I have in my possession some quite neat specimens of versification in
it, from the pen of the Yucatecan historian, Apolinar Garcia y Garcia.

When we reach Peru we find a race not less poetical in temperament than
the cultured Mexicans. Nothing but their ignorance of an alphabet, and
the indifference or fanatical hatred of the early explorers for the
productions of the native intellect, prevented the perpetuation of a
Qquichua literature, both extensive and noble. As it is, we may expect
many valuable examples of it when the learned Peruvian scholar, Senor
Gavino Pacheco Zegarra, shall publish his long promised _Tresor de la
Langue des Incas_. Among them he has announced the first appearance
of a number of _Yaravis_, or elegiac chants, composed by the
Indians themselves, and sung in memory of their departed friends.

We know, from the testimony of Garcillaso de la Vega, that the Inca
bards formed a separate and highly respected class, and that in their
hands the supple Qquichua tongue had been brought under well recognized
rules of prosody. He mentions the different classes and subjects of
their poems, compares them to similar compositions in Spanish, and even
gives specimens of two short ones, of undoubted antiquity, and adds
that, when a boy, he knew many others. "What would not one now give,"
exclaims Mr. Markham, "for those precious relics of Inca civilization,
which the half-caste lad allowed to slip from his memory."[78] All that
Mr. Markham could collect, in his extensive journeys in Peru, were not
above twenty songs of ancient date, and I regret to say that these have
not yet been published.

Of those charming Tupi songs, to which I have already referred, I fear
that we have but very few preserved in the original tongue. Not that
there is any lack of poems in the _lingoa geral_, or "common