. In publishing this matter our author always added notes and explanations, characterized by lucidity, interest, and learning. Two important works were published in 1875 and 1877—MÉxico en 1554 (Mexico in 1554) and Coloquios espirituales y sacramentales y Poesias sagradas (Spiritual and Sacramental Colloquies and Sacred Poems). The former was a reprint of three interesting dialogues in Latin by Francisco Cervantes Salazar; the book is most rare; Icazbalceta printed the original Latin text with a Spanish translation and added his usual valuable notes. The other book, chiefly composed of religious dramas for popular representation, was by Fernan Gonzales de Eslava, who was by no means a mean poet. In reprinting this curious sixteenth century book Icazbalceta practically traced the whole history of the religious play in Mexico of the past. No Mexican bibliographer has done more important work than Icazbalceta. Two works in this line need special mention. His Apuntes para un Catalogo de Escritores en lenguas indigenas de America (Notes for a Catalogue of Writers in the Native Languages of America) is not only interesting in itself, but has been the necessary foundation for everything since written regarding Mexican languages. As for his BibliografÍa Mexicana del siglo xvi. (Mexican Bibliography of the Sixteenth Century), it is a wonderful work, representing forty years of labor. “It is a systematic catalogue of books printed in Mexico in the years between 1539 and 1600, with biographies of authors and various illustrations, facsimiles of ancient title pages, extracts from rare books, bibliographic notes, etc., etc.” It is far more—it is really a restoration of the life of that wonderful age in American letters. In biography our author is eminently happy; he usually loves and reverences his subject. In 1881 he published his Don Fray Juan de ZumÁrraga, Primer Obispo y Arzobispo de MÉxico (Friar Juan de Zumarraga, first bishop and archbishop of Mexico). It is a magnificent example of such work. Another subject of his love was Alegre, and besides a biography of him he wrote—1889—Opusculos ineditos Latinos y Castellanos de Francisco Javier Alegre (The Unpublished Works, Latin and Spanish, of Francisco Javier Alegre). Icazbalceta’s last great work was Diccionario de Provincialismos Mexicanos (Dictionary of Mexican Provincialisms). This was passing through the press at the time of his death, November 26, 1894.

Many of Icazbalceta’s choicest writings were monographs of no great length prepared for reading before the Mexican Academy or other organizations of which he was a member. These always show the same careful gathering of facts, the same just criticism, and the same literary character as his greater works. Our selections—all but one—are from such a discourse read before the academy in June and July, 1882, entitled, El instruccion publica en MÉxico durante el siglo xvi. (Public Instruction in Mexico during the Sixteenth Century). The other is from a paper—Los Medicos de MÉxico en el siglo xvi. (The Physicians of Mexico in the Sixteenth Century). These passages will no doubt surprise many readers, who have been pleased to believe that Spain’s policy was to hold its conquered territories in deep ignorance.

THE EARLY MISSIONARIES.

When the first Spanish missionaries arrived, they faced that great mass of uncivilized folk, which it was necessary to convert and civilize in a single day. Today there exist an enormous number of establishments and private teachers for educating youth in classes, graded with relation to ages; there were then twelve men for millions of children and adults, who begged, in concert, for light, and light which it was impossible to deny them, because it was not merely a matter of human culture, which most important as it is, did not then occupy the first place; but of opening the eyes to blind heathen and of making them take the straight road for attaining the salvation of their souls. The matter then seemed serious; it was really still more so, because the new teachers had never heard the language of their pupils. But what may not devotion accomplish? Those venerable men quickly mastered the unknown language and then others and others as they met them; they understood, or rather they divined, the peculiar character of the population, and at once converted, instructed, and protected it. The first missionaries and those who followed after them, were certainly no common men; almost all were educated; many like Fathers Tecto, Gaona, Focher, Vera Cruz, and others had shone in professorships and prelacies; they were of noble birth, and three of them, Fathers Gante, Witte, and Daciano, felt royal blood coursing through their veins. All renounced the advantages promised by a brilliant career; all forgot their hard gained learning to devote themselves to the primary instruction of the poor and unprotected Indians. What inflated doctor, what betitled professor today would accept a primary school in an obscure village?

