MEXICO TWO CENTURIES AGO.
"Among these great benefactors to the churches of that city, I should wrong my history if I should forget one that lived in my time, called Alonzo Cuellar, who was reported to have a closet in his house laid with bars of gold instead of brick; though indeed it was not so, but only reported for his abundant riches and store of bars of gold, which he had in one chest, standing in a closet distant from another, where he had a chest full of wedges of silver. This man alone built a nunnery for Franciscan nuns, which stood him in above 30,000 ducats, and left unto it, for the maintenance of the nuns, 2000 ducats yearly, with obligation of some masses to be said in the church every year for his soul after his decease. And yet this man's life was so scandalous, that commonly, in the night, with two servants, he would go round the city visiting such scandalous persons, whose attire before hath been described, carrying his beads in his hands, and at every house letting fall a bead, and tying a false knot, that when he came home in the morning, toward break of the day, he might number by his beads the uncivil stations he had walked and visited that night.
"Great alms and liberality toward religious houses in that city commonly are coupled with great and scandalous wickedness. They wallow in the bed of riches and wealth, and make their alms the coverlet to cover their loose and lascivious lives. From hence are the churches so fairly built and adorned. There are not above fifty churches and chapels, cloisters and nunneries, and parish churches in the city; but those that are there are the fairest that ever my eyes beheld, the roofs and beams being, in many of them, all daubed with gold, and many altars with sundry marble pillars, and others with Brazil-wood stays standing one above another, with tabernacles for several saints, richly wrought with golden colors, so