Читать книгу Readings from Modern Mexican Authors - Группа авторов - Страница 16

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The famous University of Mexico was opened in 1553, almost seventy years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Literary contests of a public character were not infrequent:

The doors of the university opened, there entered by them a great number of youth, who waited with impatience the moment of commencing or prosecuting their studies. So Cervantes Salazar testifies in the description which he wrote of the institution, the year following its establishment. Soon the literary exercises began and notable was the ardor with which the students engaged in scholastic disputations, to which, as Cervantes says, night alone put an end. The learned men who were already in Mexico hastened to connect themselves with the university, among them Archbishop Montufar. Nothing was omitted to add to the luster of the new school, since there were given to it the privileges of the University of Salamanca and the title Royal and Pontifical. From it sallied many alumni as teachers, or to occupy high positions in church and state. It was really, as its founders had planned, a source of supply (nursery) of educated men, which in large measure obviated the necessity of bringing such from Europe, and there were even some who there brilliantly displayed the education which they had received in the schools of Mexico.