The Franciscans went everywhere rearing temples to the true God, and with them schools for children. They gave to their principal convents a special plan; the church set from east to west and the school, with its dormitories and chapel at right angles to it, stretching to the north. The square of buildings was completed by the ample court, which served for teaching the Christian doctrine to adults, in the morning before work, and also for the sons of the macehuales or plebeians who came to receive religious instruction; the school building was reserved for the sons of nobles and lords; although this distinction was not rigidly observed.

At first the friars found great difficulty in gathering together boys to fill these schools, because the Indians were not yet capable of understanding the importance of the new discipline and refused to give their boys to the monasteries. They had to appeal to the government that it should compel the lords and principal men to send their sons to the schools; first experiment in compulsory education. Many of the lords, not caring to give up their children, but not daring to disobey, adopted the expedient of sending, in place of their own sons, and as if they were these, other boys, sons of their servants or vassals. But in time, perceiving the advantage these plebeian boys, by education, were gaining over their masters, they sent their sons to the monasteries, and even insisted on their being admitted. The boys dwelt in the lodgings built for the purpose in connection with the schools, some so spacious as to suffice for eight hundred or a thousand. The friars devoted themselves by preference to the children, as being—from their youth—more docile and apt to learn, and found in them most useful helpers. Soon they employed them as teachers. The adults brought from their wards by their leaders, came to the patios and remained there during the hours set for instruction, after which they were free for their ordinary occupations. Divided into groups, one of the best instructed boys taught to each group the lesson learned from the missionary.

PEDRO DE GANTE’S WORK.

Although you know the fact well, gentlemen, you would not forgive me should I omit mentioning the work which the noted lay brother, Pedro de Gante, blood relative of the Emperor Charles V., did in the direction of instructing the Indians. He was not the founder of the College of San Juan de Letran, as is generally stated, but of the great school of San Francisco, in Mexico, which he directed during a half century. This was constructed, as was customary, behind the convent church, extending toward the north, and contiguous to the famous chapel of San JosÉ de Belem de Naturales—the first church of Mexico, the old cathedral included. There our lay brother brought together fully a thousand boys, to whom he imparted religious and civil instruction. Later he added the study of Latin, of music, and of singing, by which means he did a great service to the clergy, because from there went forth musicians and singers for all the churches. Not satisfied with this achievement, he brought together also adults, with whom he established an industrial school. He provided the churches with painted or sculptured figures; with embroidered ornaments, sometimes with designs interspersed of the feather work, in which the Indians were so distinguished; with crosses, with candlestick standards, and many other objects necessary for church service, no less than with workmen for the construction of the churches themselves, for he had in that school painters, sculptors, engravers, stonecutters, carpenters, embroiderers, tailors, shoemakers, and other trades workers. He attended to all and was master of all. The gigantic efforts of that immortal lay brother cause genuine admiration—who without other resources than his indomitable energy, born of his warm charity, reared from the foundations and sustained for so many years a magnificent church, a hospital and a great establishment, which was at once a primary school, a college of higher instruction and religious teaching, an academy of the fine arts, and a trades school, in fine a center of civilization.

INSTRUCTION BY HIEROGLYPHS.

Industrial schools, compulsory education, these seem to us usually modern ideas; but these old teachers knew something of object teaching, of adapting methods to varying conditions. Thus:

