Page:Mexico of the Mexicans.djvu/90

74 fulfilling his duties as a deputy. He died quietly during the dark days of the Revolution.

Primo Feliciano Velasquez, Mexican Academician, historian and journalist, drifted from law into newspaper work. He founded an anti-Government paper, El Estandarte (The Standard) in 1885, and so fierce were its attacks upon constituted authority, that he could not hope to escape the heavy hand of the power he combatted, and pains and penalties followed his bitter criticisms. Turning his attention to the milder muse of ancient history, Velasquez, in his Discovery and Conquest of San Luis Potosi, won the recognition of the Royal Spanish Academy. These researches he followed up by publishing, in 1897 and 1899, the four volumes of his Collection of Documents for the History of San Luis Potosi. In later life, Señor Velasquez has returned to the practice of the law, his first profession.

Ignacio M. Altamirano was one of those men of native Aztec blood who, by dint of genuine ability and personal force, acquired social and literary success. A peon boy, and seemingly doomed to peonage, he helped his parents in the fields at Tixtla, in the State of Guerrero. But poor and despised as is the Indian stock, it bears within it the germ of aesthetic appreciation, and the love of beauty was too deeply implanted in young Altamirano to permit of his remaining in the sordid environment of an Indian village.

The Indian lad who would attain to eminence in any department of Mexican life is doubly handicapped, for not only has he to combat the most soul-destroying poverty, but he must also face a deep-rooted race-prejudice. Born in 1834, Altamirano's abilities were recognised in the village school, and he was sent to the Literary Institute at Toluca, and later to the Colegio de san Juan at Mexico. His real literary energies commenced with the Revolution of 1854, which impelled him to write politically on the Liberal side.