When, in the year 1670, Afonso Furtado de Castro do Rio de Mendonça became governor-general of Brazil, and assumed the responsibilities of the highest office in the colony, the search for El Dorado was already something of a recognized pursuit on the part of many government officials and of many enterprising colonists. The existence of rich deposits of gold, silver, and precious stones within the confines of Portuguese America was pretty generally taken for granted; and numerous people were periodically diverted from agriculture, which early formed the basis of much of colonial wealth, to follow the will-o’-the-wisp of hidden treasure into the wilderness. The appeal of the unknown was, of course, enormous, and the vision of El Dorado had become fixed in many minds, especially after the news of Spain’s good fortune in Peru and Terra Firma was spread. With geographical knowledge as piecemeal and as imperfect as it then was, it was no difficult matter for a credulous age to suppose that by penetrating the jungle areas westward from the sea the Portuguese might in some way tap the sources of Spain’s Andean mines.

It is with genuine pleasure that I bring to the founders of the Academy of American Franciscan History the good wishes and congratulations of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Having said this, and having said it with all the sincerity at my command, I ought, if a Spartan laconicism were proper, to sit down. The assembly will recognize, I am sure, that I am a pious fraud. I represent a novel and interesting version of what I may term invincible ignorance. I venture to address you as fellow students, but I do not dare to address you as fellow scholars, since this would either exalt me beyond my desert or degrade you below your merit. This Academy is being founded to recapture a tradition descending from the Middle Ages—and I am no mediaevalist, except in the sense that it was once said of a lady of uncertain time of life that around her hung the last enchantments of the middle ages. You are launching an historical venture, but I am, alas, only a dean, and no opinion is more universal in the learned world than that a dean, whatever lower virtues he may possess, is ipso facto no scholar. When the harassed chairman of an alumni club, in search of better oratory, wired the president of his alma mater to send him a good speaker, preferably a professor but certainly not lower than a dean, the president replied: “I am sending you two assistant professors. There is nothing lower than a dean.”

The interpretation of Spanish colonial history has ever ranged to extremes. A political observer once remarked that on the subject of James G. Blaine men went crazy in pairs. And on the subject of Spain Spaniards have shown the same flair from Charles V to Franco. How else can we reconcile “the proud Spaniard” so fixed in popular psychology and the revealing verse of Batrina?

Two Poets, both laymen, stand out like brilliant stars on Mexico’s firmament, shedding the luster of the faith they loyally professed on the land they loved with equal loyalty, unfolding for Mexico’s glory the wealth of their poetic genius at a time when the storm clouds were gathering visibly and days of gloom and sorrow lowered over the Church and the faith to which their native land owed so much of her high and enviable culture. The two laymen in question are Manuel Carpio, who died in 1860, and José Joaquín Pesado, whose death occurred a year later. It is generally granted that Carpio and Pesado will always be cited in the history of Mexican literature as the leading revivers and exponents of classicism in their native land, without breaking away completely from the more popular and appealing forms of romanticism. It may be said that, as classicists, Carpio and Pesado took up and brought to fruition the movement begun by Martinez de Navarette and Sánchez de Tagle a half century earlier.

The perusal of some of the more recent publications in the field of philosophy that have come out of Mexico and South America, such as the works of Oswaldo Robles and P. Derisi, forces upon the North American reader the realization that the European philosophic tradition in the form of the philosophia perennis was firmly established on this continent several centuries before philosophy began to fulfill its vital function in the curricula of the colleges and universities of North America or, more exactly, 235 years before William Brattle offered the first course in philosophy at Harvard College.

Although the Franciscan Province in the West Indies was the first in the New World, it was the Province founded in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Cortés that became the parent unit of most of the other Provinces in Spanish America. By its extraordinary missionary achievements it likewise set the pace for the work of the other Provinces. It would require much more than a few pages to present a mere outline of the history of the Franciscan mother Province of Spanish America; we can call attention only to some outstanding facts.