They completed the instruction by the use of signs, and it may be imagined that the result was little or nothing. Desirous of hastening the instruction and realizing that what enters by the eye engraves itself more easily upon the mind, they devised the idea of painting the mysteries of religion upon a canvas. Friar Jacob de Tastera, a Frenchman, was the first, it seems, who tested this method. He did not know the language, but he showed the Indians the chart and caused one of the brighter among them, who knew something of Spanish, to explain the meaning of the figures to the others. The other friars followed his example and the system continued in use much time. They were also accustomed to hang the necessary charts upon the wall, and the missionary, as he made the doctrinal explanations, indicated with a pointer the corresponding chart. The Indians accustomed to painting hieroglyphs adopted them for writing catechisms and prayerbooks for their own use, but varying the old form and interspersing here and there words written with European letters, from which there resulted a new species of mixed writing, of which curious examples are preserved, some of which are in my possession. They made use of the same method of jotting down a record of their sins that they might not forget them at the time of going to the confessional. The use of the pictures was so pleasing to the Indians that it lasted all that century and a part of the following. In 1575 Archbishop Moya de Contreras substituted with announcements in pictures, papal bulls which failed to come from Spain; and the well known French writer, Friar Juan Bautista, caused figures to be engraved—after the seventeenth century had begun—for use in teaching the Indians of that time the doctrine.

THE UNIVERSITY OF MEXICO.

The famous University of Mexico was opened in 1553, almost seventy years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Literary contests of a public character were not infrequent:

The doors of the university opened, there entered by them a great number of youth, who waited with impatience the moment of commencing or prosecuting their studies. So Cervantes Salazar testifies in the description which he wrote of the institution, the year following its establishment. Soon the literary exercises began and notable was the ardor with which the students engaged in scholastic disputations, to which, as Cervantes says, night alone put an end. The learned men who were already in Mexico hastened to connect themselves with the university, among them Archbishop Montufar. Nothing was omitted to add to the luster of the new school, since there were given to it the privileges of the University of Salamanca and the title Royal and Pontifical. From it sallied many alumni as teachers, or to occupy high positions in church and state. It was really, as its founders had planned, a source of supply (nursery) of educated men, which in large measure obviated the necessity of bringing such from Europe, and there were even some who there brilliantly displayed the education which they had received in the schools of Mexico.

A LITERARY FESTIVAL.

In the year 1578, on the occasion of the arrival at Mexico of a great quantity of sacred relics, presented by Pope Gregory XIII. to the Jesuits, it was decided to celebrate a brilliant festival. Upon the announcement of this, many distinguished persons and a multitude of others betook themselves to Mexico. An official proclamation, given forth beforehand with much ceremony, announced a program of seven literary controversies. The procession with the sacred relics sallied from the cathedral, and on the way to the Church of the Jesuits, where they were to be deposited, there were reared five magnificent triumphal arches ‘at least fifty feet high.’ Besides these more important ones, the Indians constructed more than fifty, made of boughs and flowers according to their custom. All the doors and windows of the houses were adorned with rich tapestries, Flemish stuffs embroidered with gold and silk. In the arches, as at the corners, and in the little ornamental shrines which decorated the line of march, there were displayed placards and shields with inscriptions, sentences, and poetical verses in Latin, Spanish, and even in Greek and Hebrew. At each arch the procession paused to see and hear dances, sports, music, and poems. During the space of eight days, in the afternoons, upon platforms erected for the purpose, the students of the different schools in turn represented religious plays. One of these was the tragedy of the persecution of the church under Diocletian and the prosperity which followed, with the reign of Constantine. This drama, which still exists in printed form, was undoubtedly a work of the Jesuit professors. Delighted with its rendition the populace demanded its repetition, which took place the following Sunday.

INDIAN LANGUAGES.

An immense field is opened before my view, in the linguistic and historic works, which we owe to the sixteenth century. On their arrival the missionaries found themselves face to face with a language entirely unknown to the inhabitants of the Old World; and as they progressed with their apostolic labors they discovered with pain that this land, where the curse of Babel seems to have fallen with especial weight, was full of different languages, of all forms and structures, some polished, others barbarous, for which they had neither interpreters, nor teachers, nor books, and for the most part not even a people of culture who spoke them. That difficulty in itself would suffice to discourage the most intrepid mind; but there did not in the world exist anything which could quench the fire of charity with which the missionaries were aglow. They undertook the contest with the hundred-headed monster and vanquished him. Today the study of a group of languages, or even of one tongue, raises the fame of the philologist to the clouds, although he usually finds the way pathed out for him by previous labors; but the missionaries learned, or rather divined all, from the first beginnings; a single man at times attacked five or six of these languages without analogy, without a common filiation, without known alphabet, with nothing that might facilitate the task. Today such investigations are made, for the most part, in the tranquillity and shelter of the study; then, in the fields, the groves, upon the roads, under the open sky, in the midst of fatigues of the mission journey, of hunger, of lack of clothing, of sleeplessness.

