Page:Mexico, picturesque, political, progressive.djvu/176

174 that he was an eye-witness, and holds truth sacred, will find himself falling into vain revery. "Reports" he may procure, but, in more senses than one, they are "vain;" hearsay he will find copious and contradictory; and although hundreds of authors have travelled the country, and left their impressions on record, out of the mass of their labor little that is of absolute value can be extracted.

Diaz himself complains of the elegance and untrustworthiness of the earlier work of Francisco Lopez de Gomara. The Abbé Clavigero, who wrote of Mexico one hundred and fifty years later, enumerates forty Spanish, Italian, and Mexican historians from whose pages he derived his own narrative; and he alludes somewhat doubtfully to a long catalogue of French, English, Dutch, Flemish, and German writers of whom he is not willing to admit that they held truth sacred. His patience was justly exhausted by one among them who described native princes going on elephants to the court of the Montezumas. One is impressed, however, in reading the literature of the past about this strange and still only dimly understood country, with the