s
immense pile of buildings devoted to superstition. Among these is the
perfect equality that should exist in a place of worship. Here the rich
and the poor meet together upon a level; the well-dressed lady and the
market-woman are here kneeling together before the same image. The
distinctions of wealth and rank are for the moment forgotten. While I
was looking on and admiring this state of things, I saw a market-man on
his return homeward with an empty hen-coop on his back. He walked
boldly up, and knelt among the body of worshipers, told his beads, and
then started up and trudged on his homeward journey. This equality is
only for an hour, and hardly so long; yet it is an hour daily, and must
have its effect in this country of inequalities in reminding the most
humble that this inequality is only for this world, and that at the
termination of life all will stand upon a common level.

THE SAN CARLOS.

The San Carlos, or Academy of Arts, is now in a flourishing condition,
on account of the success of the lottery that supports it. The number
of students here gratuitously instructed in different branches of art
is quite large. Here, too, it is refreshing to see equality triumphant;
the child of the _peon_ and of the prince sit side by side, and on the
days of public exhibition, the crowds that throng its halls are
admitted gratuitously, and are of as miscellaneous a character as are
its pupils. The pictures of _Pangre_ are the present great attraction,
and every new production of his genius gains him additional applause.
The works that Humboldt so much admired are still here, but since his
time there have been added several marbles of considerable merit.

This Academy of San Carlos is one of the many monuments of that
greatest of the kings of Spain since the Conquest, Don Carlos III.,
though not brought into full operation until the reign of his imbecile
successor, Carlos IV. All the monuments of which Mexico can boast at
this day are traceable to the reign of the only enlightened Spanish
prince of whom Spain can boast in a period of 300 years. Nearly a
hundred years have elapsed since the foundation of this academy, and it
has not yet produced a man of the first class either in painting or
sculpture.

The College of Mines, the finest building in this city, is another
exhibition of the liberal spirit which governed in the reign of Don
Carlos. Under this prince a new code of mining laws had been digested,
strikingly