Note 17 — Chapter X · THE ATHENS OF SOUTH AMERICA

Mr. R. B. Cunninghame Graham, in his preface to Sr. Triana’s work, Down the Orinoco in a Canoe, says the capital of Colombia “is in a way a kind of Chibcha Athens. There all men write, and poets rave and madden through the land, and only wholesome necessary revolutions keep their number down.” Again, he declares: “Bogotá to-day is, without doubt, the greatest literary centre south of Panama. Putting aside the flood of titubating verse which, like a mental dysentery, afflicts all members of the Spanish-speaking race, in Bogotá more serious literary work is done during a month than in the rest of the republics in a year.”17