models for the students. These evidences of his munificence and taste, still exist in the fine but untenanted halls of the neglected academy. Galvez directed his attention, also, to the police of Mexico and its prisons;—he required the streets to be leveled and paved; prohibited the raising of recruits for Manilla, and solicited from the king authority to reconstruct the magnificent palace of Chapultepec on the well known and beautiful hill of that name which lies about two miles west of the capital, still girt with its ancient cypresses.
It was during the brief reign of this personage that the political Gazette of Mexico was established, and the exclusive privilege of its publication granted to Manuel Valdez. On the 3d of November Don Matias died, after a brief illness, unusually lamented by the people, from amidst whose masses he had risen to supreme power in the most important colony of Spain. Mexico had regarded his appointment as a singular good fortune, and it was fondly but vainly hoped that his reign might have been long, and that he would have been enabled to carry out the beneficent projects he designed for the country.
As the death of this officer was sudden and unexpected, no carta de mortaja, or mortuary despatch, had been sent from Spain announcing his successor, and, accordingly the Audiencia assumed the reins of government until the arrival of the new viceroy.