would come from the East to deliver them from the bondage of the Spaniards and Mexicans, and this was happily verified in 1846, when their territory, New Mexico, fell into the hands of United States soldiers.
Returning to the capital of Mexico, we shall find that everything continued to prosper; lands were distributed to poor and meritorious Spaniards, and mines long known to the ancient Mexicans were opened and successfully worked. In the years 1541 and 1542 were founded the cities of Guadalajara and Valladolid.
[A. D. 1545.] In this year occurred an eruption of the volcano of Orizaba; in the following year the rich mines of Zacatecas were discovered, and a terrible pestilence broke out among the Indians, in which eighty thousand of them perished.
In 1548 the first Bishop of Mexico, Zumárraga, died, the same man who caused such a great loss to the world by the destruction of Indian paintings. Desiring to remove from the sight of the Indians every vestige of their former arts, and especially of their idolatry, this infamous bigot ransacked the library vaults of Tezcoco and Mexico, and piling the hieroglyphic paintings in a great heap destroyed the whole by fire. No one can estimate the loss such a destruction of historic paintings has occasioned. Learned men have not ceased to regret it to the present day; and if any man ever deserved the curses of the Mexican nation, it is this same first Bishop of Mexico, Don Juan de Zumárraga.
[A. D. 1550.] Of the large number of viceroys sent out by the Kings of Spain to govern their new kingdom across the sea none was better fitted for the position than the first one, Mendoza. His many estimable qualities won upon people of all classes, and he paved the way for the future government of his successors by uniting the
