Literary extract o' the day
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Among other titles, I am reading Prescott's 'Conquest of Mexico' (1848), and felt that this less than delicate extract merited a narrower audience:
Those familiar with the modern Mexicans will find it difficult to conceive that the nation should ever have been capable of devising the enlightened polity which we have been considering. But they should remember that in the Mexicans of our day they see only a conquered race; as different from their ancestors as are the modern Egyptians from those who built, I will not say, the tasteless pyramids, but the temples and palaces whose magnificent wrecks strew the borders of the Nile, at Luxor and Karnac. The difference is not so great as between the ancient Greek, and his degenerate descendant, lounging among the master- pieces of art which he has scarcely taste enough to admire, speaking the language of those still more imperishable monuments of literature which he has hardly capacity to comprehend. Yet he breathes the same atmosphere, is warmed by the same sun, nourished by the same scenes, as those who fell at Marathon and won the trophies of Olympic Pisa. The same blood flows in his veins that flowed in theirs. But ages of tyranny have passed over him ;
he belongs to a conquered race.
he belongs to a conquered race.
Labels: Random anecdotes
