Some genuine specimens of the oratory of the northern tribes are
preserved by Mr. Hale, in the Iroquois _Book of Rites_, to which I
have referred on a previous page. The speeches it contains were learned
by heart, and transmitted from generation to generation, long before
they were committed to writing, and long after some of the words and
expressions they contain had become lost to the colloquial language of
the tribe.

The ancient Mexicans were much given to this sort of formal
speech-making. They had a large number of cut-and-dried orations, which
professional rhetoricians delivered on all important occasions in life.
The new-born child was harangued at, in good set terms, when it was but
a few days old. Betrothals, marriages, festivals, the commencement of
puberty and of pregnancy, etc., were all celebrated by the delivery of
discourses. Fathers taught their children, teachers their pupils,
monarchs their vassals, war chiefs their soldiers, by such declamations.
The general name for these speeches was _huehuetlatolli_, ancient
orations.[63]

Many have been preserved, and a tolerably complete collection could be
made in the original tongue. To effect this, we should have to have
recourse to the original Nahuatl MS. of Sahagun's history, which, I have
already said, exists in Madrid; next, to the extremely rare work of the
eminent Nahuatl scholar, Father Juan Baptista, _Platicas Morales_,
in which, according to Vetancurt, he gives, in the original, the ancient
addresses of fathers to their children, and of rulers to their
subjects;[64] and lastly, to the recently published, though very early
written, _Mexican Grammar_, of the Franciscan Andre de Olmos, which
contains a number of these discourses, carefully edited and translated
by the accomplished scholar, M. Remi Simeon.[65]