stood him to mean 40,000 houses, and multiplying this
figure by 5, the average number of persons _in a modern
family_, have obtained the figure 200,000. But 40,000 houses
peopled after the old Mexican fashion, with at least 200
persons in a house (to put it as low as possible), would make a
city of 8,000,000 inhabitants! Las Casas, in his _Destruycion
de las Indias_, vii., puts the population of Cholula at about
30,000. I observe that Llorente (in his _Oeuvres de Las Casas_,
tom. i. p. 38) translates the statement correctly. I shall
recur to this point below, vol. ii. p. 264.]

[Footnote 98: Mariana, _Historia de Espana_, Valencia, 1795,
tom. viii. p. 317.]

But when Cortes described Tlascala as "quite as well built" as Granada,
it is not at all likely that he was thinking about that exquisite
Moorish architecture which in the mind of Mr. Prescott or any cultivated
modern writer is the first thing to be suggested by the name. The
Spaniards of those days did not admire the artistic work of "infidels;"
they covered up beautiful arabesques with a wash of dirty plaster, and
otherwise behaved very much like the Puritans who smashed the
"idolatrous" statues in English cathedrals. When Cortes looked at
Tlascala, and Coronado looked at Zuni, and both soldiers were reminded
of Granada, they were probably looking at those places with a
professional eye as fortresses hard to capture; and from this point of
view there was doubtless some justice in the comparison.

[Sidenote: The ancient city of Mexico was a great composite pueblo.]

In the description of Tlascala by the Spaniards who first saw it, with
its dark and narrow streets, its houses of adobe, or "the better sort"
of stone laid in adobe mortar, and its flat and terraced roofs, one is
irresistibly reminded of such a pueblo as Zuni. Tlascala was a town of
a type probably common in Mexico. In some respects, as will hereafter
appear, the city of Mexico showed striking variations from the common
type. Yet there too were to be seen the huge houses, with terraced
roofs, built around a square courtyard; in one of them 450 Spaniards,
with more than 1,000 Tlascalan allies, were accommodated; in another,
called "Montezuma's palace," one of the conquerors, who came several
times intending to see the whole of it, got so tired with wandering
through the interminable succession of rooms t