Torquemada, a later Provincial of the same order, did not fail to use Sahagun's manuscript in the composition of his Monarchia Indiana, first printed at Seville in 1615. He is chiefly remarkable, in fact, for his piracy of the old friar's researches. His parallels—Scriptural and profane—range the Greek and the Jew by the side of the feathered Aztec with an anachronistic genius only to be expected of the seventeenth century. His book was again impressed at Madrid in 1723, in three volumes folio. Torquemada's facilities for the acquirement of much that is curious in Mexican antiquity were undoubted; and he has all the charm and amusing garrulity of his age and caste. He is by no means unimportant, were it only for an elementary yet potent curiosity which puts him on the scent of facts the fate of which, under other scrutiny, might have been to remain unrecorded.
Suave and august, the Abbe Clavigero has nought in common with Torquemada. Although a Spanish-speaking brother, his Storia Antica del Messico is written in Italian, and is best known to English readers by the translation of 1807 in two volumes quarto. This work brought the Abbe into fierce controversy with Robertson of Edinburgh, and De Pauw, a French savant, in which the Scottish professor was no less sententious or scathing than the Spanish priest.
The confessional of Joan Baptista, shriver of the Order of San Francisco, was printed in 1559. Old Baptista was the teacher of Torquemada, and professed philosophy and theology at the College-Monastery of Tlatilulco. In his Menologio, Vetancurt styles him "the Mexican Cicero." He was the author of a bundle of quaint manuscripts, which he entitled Teption amoxtli, or "The Little Book." Bartholome de Alua also compiled a confessional in Nahuatl. Bartholome was a native of Mexico and a descendant of those kings of Tezcuco who were the allies of Montezuma, and whose dynasty perished with his amidst the smoke of the Spaniards' "death-thunder."
Alonso de Molina's Confessional (1578) is one of the most
