in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York.

R. CRAIGHEAD'S Power Press,

112 Fulton Street.

T. B. SMITH, Stereotyper,

216 William Street.

TO THE HON. W. C. PRESTON.

MY DEAR PRESTON :

I inscribe this volume to you in testimony of a friendship contracted when we were room-mates in college, and which has continued to increase until the shadows of evening begin to fall upon our path.

Faithfully your friend,

WADDY THOMPSON.

PREFACE.

I HAVE yielded with a good deal of reluctance to the importunities of many of my friends in consenting to devote the little leisure which is left me from professional and other avocations, to writing the following pages. No thought of such a thing ever occurred to me during my residence in Mexico, or I should have supplied myself, as I had abundant means of doing, with the materials for such a work. The book, therefore, will be found to contain just what its title imports-" Recollections and Desultory Dissertations." The reader must not expect the life and freshness of a finished picture, but mere sketches and outlines--nor that minute exactness of detail on many subjects which may be desirable, although I believe that the sketches will be found to be generally accurate; I can say in the words of an affidavit to an answer in chancery, "that the facts stated as of my own knowledge are true, and those stated on the information of others I believe to be true." I am not sure, however, that a description of the customs, scenes, and peculiarities of a country is not generally the better for being written a year or two after the writer has left it. The want of exactness in minute particulars is compensated by the absence of a sometimes wearisome tediousness of detail, and often of circumstances of interest only to the writer. And it is perhaps also true that the general remembrance-a sort of skeleton map which is left on the mind of the writer will give to the reader a more accurate coup d'œil of the country and all its peculiarities, physical and social, than a more minute description. Before I went to Mexico I sought in vain for some work which would give me some idea of the society, manners, and customs of that unique, and, in a great degree, primitive people. This want has been since supplied. I could have

dilated these sketches to an almost indefinite extent, but I have endeavored to avoid tediousness and drivelling, and have therefore omited to notice many things which at first struck me as very strange. I have visited no other Catholic country; but to one educated in the unostentatious purity and simplicity of the Protestant religion, there is something very striking in the pomp and pageantry of the Catholic ritual as it exists in Mexico, and I must say something equally revolting in its disgusting mummeries and impostures, which degrade the Christian religion into an absurd, ridiculous, and venal superstition. If such things are not practised in other Catholic countries, why, then the priests of Mexico are alone responsible; but if these things are not confined to Mexico, the sooner and more generally they are exposed the better.

It is equally true of nations as of individuals, that those who are not entirely assured of a well-established and unquestioned position, are peculiarly sensitive to criticism, however kindly meant or respectfully expressed. Of no people in the world is this more true than of the Mexicans. They understand perfectly their true position in the estimation of the world, notwithstanding their characteristic vaunting and gasconade. I think that it is generally true that men are most apt to boast of qualities which they are conscious of not possessing. The Mexican character has much that is good in it, but very much also that is bad. In bearing testimony to the former, I cannot be silent as to the latter for indiscriminate praise is in its effects censure. My fault has been much more that of extenuation than "setting down aught in malice"-the latter would be impossible, for I was treated with so much kindness by people of all classes, from the lepero in the streets up to the President, that it would be a source of deep pain to me to know that I had wantonly wounded the feelings of any one person in the broad circumference of the Republic. I assure them in all sincerity that I take a deep interest in their continued advances in the great career of civil liberty, and their ultimate success in establishing Republican institutions on a permanent basis. God grant them success, both on their own account as well as for the great cause in which they have so long struggled, and under circumstances so discouraging.

THE AUTHOR.

February 2, 1846.