awkward reciter who is too shy to exhibit his powers to the best advantage.
There is, then, no literary shyness in Mexican letters none of the stylistic hypocrisy to which we have become accustomed in English literature. The Mexican is not afraid to let himself go; and if it be charged against him as a misdemeanour that he possesses no sense of discretion in this respect, he is quite within his rights in retorting that such discipline as has proved suitable to the cold English and the systematising French is totally unfitted to the expression of his outlook and his ideals.
No sketch of Mexican literature can altogether ignore the wondrous writings of the Colonial time, which figure again and again in modern Mexican literary productions, and have inspired the younger generation of writers with the knowledge that those who have gone before have bequeathed to them works of which any country might be proud. For the literature of Mexico goes back to the Conquest.
And, first, the book of Sahagun, the Franciscan, contemporary with the Conquest. His Historia Universal de Nueva-España, commenced after 1530, was printed separately by both Bustamante and Lord Kingsborough in 1830. Its historical and mythological value is difficult to overestimate. It was written after years of deep consultation with the wisest of native scribes; banned and confiscated by the blind zeal of his order; scattered throughout the orthodox libraries of moribund monasteries; sent to Madrid, there to become the prey of the official penchant for mañana; unearthed at last by Muñoz, at Tolosi, in Navarre, in some crumbling convent library; and seized upon with avidity by the zealot Kingsborough. Sahagun's translation of the Scriptures is a monument of the possibilities which underlie a barbarous tongue; the rude Mexican or Nahuatl speech is seized, heated to a glow; hammered, welded, and shaped into a shining, sinuous, sword-like thing, despite the cumbrous machinery of the language. It is a "world-book."
