On stated days, historical
compositions, and poems treating of moral or traditional topics,
were recited before it by their authors. Seats were provided for the
three crowned heads of the empire, who deliberated with the other
members on the respective merits of the pieces, and distributed prizes
of value to the successful competitors.
The influence of this academy must have been most propitious to
the capital, which became the nursery not only of such sciences as
could be compassed by the scholarship of the period, but of various
useful and ornamental arts. Its historians, orators, and poets were
celebrated throughout the country. Its archives, for which
accommodations were provided in the royal palace, were stored with the
records of primitive ages. Its idiom, more polished than the
Mexican, was indeed the purest of all the Nahuatlac dialects; and
continued, long after the Conquest, to be that in which the best
productions of the native races were composed. Tezcuco claimed the
glory of being the Athens of the Western World.
Among the most illustrious of her bards was the emperor
himself,- for the Tezcucan writers claim this title for their chief,
as head of the imperial alliance. He, doubtless, appeared as a
competitor before that very academy where he so often sat as a critic.
But the hours of the Tezcucan monarch were not all passed in idle
dalliance with the Muse, nor in the sober contemplations of
philosophy, as at a later period.
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