head, another on the leg, and an arrow pierced his arm, and, bruised and bleeding, he was borne below. There he lingered a few days, refusing all nourishment, assistance and sympathy, until death finally came to his relief. Thus perished the great Montezuma, in the fifty-fourth year of his age, and in the eighteenth of his reign, after having been six months a prisoner.
Weak as he was in the defence of his people, superstitious and cruel as he was in the practice of his religion, we cannot but lament this unfortunate termination of his life. In many noble qualities he far transcended those men by whom he was surrounded at the time of his death, who, though they had made him prisoner, bewailed the departure of a being so generous and so magnanimous. Of his children who survived him, three perished on the terrible night of the retreat, while from two others, a son and a daughter, descended the noble houses of Montezuma. The kings of Spain "granted many privileges to the posterity of Moatezuma on account of the unparalleled service rendered by that monarch in voluntarily incorporating a kingdom so great and rich as Mexico with the crown of Castile."
His body was delivered to the nobility, who, with much mourning and lamentation, burned it with the usual ceremonies, and the ashes were buried at Chapultepec. The people now attacked the besieged with greater violence, if possible, than before, threatening them that within, the space of two days they should all pay with their lives for the death of their king, for they had chosen a sovereign whom they could not deceive as they had the good Montezuma. Notwithstanding the fact that the Spaniards made frequent sallies from the palace into the city, in one of which they destroyed many houses and barricades, they could not succeed in opening a clear road for their retreat.
