t even the most successful barrister, or doctor, or stockbroker (they
are the people that read least) need not be fatigued by its contents. The
catalogue skips from gay to grave, from Tupper to Aretino, from Dickens
to "Drelincourt on Death." You can pick it up where you like, and lay it
down when your poor fagged attention is distracted by a cab in the
street, or a bird in the branches. Then there is the pleasure of marking
with a pencil the articles which you would buy if you could--the Nankin
double bottle, the old novel bound in the arms of the Comtesse de Verrue,
the picture ascribed to the school of Potto Pottoboileri. Of course, in
these bad times, such purchases are out of the question, but the taste
and judgment are gratified by "marking them down," like partridges in
September.

These contemplative reveries on catalogues have been inspired by a
catalogue, not without its merits--a list of relics of Mexican history
now to be sold. The curious may find it for themselves, the wealthy may
speculate in the treasures which it advertises. Here is a piece of the
Emperor Maximilian's waistcoat, "same in which they shot him," to employ
an idiom of Captain Rawdon Crawley's. There are many relics of the same
recent and troublous times; but the amateur is more strongly attracted by
a very singular series of objects of the times of the Spanish Conquest,
nearly four hundred years ago. It is not so much the obsidian idols,
made of that curious bottle-glass-like mineral so fashionable among the
Aztecs, as the authentic remains of Fernando Cortes that the collector
will covet. What man had ever such fortune as Cortes--he who discovered
a new world as strange as a new planet? He conquered a great civilized
race, he overthrew a dynasty, not only of mortals, but of gods.
Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl fled from him, and their hideous
priests, draped and masked in skins fresh flayed from beasts or men,
vanished at his coming, as Isis, Osiris, and the dog Anubis fled from the
folding star of Bethlehem. He fought battles like the visions of
romance, and he took great and stately cities, with all their temples and
towers, which a month before were as unknown to Europeans as the capitals
of Mars and Sirius. The wonderful catalogue of which we speak is rich in
relics of this hero. We are offered a chance to buy his "trunk," a
carved wooden trunk in which Cortes carried his personal property. His
army chest, which held the