The missionaries did not undertake such heavy tasks to attain fame; they did not compare the languages, nor treat them in a scientific way; they tried to reduce them all to the plan of Latin; but they went straight to the practical end of making themselves comprehensible to the natives, and laid firm foundations, upon which might be reared a magnificent structure. The linguistic section of our literature is one of those which most highly honor it, and this, although we know but a portion of it. Countless are the writings which have remained unpublished, either for lack of patronage to supply the cost of printing or because they were translations of sacred texts which it was not permitted to place in vulgar hands. Father Olmos is a notable example of the sad fate which befell many of these writers. It is believed that he knew various Chichimecan dialects, because he was a long time among them, and it is certain that he wrote without counting other books, grammars, and vocabularies of the Aztec, Huastec, and Totonac languages. Of such great works only his Aztec grammar has survived, which, after circulating during more than three centuries through public and private libraries, has finally been saved, thanks to the beautiful edition of it which was published, not in Mexico, but in Paris in 1875. In a history of Mexican literature, notices and analysis of the books on the native languages—today so much esteemed and studied in foreign lands—claim a place of honor.

That same year, about the month of September, the famous Dr. Francisco Hernandez, court physician of Philip II., arrived in Mexico. He was a native of Toledo and was born about 1517 or 1518. Nothing is known of his life previous to his journey to New Spain, whither he came by royal commission, to write the natural history of the country, with reference to medicine. He consumed seven years in the discharge of his commission, making continual journeys, meeting obstacles and suffering diseases which brought him to the edge of the grave. It has been generally said that Philip II. supplied the expenses of this expedition with regal munificence and that it cost him 20,000 ducats; but documents published in our days, clearly show that Hernandez was given but a modest salary, although we do not know exactly the amount, with no assistance whatever for his extraordinary expenses, not even for those occasioned by his frequent journeys. Nor was he supplied the assistance usual in such cases, and he had no other helper than his own son. In spite of all this he was never discouraged in that great enterprise. In order to devote himself entirely to it, he refused to practice medicine in Mexico, ‘throwing away the opportunity of gaining more than 20,000 pesos by the practice of the healing art, and much more by occupations pursued in this country, on account of employing myself in the service of your majesty and in the consummation of the work’—as he himself says in a letter to the king. Not content with describing and making drawings of the plants and animals of New Spain he caused the efficacy of the medicines to be practically tested in the hospitals, and availing himself of his title of protomedico, convoked the practitioners then in the city and urged them to make similar tests and to communicate the results to him. Finally he carried to Spain, 1577, seventeen volumes of text and illustrations, in which was the natural history; and an additional volume containing various writings upon the customs and antiquities of the Indians. Copies of all were left in Mexico, which have disappeared. He wrote the work in Latin; he translated a part of it into Spanish, and the Indians, under his direction, commenced a translation into Aztec.

Arrived in Spain, Hernandez suffered the severest blow possible for an author—instead of his great work being put promptly to press, as he had expected, it was buried in the shelves of the library of the Escorial; to be sure with all honor, for the volumes were ‘beautifully bound in blue leather and gilded and supplied with silver clasps and corners, heavy and excellently worked.’ However, this magnificent dress did not serve to protect the work, which finally perished, almost a century later, in the great conflagration of the Escorial, which took place the 7th and 8th of June, 1671, nothing being saved except a few drawings, just enough to augment our appreciation of the loss. Dr. Hernandez survived his return little more than nine years, since he died February 28, 1587.