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In the Codex Boturini, as is well known, are several important lapses that neither that eminent scholar, nor any other archæologist whose conclusions can be considered trustworthy, has been able to supply. All that reasonably can be imagined concerning these breaks is that the historian of the Aztec migration deliberately omitted certain facts from his pictured history.
I have examined the manuscript of his work, now in the Lenox Library, New York City, but it does not contain these texts, and evidently the copy used by Bustamente did not. Boturini included the translations of the two odes of Nezahualcoyotl in a work on the Virgin of Guadelupe, only a fragment of which has been preserved.
No account of the rescued fragments of this old literature of Ancient America should omit giving due credit to Chevalier Boturini, the Milanese, who went from Italy to America in 1735 as an agent of the Countess Santibañey, who claimed to be a descendant of Montezuma. He, too, was a devotee, and believed that St.
The assertion is advanced by Boturini that the genuine ancient Nahuatl poetry which has been preserved is in iambic metre, and he refers to a song of Nezahualcoyotl in his collection to prove his opinion. What study I have given to the prosody of the Nahuatl tongue leads me to doubt the correctness of so sweeping a statement.
From what he could learn about them some two centuries or more after the Conquest, the antiquary Boturini classified all the ancient songs under two general heads, the one treating mainly of historical themes, while the other was devoted to purely fictitious, emotional or imaginative subjects.
On a fac-simile of the Codex Boturini he bade me observe attentively the pictures which preceded and which followed the break in question; and then he showed me that these same pictures were the beginning and the ending of my own codex obviously put there so that this secret record might be inserted accurately into the public record of the wanderings of the Aztec tribe.
To have proved the Conquistadors a gang of unprincipled buccaneers would have spoiled a Holy War, which was just what the Inquisition would not allow to go before the world. To the little work of Boturini on Mexico there are appended, 1. The declaration of his faith in the Roman Catholic Church in the most unequivocal terms. 2. The license of the Jesuit father. 3. The license of an Inquisitor. 4.
The worthy Boturini was puzzled by those which he had collected, and writes, "the songs are difficult to explain, because they mystify historical facts with constant allegorizing," and Boturini's literary executor, Don Mariano Echevarria y Veitia, who paid especial attention to the poetic fragments he had received, says frankly: "The fact is, that as to the songs I have not found a person who can fully translate them, because there are many words in them whose signification is absolutely unknown to-day, and moreover which do not appear in the vocabularies of Molina or others."
Unfortunately, however, the author did not insert in his work any song in the native language nor a literal translation of any, as I am informed by Señor Chavero, who has kindly examined the work carefully at my request, with this inquiry in view. Half a century later, when Boturini was collecting his material, he found but very few of the old poems.
Then descending lower and still lower; disregarding alike the warning of Lord Bacon 'a credulous man is a deceiver, and of Tacitus fingunt simul creduntque he rakes up even a devotee, Boturini, and makes him also an historic authority, without overtaxing public credulity; though this wretch, as we have seen, out-Munchausens Pietro himself, and as he may have surpassed every other man in Spain in drawing the long bow, was justly selected for historiographer, at a time when death was the penalty for possessing a book not licensed by the Inquisition.
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