LETTER XXII.
CARNIVAL. LENT. HOLY WEEK.
One of the gayest seasons in Mexico is that of the Carnival; and although the amusements are not so numerous or splendid as those of Rome and Naples, yet there is more stirring life and more public exhibition of joy and pleasure than at other periods of the year, among this staid and reserved population.
The theatres are converted into hall-rooms, and decorated with great taste; masters of ceremonies are regularly appointed; and the boxes are filled every night with the beau-monde—brilliant with diamonds—while the pit and stage are covered with groups of motley maskers. Within the few last years, the fashionables have refrained from participating in the ruses of masquerade; and the floor has thus been abandoned chiefly to the French hair-dressers, pastry cooks, and milliners of the calle Plateros, who frisk about with as much gayety as if they were at the grand Opera of their beloved Paris. I went once or twice to witness these amusements; but confess that I had quite enough of them, when, on venturing once to stand up in a quadrille with some unknown fair one, I found an unmasked negro (the leader of one of the orchestras in the city,) take the place of my vis-á-vis with a white woman! I plead guilty to a prejudice against such exhibitions.
The Carnival over—Lent is observed with considerable rigor until Holy Week. As the ceremonies of that season are not without their peculiarities, I will give you some descriptions of them; and I know not how I can do so better than by extracts from my journal of the period.
JOURNAL.
18th March, Friday. This is the festival of the Virgin of Dolores. It is impossible to trace many of the old customs of the Church, in a country where the ritual is often made up of so many odd and fantastic notions, except by supposing that the idea of the original founders was, to attract the Indians by as many new devices as they could ingraft upon their regular services.
