It May Be Proper To Mention, However, That The Following
Translation, Though Faithful, Has Been Made With Some Freedom Of
Retrenching A Superfluity Of Useless Language; Though Nothing Has Been
Omitted In Point Of Fact, And Nothing Altered.
Having mentioned the work of Garcilasso de la Vega, which we have employed
as an auxiliary on the present occasion, it may be worth while to give a
short account of it in this place:
For there never was, perhaps, a
literary composition so strangely mixed up of unconnected and discordant
sense and nonsense, and so totally devoid of any thing like order or
arrangement, in the whole chronology of authorship, or rather of
book-making, as has been produced by this scion of the Incas. No
consideration short of our duty to the public, could have induced us to
wade through such a labyrinth of absurdity in quest of information. It is
astonishing how the honest knight could have patience to translate 1019
closely printed folio pages of such a farrago; and on closing the work of
the Inca for ever, we heartily joined in the concluding pious thanksgiving
of the translator, _Praised be God_. This enormous literary production of
the _Inca_ Garcilasso, is most regularly divided and subdivided into parts,
books, and chapters; which contain here a little history, then digressions
on manners, customs, opinions, ceremonies, laws, policy, arts, animals,
vegetables, agriculture, buildings, &c. &c. &c. intermixed with bits and
scraps of history, in an endless jumble; so that for every individual
circumstance on any one of these topics, the pains-taking reader must turn
over the whole work with the most anxious attention.
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