BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCLXXI. SEPTEMBER, 1846. Vol. LX.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET;
AND 37, PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON.

To whom all Communications (post paid) must be addressed.
SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.

Sabloniere Hotel, Leicester Square,
London, July 27th, 1846.

Messrs Blackwood and Sons,

Gentlemen,—Scarcely arrived in London, on my annual visit to this capital, a fiend put into my hands a copy of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine for June 1846, in which I observe an article entitled “Rogues in Outline.” The writer of this article, in a section headed “Birbone—Baseggio,” has taken most unwarrantable liberties with my character, mixing them up with some false details respecting my private life. The latter impertinences I treat with contempt: not so the titles applied to me of “Old Rogue B——” and “Birbone Baseggio,” with the insinuation that I make a practice of selling modern objects for antiques.

If your correspondent had taken the trouble to inquire of any of his well-informed countrymen at Rome or in England, he certainly never would have committed you, or himself, by the publication of the calumny he so wantonly seeks to inflict on my character. Luckily for me, there are now here many respectable persons of rank and reputation who will take a pleasure in attesting, if necessary, the habitual fairness and straight-forwardness of my dealings. I expect equal fairness from you, and that you will lose no time in affording me the reparation of a wrong you have (I trust unconsciously) done me, by at least publishing this letter in your next Number, giving me in the mean time an assurance to that effect. I await your answer, and remain your obedient servant,

JOSEPH BASEGGIO.

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCLXXI. SEPTEMBER, 1846. Vol. LX.

MEXICO, ITS TERRITORY AND PEOPLE.

Man must be content to follow the steps of Providence tardily, timidly, and uncertainly; but he can have no pursuit more worthy of his genius, his wisdom, or his virtue. Why one half of the globe remained hidden from the other during the four or five thousand years after its creation, is among the questions which we may long ask without obtaining an answer. Why the treasures, the plants, and the animals of America should have been utterly unknown, alike to the adventurous expeditions of Tyre and Sidon, to the nautical skill of the Carthaginian, to the brilliant curiosity of the Greek, and to the imperial ambition of the Roman; while their discovery was reserved for a Genoese sailor in the fifteenth century, is a problem perhaps inaccessible of solution by any human insight into the ways of the Great Disposer of all things. Yet may it not be conjectured that the knowledge was expressly withheld until it could be of practical use to mankind; that if America had been discovered a thousand years before, it would have been found only a vast wilderness in both its southern and northern divisions, for it was then almost wholly unpeopled; that with the chief interest of imperial Rome turned to European possession or Eastern conquest, the discovery would have been nearly thrown away; that there was hitherto no superflux of European population to pour into this magnificent desert; and that even if Roman adventure had dared the terrors of the ocean, and the perils of new climates, at an almost interminable distance from home, the massacres and plunders habitual to heathen conquest must have impeded, if not wholly broken up, the progress of the feeble population already settling on the soil; or perhaps trained that population to habits of ferocity like their own, and turned a peaceful and pastoral land into a scene of slaughter and misery?

The discovery of the American Continent flashed on the world like the discovery of a new Creation. In reading the correspondence of the learned at the time, the return of Columbus, and the knowledge which that return brought, is spoken of with a rapture of language more resembling an Arabian tale than the narrative of the most adventurous voyage of man. The primitive races of their fellow-beings, living in the simplicity of nature, under forests of the palm, with all delicious fruits for their food, with gold and pearls for their toys, and the rich treasures of new plants and animals of all species for their indulgence and their use, were described with the astonishment and delight of a dream of Fairy-land, or the still richer visions of restored Paradise.

Yet, when the hues of imagination grew colourless by time, the continents of the West displayed to the ripened knowledge of Europe virtues only still more substantial. The contrast between the northern and southern portions of the New World is of the most striking kind. It is scarcely less marked than the distinction between the broken, deeply-divided, and well-watered surface of Europe, and the broad plains, vast mountain ranges, and few, but mighty rivers, which form the characteristic features of Asia. In North America, we see a land of singularly varied surface, in its primitive state, covered with forest; with an uncertain climate; a soil seldom luxuriant, often sterile, every where requiring, and generally rewarding human industry; watered by many rivers, penetrated in almost every direction by navigable streams, and traversed from north to south, an unusual direction for rivers, by an immense stream, the Mississippi, bringing down the furs, the produce of the north, the corn of the temperate zone, the fruits of the tropics, and connecting all those regions with the commerce of Europe: a natural canal, of more than two thousand miles, without a perceptible difference of breadth, from New Orleans to the falls of St Anthony. The Arkansas, Missouri, Ohio, noble rivers, traverse the land in a variety of directions, with courses of from fifteen hundred to two thousand miles; and to the north of the United States, a chain of vast inland seas, a succession of Mediterraneans, surrounded by productive provinces, rapidly filling with a busy population.

The southern portion of the New World exhibits the plains of Tartary, the solitary mountain range of India, the fertility of the Asiatic soil. It, too, has its Ganges and its Indus, in the Amazon and the Rio de la Plata; but its smaller streams are few and feeble. It has the fiery heat of India, the dangerous exhalations of the jungle, the tiger and the lion, though of a less daring and powerful species; and the native, dark, delicate, timid, and indolent, as the Hindoo.

Without speaking of the contrast as perfectly sustained in all its points, it is unquestionable that North and South America have been formed for two great families of humankind as distinct as energy and ease; that the North is to be possessed only as the conquest of toil, while the South allows of the languor into whose hand the fruit drops from the tree.

May it not also be rationally conjectured, that in the discovery Europe and America were equally the objects of the Providential benevolence? It was palpably the Divine will to give Europe a new and powerful advance in the fifteenth century. Printing, gunpowder, and the mariner’s compass, were its gifts to Europe; to be followed and consummated in that new impulse at once to religious truth and to social improvement, which so soon transpired in the German Reformation, and in the commercial system of England and the continental nations. The extension of this mighty impulse to America rapidly followed. The first English colony was planted in North America in the reign of Elizabeth, the great protectress of Protestantism; and the first authentic knowledge of South America was brought to Europe by the discoveries of Englishmen, following the route of Columbus, and going beyond him. It is true that the intercourse of the South with the energetic qualities and free principles of Europe was impeded by an influence which, from its first being, has been hostile to the free progress of the human mind. The Popedom threw its shadow over Spanish America, and the great experiment of civilisation was comparatively thrown away wherever the priest of Rome was paramount. The land, too, witnessed a succession of slaughters, and the still more fearful trade in the unfortunate natives of Africa. But the most powerful contrast was furnished to mankind in the rapid growth of the Protestant states of the north, in their increasing commerce, in the vigour of their laws, in the activity of the public mind, and the ascent of their scattered and feeble communities into the rank and the enjoyments of a great nation.

Nor are we to speak of South America as having wholly slept during the period since its discovery. If all the larger faculties which give nations a place in history remained in a state of collapse under the pressure of Spain, society had made a forward step in every province of that great territory. The inhabitants had never relapsed into their primitive barbarism; they had laws, commerce, manufactures, and literature, all in a ruder degree than as developed under the vivid activity of Europe, but all raising the provinces into a gradual capacity of social vigour, of popular civilisation, and perhaps even of that pure religion without which national power is only national evil. Perhaps the cloud which has rested for so many ages over the moral soil of South America, may have been suffered to remain until the soil itself acquired strength for a larger product under a more industrious generation. It is not improbable that as the gold and silver of the South were evidently developed, in the fifteenth century, to supply the new commercial impulse of that time of European advance, the still more copious, and still more important, agricultural wealth of countries overflowing with unused exuberance—the magnificent tropical fertility of the continents beyond the ocean—may have been reserved to increase the opulence and stimulate the ardour of a period which the Steam-boat and the Railway have marked for a mighty change in the earth; and in which they may be only the first fruits of scientific skill, the promises of inventions still more powerful, the heralds of a general progress of mankind, to whose colossal strides all the past is feeble, unpurposed, and ineffectual.

The invasion of the Mexican territory by the army of the United States has naturally attracted the eyes of Europe; and whether the war shall issue in a total conquest or in a hollow peace, its results must strongly affect the future condition of the country. Mexico must at once take the bold attitude of an empire, or must be dis-severed, province by province, until its very name is no more. But no country of the western world has a position more fitted for empire. Washed on the east by the gulf which bears its name, and on the west by the Pacific, it thus possesses direct access to two oceans, and by them to the most opulent regions of the globe. On the south it can dread no rival in the struggling state of Guatemala. But the north is the true frontier on which the battle of its existence is to be fought, if fought at all, for beyond that barrier stretch the United States. The extent of its territory startles European conceptions, extending in north latitude from fifteen to forty-two degrees, and in west longitude from eighty-seven to one hundred and twenty-five degrees. Its surface, on a general calculation, contains about a million and a half of square miles, or about seven times the dimensions of France. Yet, though thus approaching the equator, the climate of Mexico is in general highly favourable to life and to the products of the temperate zone: the incomparably larger portion of its surface being a succession of table-lands or elevated plains, where, with the sun of the tropics blazing almost vertically, the evenings are refreshingly cool, the breeze is felt from the mountains or the ocean, and the days are scarcely hotter than those of Europe.

We now glance at the principal features of the great territory.

Vera Cruz, its chief commercial city, and medium of intercourse with Europe, is handsomely built, exhibiting the usual signs of commercial wealth, in the stateliness of its private houses, and in the rarer peculiarity of wide and cleanly streets. But when did commerce build with any other consideration than that of trade? Vera Cruz is proverbially unhealthy; a range of swamps in the vicinity loads the summer air with fatal exhalations; and the Vomito, the name for a rapid disease, evidently akin to the fearful Black-vomit of Africa, requires either the most vigilant precaution, or more probably the most fortunate chance, to escape its immediate seizure of the frame. Yet it is said that this disease seldom attacks the natives of the city.

But the general susceptibility of the European frame to tropical disease, is tried here in almost every shape of suffering; and typhus, yellow fever, and almost pestilence, terribly thin the concourse of the stranger.

Yet such is the courage of money-making in all parts of the world, that climate is regarded as only a bugbear. The trader in Vera Cruz enters on the campaign against “all the ills that flesh is heir to,” as if he had a patent for life. The streets, in the trading season, exhibit perpetual crowds; the harbour is full of masts, nestling under the protection of St Juan d’Ulloa from the bursts of wind which sometimes come with terrible violence from the north; and the funeral and the festivity go on together, and without much impeding each other, in a land which for the time exhibits the very Festino, or fête of the Merchant, the Sailor, and the Creole.

But, when this season ends, Vera Cruz is as sad as a dungeon, as silent as a monastery, and as sickly as an hospital. The señoras, a race of perfectly Spanish-visaged, black-eyed, and very coquettish beauties, sit all day drooping in their balconies, like doves upon the housetops, perhaps longing for a hurricane, an earthquake, or any thing which may break up the monotony of their existence. The sound of a guitar, a passing footstep, nay, the whine of a beggar, sets a whole street in motion, and there is a general rustling of mantillas, and a general rush to the windows. The men bear their calamity better; the señor, when he has once a cigar between his sallow lips, has made up his mind for the day. Whether he stands in the sunshine or sits in the shade—whether he wakes or sleeps, the cigar serves him for all the exercise of his animal functions. His brain is as much enveloped in smoke as his moustaches; his cares vanish like the smoke itself. It is not until his cigar-box is empty, that he reverts to the consciousness of his being an inhabitant of this world of ours.

