OF THE NATIVE RACES OF AMERICA. 2S 



Boturini gaA^ a list of some forty or fifty Nahua or Aztec mauuscripts, iucludiug a 

 Cronaca Mexicana giving the history of the nation from the year 1068 to 159*7. 



What most interests us in the Nahna, as well as in the Maya literature, is its poetry. 

 Some Maya poems are preserved in the book of Chilan Balam and in the Popul Vuh, and 

 the "Maya Prophecies " contain some mystic songs of the priests of Kukulcan and Itzamna. 

 Dr. Brintou, who gives this information, adds that the modern Maya lends itself readily to 

 poetic uses, as verses in his possession by Grarcià y Grarcià, the Yucatan historian, abund- 

 antly show. " The Comedy Ballet of Giiegiience," in the Nahua-Spanish dialect of Guatemala, 

 an edition of which by Dr. Briuton is to- form a volume of his Library, is worthy of mention 

 as well for that reason as for the A'ivid indications that it gives of a sense of the ludicrous 

 in the native mind. For information regarding it and also regarding the other forms of 

 Mexican, Central and South American literature, the didactic, the oratorical, the religious, 

 etc., I must refer to Dr. Brinton's " Aboriginal American Authors." I will now take 

 leave of those ancient and mysterious civilizations to roam for a while with northern 

 sachems over more familiar ground. 



No native northern poet has won such praise as that which was elicited from the pen 

 of Montaigne by the refrain of a Tupi song. {Essais, Livre I, eh. 30, p. 321). Some of the 

 northern tribes have, nevertheless, some share of literary ability. The Jesuit, Father 

 Lafitau, gives them credit for sound judgment, liA'ely imagination, ready conception and 

 wonderful memory, though he does not deny that they have serious faults. If less civi- 

 lized than the races of Mexico and Peru, they had, at least, the germs of civilization which, 

 in more favorable circumstances, might have fertilized and borne good fruit. States- 

 manship and diplomacy — of a rude kind, indeed, but yet capable, now and then, of coping 

 with the wisdom of trained European politicians — were displayed by several of the chiefs. 

 Their schemes of government, though primitive, were suited to their condition. The 

 framers of the Iroquois and other federations must have been men of skill and foresight. 

 In war it was natural that they should distinguish themselves, as it was the main occu- 

 pation of their lives. In arts and manufactures they had made the first steps and some 

 of them showed considerable invention and taste. If care in the choice of language, the 

 exercise of logic or of imagination, as the occasion called for close reasoning or appeal to 

 the emotions, and a corresponding eloquence for which the listeners seldom failed to 

 show due appreciation, be any token of literary faculty, some of the northern nations 

 were certainly not destitute of it. Some writers ascribe to the Celt the possession of 

 artistic gifts in excess of either the Teutons or the Latins. But the Celts were preceded 

 by an earlier race, of which the Basqu.es are a remnant, with which it is more than likely 

 that they intermarried, thus gaining some of the qualities by which they have ever been 

 characterized. Whether the gift of ready speech was one of these qualities it is impos- 

 sible to say ; but stranger things have happened. It is singular that the Basque is the 

 only language of the old world which is marked by peculiarities of structure that differ- 

 entiate it and the American tongues from the rest of human speech. Does that argue 

 kinship in remote times, or is it due to influences in the evolution of language as yet 

 undiscovered, which befel these tongues— the American and the Basque^and these alone ? 

 It would be strange, if it should turn out that the race, of which some refugees found a 

 permanent shelter in Pyreuean recesses, while others, as Gibeonites at first, as equals 



Sec. II., 1SS4. 4. 



