villages strike the bulls-eye with their sling-stones at a distance only limited by their strength. In billiards and bowling, in the suburbs, with badly rounded balls and illy-leveled tables, they make shots as brilliant as if both balls and tables were all they should be.
The arts of drawing have developed as rapidly as the political and economical conditions permitted; and in all America, Mexico has been the only country which has produced a school, so numerous, distinguished, and original have been her painters. Their works have almost been exhausted, by exportation to Europe as paintings of Spanish artists of the great Seventeenth Century, but students still come, from the republics to the south, sent to here study the masterpieces which we still retain, since the number of the national painters, of whom some work of merit remains, rises to one hundred and sixty-one. The art they practised was catholic and aristocratic, religious subjects and portraits; consequently it decayed with the colonial regime and fell with the decline of power of the clergy; but, in the lack of demand for such art, the national æsthetic spirit took refuge in popular modeling in clay, rags, or wax, and produced in the figurines of Guadalajara and Puebla an artistic school, only inferior in product and spontaneity to that of Tanagra in ancient Greece.
In the feather-mosaics of Michoacan, in its lacquer rivaling those of China; in the carving on the walking-sticks of Apizaco, atavic manifestation of the ancient Mexican wood-carving which found beautiful expression in the choir-stalls and benches of the churches; in the floral decorations of the Indians of Mixcoac and Coyoacan; in the sculptures of the façades of houses—which are at times caryatids worked, without a single false blow from the chisel, after the blocks have been set in the wall; in the gold and silver filagree, and even in the mural paintings of the pulquerias or in the realistic illustrations of the newspapers, there is revealed the artistic talent, though frequently without technique, of a nation, living in a medium propitious to vision; and in which the line,