But some are of a more aspiring disposition. They now and then glance round upon the noble landscape which encircles their city. But they do this with the most dexterous determination not to move a limb. Their houses are flat-roofed; some of them have little glazed chambers on the roofs; and there they sit with the sky above them, the mountains round them, and the sea beneath them, dreaming away like so many dormice. One of their American describers compares the whole well-bred population to a colony of beavers; but, we presume, without the industry of the quadruped. Their still closer resemblance would be to a wax-work collection on a large scale, where tinsel petticoats, woollen wigs, and bugle eyes imitate humanity, and every thing is before the spectator but life.

Jonathan, who thinks himself born to lay hold on every scrap of the globe by which he can turn one cent into two, looks, of course, on the whole shore of the gulf—towns, mines, and mountains—as his own. He frees himself from all scruples on the subject by the obvious convenience of the conception.

“No spot of the earth,” says one of those neighbourly persons, “will be more desirable than the soil of Mexico for a residence, whenever it is in possession of our race, with the government and laws which they carry with them wherever they go. The march of time is not more certain than that this will be, and probably at no distant day.”

And, on this showing, the man of “government and laws” proceeds to “sink, burn, and destroy,” in the “great cause of humanity,” edifies the native by grapeshot, and polishes him with the cutlass. In those exploits of a “free and enlightened” people, our only surprise is that diplomacy itself takes the trouble of offering any apology whatever. The comparative powers of resistance and attack settle the conscience of the affair in a word. The seizure is easy, and therefore why should it not be made? The riflemen of Kentucky and the hunters of Virginia, the squatters of Ohio and the sympathizers of Massachusets, all see the affair in the proper light; and why should the philosopher or the philanthropist, the man of justice or the man of religion, be listened to on subjects so much more easily settled by the rattle of twelve-pounders? The right of making war on Mexico has not yet found a single defender but in the streets; not a single ground of defence but in the roar of the rabble; not a single plea but in the convenience of the possession. Even the American journals have given up their old half-savage rant of universal conquest. Every drop of blood shed in a war of aggression is sure to be avenged.

The present town is not the town of Cortes. His “Villa Rica de Vera Cruz” (The Rich City of the True Cross) was seated six miles further inland. But trade decided against the choice of the great soldier. The pen, in this instance, conquered the sword a century before the conflict began in Europe. The population of the old city slipped away to the new and hasty hovels on the shore; and the ground consecrated by the banner of the Spanish hero was left to the donkey and the thistle.

The visible protector of the city and harbour (it has saints innumerable) is the island of St Juan de Ulloa, lying within 600 yards of the mole; and on which stands the well-known fortress. Ships, of course, pass immediately under its guns; and it is regarded as the most powerful fortress in Mexico, or perhaps in the New World, being now thoroughly armed. This is a different state of things from the condition in which it was found by the French squadron in 1839. The ramparts were then scarcely mounted, the guns were more dangerous to the garrison than to the enemy, and of regular artillerists there were few or none; engineers were unheard of. The French naturally did as they pleased; achieved a magnanimous triumph over bare walls, and plucked a laurel for the Prince de Joinville from the most barren of all possible soils of victory; but it served for a bulletin. They would probably now find another kind of reception, for the ramparts have guns, and the guns have artillerymen.

The aspect of the Mexican coast from the sea is singularly bold. On the north and west the waters of the Gulf wash a level shore; but on the south all is a crescent of mountains, rising to a general height of 12,000 feet above the level of the sea; but the noblest object is the snow-capped pinnacle of Orizaba, rising, according to Humboldt, 17,400 feet, and covered with perpetual snow from the height of 15,092. This is a volcanic mountain, but which has slept since the middle of the sixteenth century; what must have been its magnificence when its summit was covered with flame!

The mode of conveyance between Vera Cruz and Mexico is chiefly by an establishment of stage-coaches, making three journeys a-week between the capitals. Those vehicles, originally established by an American of the United States, are now the property of a Mexican whom they are rapidly making rich. The horses are Mexican, and, though small, are strong and spirited. The stage leaves Vera Cruz at eleven at night, and arrives about three o’clock in the next afternoon at Jalapa, a distance of about seventy miles, and a continual ascent through mountains. The houses on the wayside are few and wretched, constructed of canes ten feet long, fixed in the ground, and covered with palm-tree leaves. The villages strongly resemble those of the American Indians; hovels ten or twelve feet square, with a small patch of ground for Chillies and Indian corn—the only difference of those original styles of architecture being, that the northern builds with logs, the southern with mud in the shape of bricks.

A large portion of the country between those two towns belonged to the well-known General Santa Anna. The soil of his vast estate is fertile, but left to its natural fertility—the General being a shepherd, and said to have from forty to fifty thousand head of cattle in his pastures. He also acts the farmer, and takes in cattle to graze. His demand is certainly not high; and Yorkshire will be astonished to hear that he feeds them at forty dollars the hundred.

The ascent of the mountain range, and the varieties of the road, naturally keep the traveller on the qui vive. With the air singularly transparent, with the brightest of skies above, and the most varied of southern landscapes stretching to an unlimited extent below, the eye finds a continual feast. The city of Jalapa stands on the slope, throned on a shelf of the mountain 4000 feet above the sea, and with 4000 feet of the bold and sunny range above it. The whole horizon, except in the direction of Vera Cruz, is a circle of mountains, and towering above them all, at a distance of twenty-five miles, (which, from the clearness of the air, seems scarcely the fourth part of the distance,) rises the splendid cone of Orizaba. On the summit of the range stands Perote, a town connected with a strong fortress, perhaps the highest in position that the world exhibits—8500 feet above the shore.

Height makes the difference between heat and cold every where. In the middle of a summer which burns the blood in the human frame at Vera Cruz, men in Perote button their coats to the chin, and sleep in blankets. Thus winter is brought from the Poles to the Tropic, and the Mexican shivers under the most fiery sunshine of the globe.

The next stage is Puebla—eighty miles; the road passes over a vast plain generally without a sign of cultivation, as generally destitute of inhabitants, and with scarcely a tree, and scarcely a stream. It is difficult to know to what purpose this huge prairie can be turned, except to a field of battle. As the road approaches Puebla, there are farms erected by the town, and from which its wants are chiefly supplied. They produce wheat, barley, and Indian corn. The only fodder for horses is wheaten straw, but on this they contrive to “grow fat;” we are not called on to account for the phenomenon.

But every nation loves to intoxicate itself, and the Mexican boasts of the most nauseous invention for the purpose among the discoveries of man. Pulque, the national beverage, is the juice of the Agave Americana, fermented. The original process by which the fermentation is produced is one which we shall not venture to detail; but the liquor obtained from the section of the plant is drawn up by a rude syphon, and poured into dressed ox-hides. The taste is mawkish, and the smell is noisome. Yet, to the Mexican, it is nectar and ambrosia together. Pulque is to him meat, drink, and clothing, for without it the world has no pleasures. The most remarkable circumstance is, that it is without strength. Thus it wants the charm of brandy, which may madden, but which at least warms; or aquafortis, which the Pole and the Russ are said to drink as a qualifier of their excesses in train oil; but the Mexican would rather die, or even fight, than dispense with his pulque; and if Santa Anna had but put his warriors on short allowance of the national liquor before his last battle, and promised them double allowance after it, he would probably have been, at this moment, on the Mexican throne.

The Agave, called by the natives Maguey, is certainly an extraordinary instance of succulency, and an unrivalled acquisition to a thirsty population. A single plant of the Agave has been known to supply one hundred and fifty gallons of this sap. In good land it grows to an enormous size, the centre stem often thirty feet high, and twelve or fifteen inches in diameter at the bottom. When the plant is in flower, which occurs from seven to fifteen years old, the centre stem is cut off at the bottom, and the juice is collected.

Humbolt says, that a single plant will yield four hundred and fifty-two cubic inches of liquor in twenty-four hours, for four or five months, which would give upwards of four hundred gallons. How curious are the distributions of nature! All this profuse efflux of mawkish fluid would be thrown away in any other country. But nature has given the Mexican a palate for its enjoyment, and to him the draught is rapture.

Mexico is the land for the lovers of pumice-stone. The whole road from Vera Cruz to the capital is covered with remnants of lava. Every plain seems to have been burnt up by eruptions a thousand years old, or, according to the time-table of the geologist, from ten to ten thousand millions of years ago. With the mountain tops all on fire, and the plains waving with an inundation of flame, Mexico must have been a splendid, though rather an inconvenient residence, in the “olden time.”

Mexican agriculture has not yet attained the invention of an iron ploughshare; its substitute is primitive, and wooden. It evidently dates as far back as the times of the Dispersion. Nor, with thousands and tens of thousands of horses, have they yet discovered that a horse may be yoked to a plough. The Turks say, that the plague exists only where Mahometanism is the religion, and they seem to regard the distinction as a peculiar favour of Providence. It has been said by, or for, the Spaniards of the present day, that no railroad exists, nor, we presume, can exist, “where the Spanish language is spoken.” The late abortive attempts to make a railway from Bayonne to Madrid, so far prove the incompatibility of railways with the tongue of the Peninsula. A little effort of human presumption in Cuba, has been ventured on, in the shape of a brief railway, which already goes, as we are informed, at the rate of some half-dozen miles an hour. But as this is a dangerous speed to a Spaniard, we naturally suppose that the enterprise will be abandoned. But though the majority of the population, between drinking pulque and smoking cigars, find their hands completely full, one class is at least sufficiently active. Robbers in Mexico are what pedlars used to be in England; they keep up the life of the villages, plunder wherever they can, cheat where they cannot plunder, ride stout horses, and lead, on the whole, a varied, and sometimes a very gay life. One of the American travellers saw, at one of the villages where the stage changed horses, a dashing and picturesque figure, gaudily dressed, who rode by on a handsome horse richly caparisoned. On inquiring if the coachman knew him, the answer was, that he knew him perfectly well, and that he was the captain of a band of robbers, who had plundered the stage several times since the whip and reins had been in his hands. On the Americans urging the question, why he had not brought the robber to punishment, the answer was, “that he would be sure to be shot by some of the band the next time he passed the road;” the honour of Mexican thieves being peculiarly nice upon this point. It appeared that the dashing horseman had gone through the village on a reconnaissance, but probably not liking the obvious preparations of the travellers, had postponed the caption.

The mode of managing things in this somnolent country, is remarkable for its tranquillity. The American who narrates the circumstance, had taken with him from Vera Cruz four dragoons; but on accidentally enquiring on the road into the state of their arms, he found that but one carabine had a lock in fighting order, and even that one was not loaded; on which he dismissed the guard, and trusted to his companions, who were all well armed. The Mexican travellers, taking the matter in another way, never carry arms, but prepare a small purse “to be robbed of,” of which they are robbed accordingly. A few miles from Perote, the road winds round a high hill, and the passengers generally get out and walk. The Americans on this occasion had left their arms in the carriage, but their more prudent chief immediately ordered them to carry them in their hands, and in the course of the ascent, they pounced upon a group of ruffians whom the driver pronounced to be robbers; and who, but for their arms, would probably have attacked them. In less than a month after this, five or six Americans having left their arms in the stage at this spot, were attacked, and stript of every cent belonging to them.

It must be owned that this country has fine advantages for the gentlemen of the road. The highway between Vera Cruz and Mexico is the great conduit of life in the country. Nearly all the commerce goes by that way, and ninety out of every hundred travellers pass by the same route. The chief portion of the road is through an absolute desert. It frequently winds up the sides of mountains, and then is bordered by forests of evergreens, forming a capital shelter for the land pirate, the whole being a combination of Hounslow Heath and Shooter’s Hill on a grand scale, and making highway robbery not merely a showy but a safe speculation, the gaming-table being the chief recruiting-office of the whole battalion of Mercury.

