Page:The Story of Mexico.djvu/93

Rh has cast over his picture of the Golden Age a glow which is hardly justified by the cold light of modern research. His story is now regarded as unreliable in many particulars. Yet as a legend it retains its charm; and as history the graceful fabric need not be utterly destroyed while the monuments at Texcuco and the manuscripts of Nezahualcoyotl attest the existence of such a king and such a court. Until the diligent research of those explorers who are now busy in searching for the facts of early Mexican history, have fully established them, we may enjoy the tale of past magnificence upon the plateau of Anahuac.

The period of the Golden Age of Texcuco is ascribed to the fifteenth century; the date assigned to Nezahualcoyotl's accession being 1430. The Spanish invasion took place in 1516 A.D.

During that century the red rose of Lancaster was warring with the white rose of York; Joan of Arc, in France, grew up in her village home, to win back for the French king his lost provinces. Isabella and Ferdinand, by uniting the two houses of Castile and Aragon, made Spain the powerful kingdom, which was to discover the New World.

All these princes and potentates, busy with their own wars and marriages, lived their lives without thought of any form of high civilization across an untravelled ocean. Even Columbus, as he urged upon the queen his longing to cross that ocean to find out what was beyond it, did not suggest to her the vision of a cultivated court with a king who wrote poetry in an unknown tongue, and had carved lions upon his marble stairways.