Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/355

Rh city's population was not less than 300,000 souls; though Orozco y Berra, while admitting these figures, observes that considering the actual area and the large spaces occupied by palaces and public buildings, the people must have been a good deal crowded.

Very contradictory appreciations of the beauty of the Aztec capital, the grandeur of its buildings, and the merit of its architecture, have been given by different writers. Prescott's marvellous picture of the ancient city is familiar to all students of Mexican history, and hardly less well known and rivalling the American historian's delightful pages, are the chapters of Sir Arthur Helps, praised by Ruskin for their "beautiful quiet English," in which he compares Mexico to Thebes, Nineveh, and Babylon, among the great cities of antiquity, and to Constantinople, Venice, and Granada, among those of modern times, not hesitating to declare that it was "at that time the fairest in the world and has never since been equalled" (Hernan. Cortes, p. 108). The distinguished Mexican scholar Señor Alaman (Disertaciones, tom. i., p. 184) expresses his conviction that the city of Mexico contained no buildings of beauty or merit; that, aside from the royal palaces, the rest of the houses were adobe huts, amongst which rose the squat, truncated pyramids of the temples, unlovely to behold, decorated with rude sculptures of serpents and other horrible figures, and having heaps of human skulls piled in their court yards. He sustains this dreary appreciation by the argument that there would otherwise have remained some fragments of former architectural magnificence, whereas there is absolutely nothing. These eminent writers seem unwilling to allow that Tenochtitlan may have been a wonderfully beautiful city and at the same time have possessed few imposing buildings and no remarkable architecture. The descriptions of Mr. Prescott and Sir Arthur Helps are masterpieces of word-painting which charm us, but they are based upon early descriptions in which impeachable importance is given to architectural features of the city. It is, as Señor Alaman remarks, incredible that not a fragment of column or capital, statue or architrave should have been saved to attest the existence of great architectural monuments, even though 150,000 men were diligently engaged for two months in destroying the buildings, filling up canals with the debris and that finally, when the city came to be rebuilt, many idols and other larger fragments of temples were used in the foundations of the cathedral, which rose on the site of the great teocalli. Palaces, such as Montezuma's is described by the Spaniards, may be vast in extent, with beautiful courts, fountains, gardens, and audience halls, they may be luxurious and filled with curious and beautiful objects, but they add little to the picturesque or imposing appearance of a capital; the temples were sufficiently numerous, but none save the great temple seem to have been lofty, and even the principal teocalli had but 114 steps, so that its heighth was only remarkable by comparison with the great stretch of low flat-roofed houses about it. Cortes describes the destruction of the city, day by day, which he sincerely deplored as