The statistics of gaming might borrow a chapter from Mexico. The passion for play is public, universal, and unbounded. It is probably superior even to the passion for pulque. Every one plays, and plays for all that he is worth in the world, and often for more. But he has his resource—the road. A man who has lost his last dollar, but who is determined to play on till he dies, lays himself under strong temptations of coveting his neighbour’s goods. The hour when the stages pass is known to every one; the points of the road where they must go slowly up the hill, are familiar to all highway recollections. Associates are expeditiously found among the loiterers, who, after their own ruin, sit round the room watching the luck of others. The band is formed in a moment; they take the road without delay, post themselves in the evergreens, enjoy the finest imaginable prospect, and breathe the most refreshing air, until the creaking of the coach-wheels puts them on the alert. They then exhibit their weapons, the passengers produce their little purses, the stage is robbed of every thing portable, or convertible into cash, the band return to the gaming-table, fling out their coin, and play till they are either rich or ruined once more.

Some time after an adventure, such as we have described, the stage was robbed near Puebla by a gang, all of whom had the appearance of gentlemen. When the operation of rifling every body and every thing was completed, one of the robbers observed—“that they must not be looked on as professional thieves, for they were gentlemen; but having been unfortunate at play, they were forced to put the company to this inconvenience, for which they requested their particular pardon.”

An incident of this order occurring in the instance of a public personage, some years before, long excited remarkable interest. The Swiss consul had been assassinated at noonday. A carriage had driven up to his door, out of which three men came, one in the dress of a priest. On the doors being opened they seized and gagged the porter, rushed into the apartment where the consul was sitting, murdered and robbed him, and then retreated. None knew whence they came or whither they went; but the murdered man, in his dying struggle, had torn a button off the coat of one of the robbers, which they found still clenched in his hand. A soldier was shortly after seen with more money than he could account for; suspicion naturally fell upon him; his quarters were searched, and one of his coats was found with the button torn off. He was convicted, but relied upon a pardon through the Colonel Yanez, chief aide-de-camp of the president Santa Anna, who was his accomplice in the transaction. On being brought out for execution, and placed on the fatal bench where criminals are strangled, he cried out, “Stop, I will acknowledge my accomplices;” and he pronounced the name of the colonel. Search was immediately made in the house of Yanez, and a letter in cipher was found, connecting him with this and other robberies. This letter was left in the hands of one of the judges: he was offered a large sum to destroy it, and refused. In a few days after he was found dead, as was supposed, by poison. The paper was then transferred to another judge who was offered the same bribe, and who promised to destroy it; but on conferring with his priest, though he took the money, he shrank from the actual destruction of the document and kept it in silence. Yanez was brought to trial, and, believing that the paper was no longer in existence, treated the charge with contempt. The paper was produced, and the aide-de-camp was condemned and executed.

Puebla is one of the handsomest cities in the Mexican territory. The houses are lofty, and in good taste, and the streets are wide and clean About six miles from the city stood Choluta, which Cortes described “as having a population of forty thousand citizens, well clothed,” and as it might appear, peculiarly devout according to their own style, for the conqueror counted in it the towers of four hundred idol temples. Of this city not a vestige remains but an immense mound of brick, on which now stands a Romish chapel.

Beyond Puebla, cultivation extends to a considerable distance on both sides of the road. To the right lies the republic of Tlascala, so memorable in the history of the Spanish conquest, and once crowded with a population of warriors. The road then runs at the foot of Pococatapetl, the highest of the Mexican mountains, seventeen thousand feet above the level of the sea. The capital is now approached; and on passing over the next ridge, the first glimpse is caught of the famous valley and city of Mexico. From this ridge Cortes had the first view of his conquest. It must have been an object of indescribable interest to the great soldier who had fought his way to the possession of the noblest prize of his age. The valley of Mexico, a circuit of seventeen hundred square miles, must then have been a most magnificent sight, if it be true that it contained “forty cities, and villages without number.” Time, war, and the fatal government of Spain, have nearly turned this splendid tract into a desert. But it still has features combining the picturesque with the grand. The valley partially resembles the crater of an immense volcano wholly surrounded by mountains, some of them rising ten thousand feet above the city. In the centre of this vast oval basin is a lake, or rather a chain of lakes, through the midst of which the road now passes for about eighteen miles, on a raised causeway. The city stands in the north-eastern quarter of the valley, not more than three miles from the mountains, at an elevation of seven thousand four hundred and seventy feet, and its position seems obviously made for the capital of an empire.

Mexico is regarded as the “stateliest city” in the New World. Its plan was laid, and the principal portion of its public buildings are said to have been designed, by Cortes. They bear all the impress of a superb mind. The habitual meanness of democratical building has no place there; the majority of the fabrics were evidently constructed by a man to whom the royal architecture of the European nations was familiar, and the finest houses in the city are still inhabited by the descendants of the conqueror.

The principal square is the pride of the Mexicans, and the admiration of travellers. It has an area of twelve acres; unluckily, this fine space, which in England would be covered with verdant turf, shrubs, and flowers, is covered only with pavement. But the buildings are on a noble scale. The Cathedral fills one whole side of the square, the Palace another, and the sites of both are memorable and historical; the Cathedral standing on the ground where once stood the great idol temple, and the Palace on the ground of the palace of Montezuma! The latter building is 500 feet long, and contains the public offices, besides the apartments of the President. The Cathedral is of striking Gothic architecture, and after all the pressures and plunderings of the later period, still retains immense wealth. The high altar is covered with plates of silver, interspersed with ornaments of massive gold. This altar is inclosed with a balustrade a hundred feet long, not less precious than the high altar itself. It is composed of an amalgam of gold, silver, and copper, richly flourished and figured. It is said that an offer had been made to purchase it at its weight in silver, giving half a million of dollars besides. Of this balustrade there are not less in the building than 300 feet. Statues, vases, and huge candlesticks of the precious metals, meet the eye every where; and yet it is said that the still more precious portion of the treasure is hidden from the popular eye. The streets are wide, and cross each other at right angles, dividing the whole city into squares. But the Romish habit of giving the most sacred names to common things, is acted on in Mexico with most offensive familiarity. The names of the streets are instances of this profanation, which has existed wherever monks have been the masters. Thus, the Mexican will tell you that he lives in “Jesus,” or in the “Holy Ghost.” In the Spanish navy the most sacred names were similarly profaned; and the Santissima Trinidada (the Most Holy Trinity) was a flag-ship in the fleet destroyed at Trafalgar. What blasphemies and brutalities must not have been mingled with this sacred name in the mouths of a crew!

The churches are the chief buildings in the city, some of them of great size, and all filled with plate and other wealth. Yet the houses, even of the most opulent families, exhibit some of the vilest habits of the vilest southern cities of Europe. To pass over other matters, in the whole city there is perhaps not a stable separate from the house. The stud is on the basement story, and it may be conceived how repulsive must be the effects of such an arrangement in the burning climate of Mexico! The servants’ rooms are also upon this floor; and in some of the principal houses the visitors have to pass through this row of stables and sleeping rooms on their way to the chief apartments. In some, too, of the larger private houses, no less than thirty or forty families reside, each renting one or two rooms, and having a common stair of exit to the street. This crowding of families is produced, in the first instance, by the narrow limits of the city, which is scarcely more than two miles in length by a mile and a half in breadth; and in the next, by the lazy habits of their Spanish ancestry, which still gathered them together for the sake of gossiping and idling, and which seem every where to have had an abhorrence of cleanliness, of fresh air, and of the sight of a field; the population thus festering on each other, while the country round them is open, healthful, and cheerful. The inhabitants, to the amount of two hundred thousand, evidently prefer half suffocation in an atmosphere that tortures the nostrils of all strangers; and are content with the dust and dimness, the heat and the effluvia, naturally generated by a tropical sun acting upon a crowded population.

In addition to this voluntary offence, Mexico has two natural plagues, inundations and earthquakes. The city was once a kind of American Venice, wholly surrounded by water, penetrated by water, and built on piles in the water. A gigantic canal, which was tunnelled through its mountain barrier in the beginning of the seventeenth century, partially drained the waters of the lakes, and left it on firm ground. But the lakes, from time to time, take their revenge; clouds of a peculiarly ominous aspect begin to roll along the mountains, until they break down in a deluge. Then the genius of the land of monks exhibits itself, and all the bells in the city are rung, whether to frighten the torrent, or to propitiate the Deity. But the rain still comes down in sheets, and the torrents roar louder. The bells meet the enemy by still louder peals. At length the clouds are drained, and the torrents disappear; the bells have the praise. The city recovers its spirits, finds that its time for being swept from the earth has not yet arrived; the sun shines once more, and the monks have all the credit of this triumph over Satan and Nature.

Mexico has its museum, and it contains some curiosities which could not be supplied in any other part of the world. They are almost wholly Mexican. The weapons found among the people at the time of the conquest: rude lances, daggers, bows and arrows, with the native armour of cotton, and those wooden drums which the old Spaniards seem to have dreaded more than the arms. Among them is the Mexican “razor sword,” a staff with four projecting blades, made of volcanic glass, and brought to such sharpness that a stroke has been known to cut off a horse’s head. In the museum there are some still more curious specimens of their manufactures, paper made from the Cactus, with much of their hieroglyphic writing on it. One of these rolls exhibits the Mexican idea of the deluge, and among other details shows “the bird with a branch in its claw.” It is said that they had traditions of the leading events from the Creation to the Deluge, nearly resembling the Mosaic history; but that from the Deluge downwards all records have escaped them. But the museum contains more modern and more characteristic remains. Among the rest, the armour of Cortes.

From its size, its wearer must have been a man of small stature, and about the size of Napoleon. The armour of the brave Alvarado is also in the museum, and is even smaller than that of Cortes; but, as a covering of the form, both are complete. The wearer could have been vulnerable only at the joints; the horse of the man-at-arms was similarly protected, being in fact covered all over either with steel or bull’s hide. The use of cannon finally put an end to the wearing of armour, which was found to be useless against weight of metal. It is now partially reviving in the cuirass, and unquestionably ought to be revived among the infantry so far as covering the front of the soldiers. The idea is childish that this would degrade the intrepidity of the troops. The armour of knighthood did not degrade its intrepidity; the cuirasses of our dragoons have not degraded their intrepidity; nor will any man be the less daring from the sense that he is less exposed to the casualties of the field.

A colossal bronze statue of Charles IV. stands in the court-yard of the museum, but its history is of higher value than its subject; that history being, that it was designed by one native Mexican, and cast by another. Thus at least showing that the cultivation of the fine arts is not impossible, even in Spanish America.

There also is the great sacrificial stone on which human victims bled, a circular mass four feet high and eight in diameter, with figures in relief elaborately carved on the top and sides. On this stone sixty-two of the companions of Cortes were put to death before the eyes of their countrymen.

The finance of Mexico becomes a matter of European importance, in a period which should be called the “Age of Loans.” The debt in 1844 was about one hundred millions of dollars, of which sixty millions are due to foreigners. But the territory is evidently the richest in silver that the world has yet seen, and possibly exceeding in mineral wealth all the world beside, if we except the gold sands of the Ural, which have lately teemed with such marvellous produce. Humboldt reckoned no less than three thousand silver mines in Mexico in the year 1804. But not one fiftieth of those mines continue to be worked, a result caused by the distance of quicksilver in the mines of Old Spain. The mines produce but little gold, and that little is generally found in combination with silver. But the quantity of silver is absolutely astonishing. The mines still continue to give a produce as large as in any year of the last two centuries, in which Humboldt computes the average produce at twelve millions of dollars annually. But allowing for the quantity notoriously smuggled out of the country, besides the eighteen millions and a half of gold and silver actually registered for exportation, the produce may amount to twenty-four millions of dollars yearly. This increase evidently arises from the greater tranquillity of the country; for in the times of actual revolution, it frequently sank to three or four millions.

The American writer from whom we have taken these calculations, cannot help betraying the propensity of Yankeeism, by talking of the wonders which would be done in such a country if it were once in the possession of Jonathan. He thinks that the produce of the mines would be “at least five times as great as it is now,” that every mine would be worked, and that many more will be discovered. Calculating the exports of British produce at two hundred and sixty millions of dollars yearly, he thinks that “Mexico, if in full action, would equal that amount in ten years.” But his words are more significant still with respect to the relations of the United States. We are to remember that those words were written previously to the aggression which has just taken place against Mexico, and which the Americans pretend to be perfectly innocent and justifiable. And also, that they are written by an American minister. “Recent manifestation,” says this writer, “of a rabid, not to say rapacious spirit of acquisition of territory on the part of our countrymen, may well cause a race so inferior in all the elements of power to tremble for the tenure by which they hold this Eldorado. It is not often, with nations at least, that such temptations are resisted, or that ‘danger winks on opportunity.’ I trust, however, that our maxim ever will be, ‘noble ends by worthy means,’ and that we may remember that wealth improperly acquired never ultimately benefited an individual or a nation.”

Those are wise and just sentiments. But we unluckily see the practical morality of the Americans on the subject, in the invasion of the territory, and the slaughter of the natives.

The mineral produce is not confined to gold and silver. No country produces larger masses of that iron which so much better deserves the name of precious metal, if we are to estimate its value by its use. And tin, lead, and copper are also found in large masses.

The fertility of the soil, where it receives any tolerable cultivation, is also remarkable, and two crops may be raised in one year. But the farmers have neither capital nor inclination to cultivate the soil. Having no market, they have no use for their superfluity, and therefore they raise no superfluity. A considerable portion of the whole territory is also distributed into immense pastures of eighty or a hundred thousand cattle, and fifteen or twenty thousand mules and horses, the grass being green all the year round, and those animals being left to the course of nature. Yet, except when there is a government demand to mount the cavalry, those immense herds of horses seldom find a purchaser, nearly all agricultural work being done by oxen. Horses are sold at from eight to ten dollars a-piece. But the Mexicans exhibit the old Spanish preference for mules and a pair of handsome carriage mules will cost one thousand dollars.

Thus, in all the precious products of the earth, Mexico may stand rivalry with the most favoured nations. It is the land of the cochineal; it produces all the rice which is required for the food of the people; the silk-worm might there be multiplied to any extent; cotton can be raised in almost every province to a boundless amount. The high grounds are covered with fine timber, and, where nothing else is produced, bee’s-wax abounds; this is consumed chiefly in the churches, where a part of their religion consists in keeping candles perpetually burning. Yet the Mexican bee-masters are as careless as the rest of their countrymen, and they do not produce wax enough for this holy ignition, and great quantities are imported accordingly.

The history of Mexico, since the Spanish conquest, is a combination of the histories of European sovereignty and American republicanism.

Mexico was not among the discoveries of the great Columbus, though he approached Yucatan. That peninsula was first seen in 1517 by Cordova. In 1519 the famous Hernan Cortes landed on the site of Vera Cruz. After founding Villa Rica, he began his memorable march into the territory of Montezuma, King of the Aztecs. It cost him two years of desperate struggle to make good his ground; the Mexicans exhibited occasional bravery, and fought with the fervour of devotees to their king and their idols. But the novelty of the Spanish arms, the belief in an ancient prediction that “the kingdom was to be conquered from the sea,” and, above all, the indefatigable bravery of Cortes, finally established the supremacy of Spain.

The great source of calamity to Spain has always been its pride. The groundless sense of personal superiority in every thing belonging to Spain, its religion, its government, its literature, and its people, has, during the last four hundred years of European advance, kept Spain stationary. The country was pronounced to be perfect, and what is the use of trying to improve perfection? But the Spaniard pronounced himself as perfect as the country; and, therefore, what was the use of his adopting the inventions, habits, or intelligence of others? He disdained them all, and therefore continued the byword of ignorance, arrogance, and prejudice, to all nations. The troops of Cortes, and the gallant adventurers who followed them as settlers in the Spanish colonies, had descendants who soon began to form a powerful population. Among those, a government possessed of common sense would have found the natural support of the parent state. But the man of Spain scorned to acknowledge the equality even of the Spanish blood, when born in the colonies; and no office of trust, and no commission in the colonial troops, could be given to a Creole. The foundation of hostility was thus laid at once, and on it was raised a large superstructure.

Another race soon rose, the children of Spaniards by native women, the Mestizos. They, too, were excluded from all employments. The revolt of the United States would probably have applied the torch to this mass of combustible matter, but for the jealousy of the two races. As the men of Old Spain despised the Creole, the Creole despised the Mestizo. Thus the power of Spain remained guarded by the jealousies of both.

But a new period was at hand. The infamous seizure of Spain by Napoleon in 1808, roused both races to an abhorrence of the French name, and a determination to separate themselves from a kingdom which could now be regarded only as a French province. Again jealousy prevailed; the Creoles demanded a national representation, the Spanish troops and employés a royal government. In the midst of their disputes, a powerful enemy appeared. The Mestizos and Indians united under a village priest, Hidalgo, and overran the country. This incursion brought the disputants to a sense of their own peril; they collected troops, were beaten by the bold priest, rallied for another field, beat him, took him prisoner in the battle, and put him to death.

But the spirit of revolt had now become popular, and another priest, Morellos, was found to head another insurrection. His talents and intrepidity swept all before him for a period, and the “independence of Mexico” was declared by a “national assembly” in November 1813. But Morellos was finally unfortunate, was attacked by the Spanish general Colleja, who seems to have been a man of military genius, was taken prisoner, and shot. The Old Spaniards were once more masters, and Apodaca, a man of intelligence and conduct, was sent from Spain as viceroy.

But sudden tumults broke out in Spain itself. The “Constitution of 1820” was proclaimed, the parties in Mexico followed the example, and a constitution strongly tending to democracy was proposed. It produced a total dissolution of the alliance between the Creoles and the Old Spaniards, the former demanding a government virtually independent, the latter adhering to Spain. In the confusion, Iturbide, a young Creole of an ancient family, and of large possessions, pushed his way into power, and, to the astonishment of all Western republicanism, in 1822 proclaimed himself Augustin the First, Emperor of Mexico.

But he instantly committed the capital fault of quarrelling with his congress. By a rash policy he dissolved the assembly and appointed another, composed of his adherents. But Cromwell’s boldness required Cromwell’s abilities to sustain it. The army had been the actual givers of the throne, and what they had given they regarded themselves as having the right to resume. The generals revolted against Iturbide, overthrew him, proclaimed a new constitution, and sent him to travel in Europe on a pension!

The constitution thus formed (October 1824) was republican, and took for its model that of the United States. Its two assemblies are a senate and a house of representatives. The senate consisting of two members for each state; the representatives, of two for every eighty thousand inhabitants. All must be natives, and have landed property to the amount of eight thousand dollars, or some trade or profession which brings in ten thousand dollars annually. The congress sits every year from the first of January to the middle of April. The senators holding their seats for four years, generally; the representatives for two. The executive is vested in a president and vice-president, both elected by the state legislatures for four years. The ages of the several functionaries are curiously fixed. The representative must have attained the age of twenty-five, the senator of thirty, and the high officers of state thirty-five.[A] The whole territory forms one “Federal Republic, governed by one Executive,” a marked distinction between Mexico and its model; the several states of the American Union retaining to themselves many of the privileges which, in the Mexican, belong to the government of the capital.

[A] There have been some subsequent changes in these matters.

Iturbide, after a two years’ exile, whether uneasy in his fall, or tempted by the perpetual tumults of party at home, returned to Mexico in 1824. He was said to complain of the stoppage of his pension; but, before his arrival, a party especially hostile to him had obtained power, and Iturbide, with a rashness which exhibits the true Creole, landing, without making the natural inquiry into the actual condition of things, was instantly seized and shot. Santa Anna, who had distinguished himself in the military service, now appealed to the usual donor of power, the army, and, at the head of his squadrons, took possession of the Presidentship.

In the present confusion of Mexican affairs, the recollection of Santa Anna has been frequently brought before the mind of his nation, as the only man fit to sustain it under the difficulties of the crisis; and nothing can be more fully acknowledged, than that, among the successive leaders of the country, he has had no rival in point of decision, intelligence, and intrepidity, the qualities obviously most essential for the time.

Santa Anna, in 1823, was unknown; he was simply a colonel in the Mexican service. The declaration of public opinion in that year for Republicanism, found him a zealous convert; and at the head of his regiment he marched from Vera Cruz to meet the troops of Iturbide. He met the Emperor’s general, Echavari, half-way to the capital, and, after some trivial encounters, made a convert of his enemy; Echavari’s battalions marched into Santa Anna’s camp. Iturbide, thus suddenly stript of his troops, had no alternative but to capitulate, and go into banishment. The Republic was proclaimed, and Santa Anna was recognised as the deliverer of his country. But an occasion occurred in which his military talents were to be equally conspicuous.

In 1829, a Spanish armament, with four thousand troops under General Barrados, made its appearance off Tampico, dispatched to recover the country for the Spanish crown. This instance of activity on the part of Old Spain was so unexpected, that the Republic was in general consternation. But Santa Anna took his measures with equal intelligence and bravery. Collecting about seven hundred men hastily, crossing the Gulf in open boats, and evading the Spanish vessels of war, he landed within a few miles of the Spanish expedition. Barrados, unprepared for this dashing antagonist, had gone on some rash excursion, carrying with him three-fourths of his force; the remaining thousand were the garrison of Tampico. Santa Anna, losing no time, assaulted the place next morning, and after a four hours’ struggle, made the whole garrison prisoners. But his victory had placed him in imminent danger. Barrados rapidly returned; the Mexican general, encumbered with prisoners, found himself in presence of triple his numbers, and with a river in his rear. Death, or surrender, seemed the only alternatives. In this emergency, he dexterously proposed an armistice, impressing the Spanish general with the idea that he was at the head of an overwhelming force—an impression the more easily made, from the apparent hardihood of his venturing so near an army of Spanish veterans. One of his first conditions was, that the Mexican troops should return to their own quarters unmolested. Thus, with merely six hundred men, he escaped from five times that number. In a few days he was joined by several hundred men. He then commenced a vigorous and incessant attack on the Spanish position, which was followed by the surrender of the entire corps; and 2200 Spaniards were embarked for the Havannah as prisoners of war. Santa Anna’s force never exceeding 1500 men.

A campaign of this rank naturally placed him in a distinguished point of public view. Yet he remained in comparative quiet on his estates near Vera Cruz, probably on the Napoleon principle—waiting his opportunity. It soon came; in 1841, Bustamente, the president, fell into unpopularity; murmurs rose ominously among the troops, and Santa Anna was summoned to head a revolution. Gathering five or six hundred men, chiefly raw recruits, he marched on the capital. The enterprise was singularly adventurous, for Bustamente was an experienced officer, with 8000 men under his immediate command. Santa Anna again tried the effect of diplomacy; the result was, that Bustamente finally surrendered both his power and his place, and was shortly after sent into exile.

Santa Anna now governed the country as dictator. His administration had the rashness, but the honesty, of his Spanish origin; and Mexico, relieved from the encumbrances of her Spanish dependence, was beginning to enjoy the riches of her unparalleled climate and boundless fertility, when a new enemy arose in Texas—the American settlers, who, in the spirit of cosmopolitism, had been universally suffered to enter the Mexican territories as inhabitants. The result was, that they began to clamour for provincial independence. The natives were generally tranquil; but the new-comers intrigued, harangued, and demanded a direct alliance with the United States. The struggle has been too recent to require recital. Santa Anna, with the rashness which characterises his courage, rushed into this war with troops evidently unprepared. After various skirmishes, in which the settlers suffered severely, his undisciplined force was routed, and Santa Anna, left alone in the field, was made prisoner in the attempt to escape. The “Independence” of Texas followed, which was quickly exchanged for the “Annexation” to the United States, by which its independence was extinguished.

The “Annexation” was immediately pronounced by the Mexican government to be a breach of that treaty by which the neighbour States were pledged to respect the possessions of each other; and the invasion of Mexico by an American army was the consequence. The Mexican force on the frontier was obviously too feeble for any effective resistance; and the American general, after some delays of movement, and divisions of his forces, which one active officer on the defensive would have turned to his ruin, attacked the Mexicans, drove them from their position, and took their guns. Since that period the advance of the Americans seems to have been checked by the difficulties of the country. Whether it is the intention of the American commander to fight, or to negotiate, to make a dash for the capital, or to treat for California, must be left to be discovered by events. But Paredes, the present head of the state, and commander of the troops, has the reputation of a brave officer, and Santa Anna is strongly spoken of as the man whom the nation would gladly summon to the redemption of his country.

But Mexico has one fatal feature which makes the mind despair of her ever holding the rank of a great nation. However glaring may be the superstition of continental Europe, it is of a feeble hue to the extravagance of Mexican ceremonial. In those remote countries, once guarded under the Spanish government with the most jealous vigilance from the stranger’s eye, every ceremonial was gradually adopted, of every shape and colour, which the deepest superstition, aided by great wealth, the influence of a powerful hierarchy, and the zeal of a people at once desperately ignorant and singularly fond of show, could invent. Rome, and even Naples, were moderate, compared with Mexico. The conveyance of the Host to the sick was almost a public pageant; its carriage to the wife of Santa Anna was accompanied by twenty thousand people. The feast of Corpus Christi exhibits streets through which thirty or forty thousand people pour along, of all classes of society, with thousands of soldiery, to swell and give military brilliancy to the display. At the head of the pageant moves a platform, on which the wafer is borne by the highest dignitaries of the church. Then follows, in a similar vehicle, “Our Lady of the Remedies,” the blessed Virgin Mother, a little alabaster doll, with the nose broken and an eye out. This was the image of herself given by the Virgin to Cortes to revive the valour of his soldiers after their Mexican defeat; and this the priests profess to believe, and the populace actually do believe. The doll’s wardrobe, with its precious stones, is valued at a million of dollars. The doll stops all contagious diseases, and is remarkably active in times of cholera.

Some of the popular exhibitions on Scriptural subjects are actually too startling to be described to Christian ears. Among those is the exhibition of the Nativity, as the especial display of Christmas eve. Joseph enters Bethlehem with Mary; they are sitting on the same mule; they search the city for lodgings in vain. At last they find the stable. The rest of the exhibition, a part of which, however, passes behind a curtain, is indescribable. And all this is done with the highest approbation of the ecclesiastical authorities.

The anniversary of the “Miracle” of the “Virgin of Guadaloupe,” is one of the “grand days” of the Federal Republic. The president, the cabinet, the archbishop, and all the principal functionaries of the state, are present, with an immense multitude of every class. A member of Congress delivers an oration on the subject; and the Virgin and her story are no more doubted than the history of Magna Charta. The story thus blazoned, and thus believed, is briefly this:—

An Indian, going to Mexico one morning in the sixteenth century, saw a female form descending from the sky. He was frightened; but the female told him that she was the Virgin Mary, come down to be the patron of the Mexican Indians, and ordered him to announce to the bishop that a church must be built in the mountain where she met him. The Indian flew to the bishop, but the prelate drove him away. The next day he met the Virgin on the same spot, and she appointed a day to convince the sceptical ecclesiastic. She bid him go to the summit of the mountain, where he should find the rock covered with roses for the first time since the Creation. He carried the roses in his apron to the bishop, when, lo! he found that on his apron was stamped a figure of the Virgin in a cloak of velvet spangled with stars of gold! Her proof was irresistible, and the church was built. The original portrait is still displayed there, in a golden frame studded with precious stones, with the motto, Non fecit taliter omni nationi. (He hath not so done to every nation; or, more significantly, to any other nation.) Copies of the miraculous picture, of more or less costliness, are to be found in almost every house, and all have the full homage of saintship. The Church of the Virgin, though not so large as the Cathedral, is of a finer style, and nearly as rich; the balustrade is pure silver, and all the candelabra, &c., are of the precious metals.

The idleness and the low class of life from which the majority of the monks and friars are taken, make celibacy especially dangerous to the community. The higher orders of the priesthood are comparatively decorous; but many of them have these suspicious appendages to a priest’s household, which are called “house-keepers,” with a proportionate share of those equally suspicious appendages, which are popularly called “nephews and nieces,” the whole system being one which furnishes a large portion of the gossip of Mexican society. But on those topics we have no wish to dwell.

Whether the American invasion will succeed in reaching Mexico, or in obtaining Upper California, or in breaking up the Federation, are matters still in the future. The disruption of the Federation seems to have been already, and spontaneously begun; Yucatan is said to have demanded independence; and the northern provinces bordering on the United States will, in all probability, soon make the same demand. It is obvious that the present Mexican territory is too large for the varying, distracted, and feeble government which Mexico has exhibited for the last quarter of a century—a territory seven times the size of France, or perhaps ten times that size, can be governed by a central capital only so long as the population continues scanty, powerless, and poor. But if Mexico had a population proportionate to France, and there is no reason for doubting its capacity of supporting such a population, the capital would govern a territory containing little less than three hundred millions of men; an obvious impossibility, where those men were active, opulent, intelligent, and engaged in traffic with the world. The example of the Chinese population is not a contrary case. There the empire was old, the throne almost sacred, the imperial power supported by a large military establishment, the character of the people timid, and the country in a state of mental stagnation. Yet, even for China, great changes may be at hand.

But the whole subject is to be looked on in a more comprehensive point of view. There is a general shaking of nations. The Turk, the Egyptian, the African, and the Chinese, have all experienced an impulse within late years, which has powerfully influenced their whole system. That impulse is now going westward. The immense regions beyond the Atlantic are now commencing the second stage of that existence, of which their discovery by Europe was the first. The language, the habits and history, the political feelings of England, are becoming familiar to them. They have begun their national education in the great school of self-government, with England for their teacher; and however tardy may be the pupilage, or however severe the events which turn the theory into example, we have strong faith in the conception, that all things will finally work together for good, and that a spirit of regeneration is already sent forth on its mighty mission to the New World as to the Old, to the “bond as to the free;” to those whom misgovernment has enfeebled, and superstition has debased, as to those who, possessing the original advantages of civilisation and religion, have struggled their difficult way to increasing knowledge, truth, and freedom, and whose progress has alike conferred on them the power, and laid upon them the duty, of being the moral leaders of Mankind.

A SUMMER DAY.
By Thomas Aird.

Morning.

Dear little Isle of ours! your very clouds,
Ranged in the east and battlemented black,
White flock of zenith, or, with stormy glory,
Tumbling tumultuous o’er the western hills,
Lend power and beauty to your pictured face,
Relieved and deepened in its light and shade,
Varied of dale and mountain, pleasing still
Through all the seasons, as they come and go,—
Blue airy Summer, Autumn brown and grave,
Gnarled sapless Winter, and clear glinting Spring.

Mine be the cottage, large enough for use,
Yet fully occupied, and cheerful thus.
Desolate he who, with his means abridged,
And wants reduced, yet pride of property
Still unimpaired, dwells in a narrow flank;
Of his ancestral house, gloomily vast
Beyond his need,—dwells with the faded ghost
Of former greatness. There the bellied spider,
That works in cool and silent palaces,
Has halls his own. The labyrinthine rooms
Seem haunted all. Mysterious laden airs
Move the dim tapestries drearily. And shapes
Spectral at hollow midnight beckoning glide
Down the far corridors, and faint away.

Up with the summer sun! Earlier at times,
And see gray brindled dawn come up before him;
There’s natural health, there’s moral healing in
The hour so naked clear, so dewy cool!
But oft I wish a chamber in the black
Castle of Indolence, far in, where spark
Of prying light ne’er comes, nor sound of cock
Is heard, nor the long howl of houseless cur,
Nor clock, nor shrill-winged gnat, nor buzzing fly
That, by the snoring member undeterred,
Aye settles on your nose’s tickled tip
Tormentingly. Deep in that charmèd rest
Laid, I could sleep the weary world away,
Months at a time—so listless fancy thinks.

Oh! curse of sleeplessness! Haggard and pale,
The tyrant Nero, see him from his bed
Wandering about, haunting the long dim halls,
And silent stairs, at midnight, startled oft
At his own footsteps, like a guilty thing
Sharp turning round aghast. The palace sleeps,
And all the city sleeps, all save its lord.
Then looks he to the windows of the east,
Wearily watching for the morning light,
That comes not at his will. Down on his bed
He flings himself again. His eyeballs ache;
His temples throb; his pillow’s hot and hard;
And through his dried brain thoughts and feelings drift,
Tumultuous, unrestrained, carrying his soul
On the high fever’s surge. The imperial world
For one short dewy hour of healing sleep!
Worlds cannot buy the blessing. Up he reels,
And staggers forth. Slow-coming day at length
Has found him thus. Its living busy forms,
Its turms, its senators, its gorgeous guests,
Bowing in homage from barbaric isles,
Its scenes, its duties are to him a strange
Phantasmagoria: Through its ghastly light
Wildered he lives. To feel and be assured
He yet has hold on being, with the drugs
Of monstrous pleasures, cruelty and lust,
He drugs his spirit; ever longing still
For the soft hour of eve, if sleep may come
After another day has worn him out.
But images of black, bed-fellows strange,
Lie down with him; drawing his curtain back,
Unearthly shapes, and unimagined faces,
Look in upon him, near down on his eyes,
Nearer and nearer still, till they are forced
To wink beneath the infliction, like a weight
Of actual pressure, solid, heavy, felt.
But winking hard, a thousand coloured motes
Begin to dance confused, and central stars,
And spots of light, welling and widening out
In rings concentric, peopling all the blind
Black vacancy before his burning balls.
But soon they change to leering antic shapes,
And dread-suggesting fiends. Dim, far away,
Long dripping corpses, swaying in the waves,
Slowly cast up, arise; gashed, gory throats,
And headless trunks of men, are nearer seen,
And every form of tragic butchery—
The myriad victims of his power abused
By sea and land. To give their hideousness
Due light, a ceiling of clear molten fire,
Figured with sprawling imps, begins to glow
Hot overhead, casting a brazen light
Down on the murdered crew. All bent on him,
Near, nearer still, they swarm, they crowd, they press;
And round and round, and through and through the rout,
The naked Pleasures, knit with demons, dance.
Wild whirls his brain anew. This night is as
The last, and far more terrible. Guilt thus,
And sleeplessness, more than perpetuate
Each other—dreadful lineage! Let us hope,
For human nature, that the man was mad.

Up from your blameless sleep, go forth and meet
The glistening morn, over the smoking lawn
Spangled, by briery balks, and brambled lanes,
Where blows the dog-rose, and the honey-suckle
Hangs o’er the heavy hedge its trailing sheaf
Of stems and leaves, tendrils and clasping rings,
Cold dews, and bugle blooms, and honey smells,
And wild bees swinging as they murmur there.
The speckled thrush, startled from off the thorn,
Shakes down the crystal drops. With spurring haste,
The rabbit scuds across the grassy path;
Pauses a moment—with its form and ears
Arrect to listen; then, with glimpse of white,
Springs through the hedge into the ferny brake.
Or taste the freshness of the pastoral hills
On such a morn: Light scarfs of thinning mist
In graceful lingerings round their shoulders hang;
New-washed and white, the sheep go nibbling up
The high green slopes; a hundred gurgling rills,
Sparkling with foam-bells, to your very heart
Send their delicious coolness; hark! again,
The cuckoo somewhere in the sunny skirts
Of yonder patch of the old natural woods;
With sudden iron croak, clear o’er the gray
Summit, o’erhanging you, with levell’d flight,
The raven shoots into the deep blue air.

Lo! in the confluence of the mountain glens,
The small gray ruin of an ancient kirk.
’Twas the first kirk, so faithful reverence tells,
Of Scotland’s Reformation: And it drew,
Now as before, from all the hills around
The worshippers; till, in a richer vale,
To suit the populous hamlet rising there,
A larger, nearer parish church was built.
Thus was the old one left. But there it stands,
And there will stand till the slow tooth of Time
Nibble it all away; for it is fenced
Completely round, not with just awe alone,
But superstitious fears, the abuse of awe
In simple minds: Strange judgments, so they say,
Have fallen on those who once or twice have dared
To lay their hands upon its holy stones
For secular uses, and remove its bell.
With such excess of love—we’ll blame it not—
Does Scotland love her Church. Be it so still
And be its emblem still the Burning Bush!
Bush of the wilderness! See how the flames
Bicker and burn around it; but a low
Soft breath of the great Spirit of Salvation
Blows gracious by, and the dear little Bush,
The desert Bush, in every freshened leaf
Uncurled, unsinged in every flowery bud,
Fragrant with heavenly dews, and dropping balsams
Good for the hurt soul’s healing, waves and rustles,
Even in the very heart of the red burning,
In livelier green and fairer blossoming.

Earth sends her soft warm incense up to heaven;
The birds their matins sing. Joining the hymn,
The tremulous voice of psalms from human lips
Is heard in the free air. You wonder where,
And who the worshippers. Behold them now,
Down in the grassy hollow lowly seated,
Close by the mountain burn—an old gray man,
His head uncovered, and the Book of life
Spread on his knee, a female by his side,
His aged wife, both beggars by their garb,
With frail cracked voices, yet with hearts attuned
To the immortal harmonies of faith,
And hope, and love, in the green wilderness
Praising the Lord their God—a touching sight!
High in the Heavenly House not made with hands,
The archangels sing, angels, and saints in white,
Striking their golden harps before the Throne;
But, in the pauses of the symphony
A voice comes up from Earth, the simple psalm
Of those old beggars, heard by the Ear of God
With more acceptance than hosannahs sung
In blissful jubilee. ’Tis hard to think
The people of the Lord must beg their bread;
Yet happy they who, poor as this old twain
On earth, like them, have laid fast titled hold
Upon the treasures of Eternity!

Her nest is here: But ah! the cunning thing,
See where our White-throat, like the partridge, feigns
A broken wing, thick fluttering o’er the ground,
And tumbling oft, to draw you from her brood
Within the bush. Now that’s a lie, my birdie!
Your wing’s not broken; but we’ll grant you this,—
The lie’s a white one, white as your own throat.
Yet how should He who is the Truth itself,
And whose unquestioned prompting instinct is,
Implant deceit within your little breast,
And make you act it, even to save your young?
The whole creation groans for man, for sin,
And death its consequence: We’re changed to you
In our relations, birdie; as a part
Of that primeval ill, we rob your nest.
To meet this change, and in God’s own permission
Of moral wrong, was it, that guile was given
Even to the truest instinct of your love;
And your deceit is our reflected sin?
Subtle philosopher, or sound divine,
’Tis a grave question; can you answer it?
The more we wonder at the curious warp
From truth, the more we see the o’erruling law
Of natural love in all things, which will be
A fraud in instinct, rather than a flaw
In care parental. Oh! how gracious good,
That all the generations, as they rise,
Of living things are not sustained by one
Great abstract fiat of Benevolence;
But by a thousand separate forms of love,
All tremblingly alive: The human heart,
With all its conduits and its channel-pipes,
Warm, flowing, full, quiveringly keen and strong
In all its tendrils and its bloody threads,
Laying hold of its children with the fast
Bands of a man; fish, bird, beast, reptile, insect,
The wallowing, belching monsters of the deep,
Down to the filmiest people of the leaf,
Are all God’s nurses, and draw out the breast,
Or brood for Him. Oh! what a system thus
Of active love, of every shape and kind,
Has been created, from the Heart of Heaven
Extended, multiplied, personified
In living forms throughout the Universe!

In life’s first glee, and first untutored grace,
With raven tresses, and with glancing eyes,
How beautiful those children, lustrous dark,
Pulling the kingcups in the flowery meadow!
Born of an Indian Mother: She by night,
An orphan damsel on her native hills,
Looked down the Khyber Pass, with pity touched
For the brave strangers that lay slain in heaps,
Low in that fatal fold and pen of death.
Sorrow had taught her mercy: Forth she went
With simple cordials from her lonely cot,
If she might help to save some wounded foe.
By cavern went she, and tall ice-glazed rock,
Casting its spectral shadow on the snow,
Beneath the hard blue moon. Save her own feet
Crushing the starry spangles of the frost,
Sound there was none on all the silent hills;
And silence filled the valley of the dead.
Down went the maid aslant. A cliff’s recess
Gave forth a living form. A wounded youth,
One unit relic of that thick battue,
Escaping death, and mastering his deep hurt,
From out the bloody Pass had climbed thus far
The mountain side, and rested there a while.
The virgin near, up rose he heavily,
Staggered into the light, and stood before her,
Bowing for help. She gave him sweet-spiced milk,
And led him to her home, and hid him there
Months, till pursuit was o’er, and he was healed,
And from her mountains he could safely go.
But grateful Walter loved the Affghan girl,
And would not go without her: They had taught
Each other language: Will she go with him
To the Isles of the West, and be his wife?
Nor less she loved the fair-haired islander,
And softly answered, Yes. And she is now
His Christian wife, wondering and loving much
In this mild land, honoured and loved of all;
With such a grace of glad humility
She does her duties. And, to crown her joy
Of holy wedded life, her God has given her
Those beauteous children, with the laughing voices,
Pulling the kingcups in the flowery meadow.

Our walk is o’er. But let us see our bees,
Before we turn into our ivied porch.
The little honey-folk, how wise are they!
Their polity, their industry, their work,
The help they take from man, and what they give him
Of fragrant nectar, sea-green, clear, and sweet,
Invest them almost with the dignity
Of human neighbourhood, without the intrusion.
Coming and going, what a hum and stir!
The dewy morn they love, the sunny day,
With showery dropping balms, liquoring the flowers
In every vein and eye. But when the heavens
Grow cloudy, and the quick-engendered blasts
Darken and whiten as they skiff along
The mountain-tops, till all the nearer air,
Seized with the gloom, is turbid, dense, and cold,
Back from their far-off foraging the bees,
In myriads, saddened into small black motes,
Strike through the troubled air, sharp past your head,
And almost hitting you, their lines of flight
Converging, thickening, as they draw near home;
So much they fear the storms, so much they love
The safety of their straw-built citadels.

Noon.

At times a bird slides through the glossy air,
O’er the enamelled woodlands; but no chirp
Of song is heard: All’s dumb and panting heat.
How waste and idle are yon river sands,
Far-stretching white! The stream is almost shrunk
Down to the green gleet of its slippery stones;
And in it stand the cows, switching their tails,
With circling drops, and ruminating slow.
A hermit glutton on a sodded root,
Fish-gorged, his head and bill sunk to his breast,
The lean blue heron stands, and there will stand
Motionless all the long dull afternoon.

But the old woods are near, with grateful glooms,
Dells, silent grottoes, and cold sunken wells;
There rest on mossy seats, and be refreshed:
Thankful you toil not, at this blazing hour,
Beneath the dog-star, in some sandy lane
Of the strait sea-coast town, pent closely in
With walls of fiery brick, their tops stuck o’er
With broken pointed glass, and danders hot
Fencing their feet, with sparse ears of wild barley
Parched, dun, and dead amongst them; o’er your head
The smoke of potteries, and the foundry vent
Sending its quivering exhalation up—
Heat more than smoke; to aggravate the whole,
The sweltering, smothering, suffocating whole,
The oppressive sense upon your heart of man’s
Worst dwellings round you—smells of stinking fish,
Torn dingy shirts, half washed, flea-spotted still,
Hung out on bending strings at broken windows;
Hunger, and fear, and pale disordered faces,
Lies, drunken strife, strokes, cries, and new-coined oaths,
All hot and rough from the red mint of hell.

Lo! with her screwed tail cocked aloft in air,
The cottar’s cow comes scampering clumsily.
Her, sorely cupped and leeched, the clegs have stung
From her propriety; and hoisting high
Her standard of distress, this way she comes
Cantering unwieldily, her heavy udder,
Dropping out milk, swinging from side to side.
Pathetic sight! So long have we been used
To see the solemn tenor of her life,
From calfhood to her present reverend age
Of wrinkled front, scored horns, and hollow back,—
Tenor unbroken, save when once or twice
A pool of frothy blood before the smithy
Has made her snuff, snort, paw, and toss her head,
Wheel round and round, and slavering bellow mad:
That blood the cadger’s horse, seized with the bots,
When he on cobwebbed clover, raw and cold,
Had supped, gave spouting, spinning from his neck,
Beneath the blacksmith’s mallet and his fleam.
Is this the cow, at home so patient o’er
The cool sobriety of cabbage leaves,
Hoarse cropped for her at morn, when the night-drops
Lie like big diamonds in the freshened stock,—
Drops broken, running, scattered, but again
Conglobed like quicksilver, until they fall
Shaken to earth? Is this the milky mother,
That long has given to thankful squeezing hands,
With such an air of steady usefulness,
The children’s streaming food—twelve pints a day;
And with her butter, and her cheese, and cans
Of white-green whey, has bought the grocery goods,
Snuff and tobacco? Oh! the affecting sight!
Help, help, ye Shades, the venerable brute!
But gradually subsiding to a trot,
She takes the river with a fellow-feeling,
And, modestly aloof to raise no strife,
There settles down behind the stranger cows.
Ah! Crummie, you have stolen this scampering march
Upon the little cow-herd. Far are heard
The opening roarings of his wondering fear,
Nearer and nearer still, as they come on,
Loading the noontide air. Three other friends
Had he to feed, besides the family cow.
Twin cushats young, the yellow hair now sparse
In their thick gathering plumage, nestling lie
Within his bonnet; they can snap, and strike
With raised wing; grown vigorous thus, they need
A larger dinner of provided peas.
Nor less his hawk, shrill-screaming as it shakes
Its wings for food, must have the knotted worms
From moist cold beds below the unwholesome stone,
That never has been raised—if he be quick
To raise it, and can seize them ere they slink
Into their holes, or, when half in, can draw them,
With a long, steady, gentle, equal pull,
Tenacious though they be, and tender stretched
Till every rib seems ready to give way,
Unbroken out in all their slippery length.
These now he wandered seeking, for the ground
Was parched, and they the surface all had left;
And many a stone he raised, but nothing saw,
Save insect eggs, and shells of beetles’ wings,
Slaters, cocoons, and yellow centipedes.
Thus was he drawn away. When he came back,
His cow was gone. Dismayed, he looked all round.
At last he saw, far-off on the horizon,
Her hoisted tail. He seized his birds and ran,
Following the tail, and as he ran he roared.
Yonder he comes in view with red-hot face;
Roaring the more to see old Crummie take
The river—how shall he dislodge her thence;
And get her home again? Oh! deep distress!

The world is flooded with the dazzling day.
We take the woods. Couched in the checkered skirts,
Below an elm we lie. A sylvan stream
Is sleeping by us in a cold still pool,
Within whose glassy depth the little fishes
Hang, as in crystal air. Freckled with gleams,
’Neath yonder hazelly bank that roofs it o’er
With roots and moss, it slides and slips away.
Here a ray’d spot of light, intensely clear,
Strikes our eyes through the leaves; a sunbeam there
Comes slanting in between the mossy trunks
Of the green trees, and misty shimmering falls
With a long slope down on the glossy ferns:
Light filmy flies athwart it brightening shoot,
Or dance and hover in the motty ray.

We love the umbrageous Elm. Its well-crimp’d leaf,
Serrated, fresh, and rough as a cow’s tongue,
Is healthy, natural, and cooling, far
Beyond the glazy polish of the bay,
Famed though it be, but glittering hard as if
’Twere liquor’d o’er with some metallic wash.
Thus pleased, laid back, up through the Elm o’erhead
We look. The little Creeper of the Tree
Lends life to it: See how the antic bird,
Her bosom to the bark, goes round away
Behind the trunk, but quaintly reappears
Through a rough cleft above, with busy bill
Picking her lunch; and now among the leaves
Our birdie goes, bright glimmering in the green
And yellow light that fills the tender tree.

Low o’er the burnie bends the drooping Birch:
Fair tree! Though oft its cuticle of bark
Hangs in white fluttering tatters on its breast,
No fairer twinkles in the dewy glade.
Sweet is its scented breath, the wild deer loves it,
And snuffs and browses at the budding spray.
But far more tempting to the truant’s eyes,
Wandering the woods, its thick excrescences
Of bundled matted sprigs: Soft steals he on,
To find what seems afar the cushat’s nest,
Or pie’s or crow’s. Deceived, yet if the tree
Is old, he seeks in its decaying clefts
The fungous cork-wood that gives balls to boys,
And smooth-skinn’d razor-strops to bearded men.
Bent all on play, our little urchin next
Peels off a bit of bark, and with his nails
Splits and divides the many-coated rind
To the last outer thinness; then he holds
The silky shivering film between his lips,
And pipes and whistles, mimicking the thrush.

Nor less the Beauty of our natural woods
Is useful too. What time the housewife’s pirn
(Oh, cheerless change that stopp’d the birring wheel!)
Whirled glimmering round before the evening fire,
’Twas birchen aye. And when our tough-heel’d shoes
Have stood the tear and wear of stony hills
Beyond our hope, we bless the birchen pegs.
In Norway o’er the foam, their crackling fires
Are fed with bark of birch, and there they thatch
Their simple houses with its pliant twigs.
At home, the virtues of our civic besoms
Confess the birch. The Master of the School
Is now “abroad:” Oh! may he never miss,
Wander where’er he will, the birchen shaw,
But cut the immemorial ferula,
To lay in pickle for rebellious imps,
And discipline to worth the British youth.

The Queen can make a Duke; but cannot make
One of the forest’s old Aristocrats.
Behold yon Oak! What glory in his bole,
His boughs, his branches, his broad frondent head!
The ancient Nobleman! Not She who rules
The kingdoms, many-isled, on which the sun
Never goes down, with all the investiture
Of garters, coronets, scutcheons, swords, and stars,
Could make him there at once. Patrician! Nay,
King of the woods, his independent realm!
Whate’er his titled name, there let him stand,
Fit emblem of our British constitution,
Full constituted in the rooted Past,
With powers, and forces, and accommodations,
The growth of ages, not an act or work!
Beyond this emblem of old diguity,
And far beyond the associated thought
Of “Hearts of Oak,” that mightiest incarnation
Of human power that earth has ever seen—
As when we launch’d our Nelson, and he went
Thundering around the world, driving the foe,
With all their banded hosts, from hemisphere
To hemisphere, before him, by the terror
Of his tremendous name, but overtook
And thunder-smote them down, swept from the seas,—
Beyond all this, the reverend Oak takes back
The heart to elder days of holy awe.
Such oaks are they, the hoariest of the race,
Round Lochwood Tower, the Johnstones’ ancient seat.
Bow’d down with very age, and rough all o’er
With scurfy moss, and the depending hair
Of parasitic plants, (the mistletoe,
Be sure, is there, congenial friend of old,)
They look as if no lively little bird
Durst hop upon their spirit-awing heads:
Perhaps, at midnight hour, Minerva’s bird,
The grave, staid owl, may rest a moment there.
But solemn visions swarm on every bough,
Of Druid doings in old dusky time.

When lowers the thunder cloud, and all the trees
Stand black and still, with what a trump profound
The wild bee wanders by! But here he is,
Hoarse murmuring in the fox-glove’s weigh’d-down bell.
Happy in sumner he! but when the days
Of later autumn come, they’ll find him hanging
In torpid stupor, on the horse-knot’s top;
Or by the ragweed in the school-boy’s hand,
As forth he issues, angry from his bike,
Struck down, he’ll die—what time the urchins, bent
On honey, delve into the solid ground:
They seize the yellower and the cleaner comb,
But drop it quick, when squeezing it they find
Nought there but milky maggots; then they pick
The darker bits, and suck them, though they be
Wild, bitter flavoured, in their luscious strength,
And dirty brown, and mix’d with earthen mould.
The luckier mower in the grassy mead,
Turns up with his scythe’s point, or with its edge,
The foggie’s bike, a ball of soft, dry fog.
With what a sharp, thin, acrid, pent-up buzz,
Swarming, it lives and stirs! But when the bees
Are all dislodged, and, circling, wheel away,
The swain rejoices in that bright clean honey.

Ah! there’s Miss Kitty Wren, with her cocked tail,
Cocked like a cooper’s thumb. Miss Kitty goes
In ’neath the bank, and then comes out again
By some queer hole. Thus, all the day she plies
Her quest from hedge to bank, scarce ever seen
Flying above your head in open air.
Unsmitten by the heat where now she is,
She strikes into her song—Miss Kitty’s song!
(We never think of male in Kitty’s case.)
The song is short, and varies not, but yet
’Tis not monotonous; with such a pipe
Of liquid clearness does she open it,
And, with increasing vigour, to the end
Go through it quite: Thus, all the year, she sings,
Except in frost, the spunky little bird!
On mossy stump of thorn, her curious nest
Is often built, a twig drawn over it,
To bind it firm; but more she loves the roof
Of sylvan cave over-arched, where the green twilight
Glimmers with golden light, and fox-gloves stand,
Tall, purple-faced, her goodly beef-eaters,
To guard and dignify her entrance-gate.
The ballad vouches that a wee, wee bird
Oft brings a whispered message to the ear;
So here’s our ear, Miss Wren, (your pardon! we
Must call you Mrs now,) pray, tell us how
You manage, in your crowded little house,
To feed your thirteen young, nor miss one mouth
In its due turn, but give them all fair play?
And here’s our other ear; say, ere you go,
What means the Bachelor’s Nest? ’Tis oftener found
Than the true finished one. Externally,
’Tis built as well; but ne’er we find within
The cozy feathery lining for the home
Of love parental. Is it, as some think,
And as the name, though not precise, implies,
Made for your husband, whosoe’er he be,
To sleep o’nights in? Or, as others deem,
Is it a lure to draw the loiterer’s eye
Off from the genuine nest, not far away?
Or, shy and nice, were you disturbed in building;
Or by some other instinct, fine and true,
Impelled to change your first-projected place,
And choose a safer? This your Laureate holds.

But here comes Robin. In our boyish days,
We thought him Kitty’s husband. By his clear
Black eye, he’s fit to answer for himself.
Like her, he sings the whole year round; but she
Is not his wife. See how he turns the head
This way and that, peeping from out the leaves
With curious eye, and still comes hopping nearer.
Strong in his individual character,
His knowing glance, his shape, his waistcoat red,
His pipe mellifluous, and pugnacious pride,
Darting to strike intruders from his beat,
And other qualities, his love of man
Is still his great peculiarity.
The starved hedge-sparrow haunts the moistened sink,
On gurly winter days, the bitter wind
Ruffling her back, showing the bluer down
Beneath her feathers freckled brown above,
But ne’er she ventures nearer where man dwells.
With sidelong look, bold Robin takes our floor;
And when, as now, we rest us in the depths
Of leafy woods, he’s with us in a trice.
Such is the genius of red-breasted Robin.

Along the shingly shallows of the burn,
The smallest bird that walks, and does not hop,
How fast yon Wagtail runs; its little feet
Quick as a mouse’s! Thus its shaking tail
Is kept in even balance, poised and straight.
With hopping movements ’twould not harmonise,
But, wagging inconveniently more,
Mar and confound the bird’s progressive way,
When off the wing. Wisdom Divine contrived
The just proportions of this compromise
Betwixt the motions of the feet and tail.
Aloft in air, each chirrup keeping time
With each successive undulation long,
The Wagtail flies, a pleasant summer bird.

A moment on the elm above our head
Rests the Green-linnet. Wordsworth says, He “from
The cottage-eaves pours forth his song in gushes.”
Not so in Scotland: Here he sometimes builds
His nest within the garden’s beechen hedge;
But never haunts our eaves. As for his song,
A few short notes, meagre and harsh, are all
This somewhat spiritless and lumpish bird
Has ever given us. Can the Master err?

With all the short thick rowing of her wings
The Magpie makes slow way. But her glib tongue
Goes chattering fast enough. In yonder fir,
The summer solstice cannnot keep her mute.
Surely, the bird should speak: Take the young pie,
And with a silver sixpence split its tongue,
’Twill speak incontinent; thus the notion runs
From simple father down to simple son,
In many parts. Oft in our boyhood’s days
We’ve seen it tried; but somehow, by bad luck,
It always happened that the poor bird died,
When, doubtless, just upon the eve of speech.
Sore was the splitting then, but far worse now:
The sixpence then, worn till it lost the head
Of George the Third, was thin as a knife’s edge,
And fitly sharp; the coin’s now thick and dull,
And makes the clumsier cleaving full of pain.
As boys we feared the magpie, for ’twas held
A bird of omen: oft ’twas seen to tear
With mad extravagant bill the cottage thatch,
Herald of death within: To neighbouring towns
The schoolboy, sent on morning messages,
Counted with awe how many pies at once
Hopped on his road; by this he learned to know
The various fortunes of the coming time.

Sweet lore was yours, O Bewick! with that eye
So keen, yet quiet, for the Beautiful,
And for the Droll—that eye so loving large!
Yet sweeter, Wilson, yours, as yours a range
More ample far, watching the goings-on
Of Nature in the boundless solitudes.
We know no happier man than him, at once,
With native powers, fixed from a restless youth,
To a great work congenial, which his might
Of conscious will has mastered ere begun;
Life’s work, and the foundation of his fame:
But oh! its sweetness, if in Nature’s eye
His is the privilege to work it out!
Such was the work of Wilson. Happy, too,
Is Audubon. When Day, like a bright bird,
Throughout the heavens has flown, chased by the black
Falcon of Night, he sleeps beneath a tree;
Upspringing with the morn, the enthusiast holds
On his green way rejoicing: His to catch,
And fix the creatures of the wilderness
In pictured forms, not in the attitudes
Of stiff convenience, but in all their play
Of happy natural life, fearless, untamed
By man’s intrusion, wanton, easy, free,
Yet full of tart peculiarities,
Freakish, and quaint, and ever picturesque,
Their secret gestures, and the wild escapes
From out their eyes; watching how Nature works
Her fine frugalities of means, even there
Where all is lavish freedom, finer still,
The compensations of her processes,
Throughout their whole economy of life.
Sweet study! Oh! for one long summer day
With Audubon in the far Western woods!

We leave the shade, and take the open fields,
Winding our way by immemorial paths,
So soft and green, the poor man’s privilege:
May jealous freedom ever keep them free!
Such is the sultry languor of the day,
The eye sees nothing clear. But now it rests
On yonder sable patch—ah! yes, a band
Of mourners gathered round a closing grave,
In the old churchyard. How unnatural
The black solemnity in such a day
Of light and life! But who was he or she
Who thus goes dust to dust? A matron ripe
In years and grace at once for death and Heaven.
Her aged father’s stay until he died,
She then was wed and widowed in one year,
And made a mother. With her infant son
She dwelt in peace, and nourished him with love.
Mild and sedate, upgrew the old-fashioned boy;
And went to church with her, a little man
In garb and gravity: you would have smiled
To see him coming in. She lifted him
Up to his seat beside her, drew him near,
And took his hand in hers. There as he sate,
Oft looked she down to see if he was sleeping;
And drowsy half, half in the languor soft
Of innocent trust and aimless piety,
The child looked up into his mother’s face.
And she looked down into his eyes, and saw
The neighbouring window in their pupils’ balls,
With all its panes, reflected small but clear;
And gave his hand soft pressure with her hand,
Still shifting, trying still to be more soft.
God took him from her. In a holy stillness
She dwelt concentred. Decent were her means,
And so she changed not outwardly. No trouble
Gave she to neighbours; but she helped them oft.
And when she died, her grave-clothes, there they were,
Made by her own preparing heart and hand,
And neatly folded in an antique chest:
Not even a pin was wanting, where, to dress
Her body with due care, a pin should be;
And every pin was stuck in its own place.
Nor was all this from any hard mistrust
Of human love, for she the charities
Took with glad heart; but from a strength of mind
Which stood equipped in every point for death,
And, loving order, loved it to the end.

The mourners all are gone. How lonely still
The churchyard now! Here in their simple graves
The generations of the hamlet sleep:
All grassy simple, save that, here and there,
Love-planted flowerets deck the lowly sod.
Blame not that sorrowing love: ’Tis far too true
To make of Burial one of the Fine Arts;
Yet the sweet thought that scented violets spring
From the loved ashes, is a natural war
Against the foul dishonours of the grave.
Bloom then, ye little flowers, and sweetly smell;
Draw up the heart’s dust in your flushing hues,
And odorous breath, and give it to the bee,
And give it to the air, circling to go
From life to life, through all that living flux
Of interchange which makes this wondrous world.
Go where it will, the dear dust is not lost;
Found it will be in its own place and form,
On that great day, the Resurrection Day.

Evening.

Those shouts proclaim the village school is out.
This way and that, the children break in groups;
Some by the sunny stile, and meadow path,
Slow sauntering homeward; others to the burn
Bounding, beneath the stones, and roots, and banks,
With stealthy hand to catch the spotted trout,
Or stab the eel, or slip their noose of hair
Over the bearded loach, and jerk him out.
Here on his donkey, slow as any snail
At morn from the far farm, but, homeward now,
Willing and fast, an urchin blithe and bold
Comes scampering on: His face is to the tail
In fun grotesque; stooping, with both his hands
He holds the hairy rump; his kicking feet
Go walloping; his empty flask of tin,
That bore his noon of milk, quiver of life,
And not of death, high-bounding on his back,
Rattles the while. With many a whoop behind,
Scouring the dusty road with their bare feet,
In wicked glee, a squad of fellow-imps
Come on with thistles and with nettle-wands,
Pursuingly, intent to goad and vex
The long-eared cuddy: He, the cuddy, lays
His long ears back upon his neck, his head
Lowered the while, and out behind him flings
High his indignant heels, at once to keep
That hurly-burly of tormentors off,
And rid his back of that insulting rider.

Unconscious boyhood! Oh! the perils near
Of luring Pleasures! In the evening shade,
Drowsy reclining, in my dream I saw
A comely youth, with wanton flowing curls,
Chase down the sunlit vale a glittering flight
Of winged creatures, some like birds, and some
Like butterflies, and moths of marvellous size
And beauty, purple-ruffed, and spotted rich
With velvet tippets, and their wings like flame—
Onward they drew him to a coming cloud,
With skirts of vapoury gold, but steaming dense
And dark behind, close gathering from the ground:
And on and in he went, in heedless chase.
And straight those skirts curled inward, and became
Part of the gloom: Compacted, solid, black,
It has him in, and it will keep him there.
The cloud stood still a space, as if to give
Time for the acting of some doom within,
Ominous, silent, grim. It moved again,
Tumultuous stirred, and broke in seams and flaws,
And gave me glimpses of its inner womb:
Outdarting forkèd tongues, and brazen fins,
Blue web-winged vampire-bats, and harpy faces,
And dragon crests, and vulture heads obscene,
I there beheld: Fierce were their levelled looks,
As if inflicted on some victim. Who
That victim was, I saw not. But are these
The painted Pleasures which that youth pursued
Adown the vale? How cruel changed! But where,
And what is he? Is he their victim there?
Heavy the cloud went passing by. From out
Its further end I saw that young man come,
Worn and dejected; specks and spots of dirt
Were on his face, and round his sunken eyes;
Hollow his cheeks, lean were his bony brows;
And lank and clammy were the locks that once
Played curling round his neck: The Passions there
Have done their work on him. With trembling limbs,
And stumbling as he went, he sate him down,
With folded arms, upon a sombre hill,
Apart from men, and from his father’s house,
That wept from him; and, sitting there, he looked
With heavy-laden eyes down on the ground.
But the night fell, and hid him from my view.

In yonder sheltered nook of nibbled sward,
Beside the wood, a gipsy band are camped;
And there they’ll sleep the summer night away.
By stealthy holes, their ragged tawny brood
Creep through the hedges, in their pilfering quest
Of sticks and pales, to make their evening fire.
Untutored things, scarce brought beneath the laws
And meek provisions of this ancient State!
Yet, is it wise, with wealth and power like hers,
And such resources of good government,
To let so many of her sons grow up
In untaught darkness and consecutive vice?
True, we are jealous free, and hate constraint,
And every cognisance o’er private life;
Yet, not to name a higher principle,
’Twere but an institution of police,
Due to society, preventative
Of crime, the cheapest and the best support
Of order, right, and law, that not one child,
In all this realm of ours, should be allowed
To grow up uninstructed for this life,
And for the next. Were every child State-claimed,
Laid hold of thus, and thus prepared to be
A proper member of society,
What founts of vice, with all their issuing streams,
Might thus be closed for ever, and at once!
Good propagating good, so far as man
Can work with God. Oh! this is the great work
To change our moral world, and people Heaven.

Would we had Christian statesmen to devise,
And shape, and work it out! Our liberties
Have limits and abatements manifold;
And soon the national will, which makes restraint
Part of its freedom, oft the soundest part,
Would recognise the wisdom of the plan,
Arming the state with full authority
For such an institute of renovation.
This work achieved at home, with what a large
Consistent exercise of power, and right
To hope the blessing, should we then go forth,
Pushing into the dark of Heathen worlds
The crystal frontiers of the invading Light,
The Gospel Light! The glad submitting Earth
Would cry, Behold, their own land is a land
Of perfect living light—how beautiful
Upon the mountains are their blessed feet!

Through yonder meadow comes the milk-maid’s song,
Clear, but not blithe, a melancholy chaunt,
With dying falls monotonous; for youth
Affects the dark and sad: Her ditty tells
Of captive lorn, or broken-hearted maid,
Left of her lover, but in dream thrice dreamt
Warned of his fate, when, with his fellow-crew
Of ghastly sailors on benighted seas
He clings to some black, wet, and slippery rock,
Soon to be washed away; what time their ship,
Driven on the whirlpool’s wheel, is sent below,
And ground upon the millstones of the sea.
The song has ceased. Up the dim elmy lane
The damsel comes. But at its leafy mouth
The one dear lad has watched her entering in,
And with her now comes softly side by side.
But oft he plucks a leaf from off the hedge,
For lack of words, in bashful love sincere;
Till, in his innocent freedom bolder grown,
He crops a dewy gowan from the path,
And greatly daring flings it at her cheek.
Close o’er the pair, along the green arcade,
Now hid, now seen against the evening sky,
The wavering, circling, sudden-wheeling bat
Plays little Cupid, blind enough for that,
And fitly fickle in his flights to be
The very Boy-god’s self. Where’er may lie
The power of arrows with the golden tips,
That silent lad is smit, nor less that girl
Is cleft of heart: Be this the token true:—
Next Sabbath morn, when o’er the pasture hills
Barefoot she comes to church, with Bible wrapped
In clean white napkin, and the sprig of mint
And southernwood laid duly in the leaves,
And down she sits beside the burn to wash
Her feet, and don her stockings and her shoes,
Before she come unto the House of Prayer,
With all her reverence of the Day, she’ll cast
(Forgive the simple thing!) her eye askance
Into the mirror of the glassy pool,
And give her ringlets the last taking touch,
For him who flung the gowan at her cheek
In that soft twilight of the elmy lane.

Pensive the setting Day, whether, as now
Cloudless it fades away, or far is seen,
In long and level parallels of light,
Purple and liquid yellow, barred with clouds,
Far in the twilight West, seen through some deep
Embrowned grove of venerable trees,
Whose pillared stems, apart, but regular,
Stand off against the sky: In such a grove,
At such an hour, permitted eyes might see
Angels, majestic Shapes, walking the earth,
Holding mild converse for the good of man.

Day melts into the West, another flake
Of sweet blue Time into the Eternal Past!

Dumfries, May 18, 1846.

CABRERA.

[Historia de la Guerra Ultima en Aragon y Valencia, escrita par D. F. Cabello, D. F. Santa Cruz, y D. R. M. Temprado. Madrid: 1846.]

On the twenty-seventh day of December 1806, at the collegiate town of Tortosa in Catalonia, Maria Griño, the wife of José Cabrera, an industrious and respectable mariner, gave birth to a son. Destined to the church, this child, from his earliest boyhood, was the petted favourite of his family. His parents looked to him as a staff and support for their declining years, his sisters as a protector; and none ventured to thwart his whims, or correct the failings of the young student. Thus abandoned to the dictates of a disposition naturally perverse, Ramon Cabrera led the life of a vagabond, rather than that of a scholar and of one destined to holy orders. Avoided by the more respectable of his classmates and townsmen, he fell amongst evil associates, and soon became notorious for precocity of vice. The reprimands of his superiors, the entreaties of his relatives, even punishment and seclusion, were inefficacious to reclaim him. Disliking books, the sole use he made of opportunities of study, was to imbibe the abominable and sanguinary maxims of the Inquisition. The taint of Carlism, widely spread amongst the clergy of the diocese of Tortosa, whose bishop, Saenz, was an influential and devoted member of the apostolical party, was speedily contracted by Cabrera. By character and propensities better fitted for an unscrupulous military partisan than for a minister of the gospel, for a devouring wolf than for a meek and humble shepherd of God’s flock, no sooner was the cry of insurrection raised in the kingdom of Arragon than he hastened to swell it with his voice. On the 15th of November 1833 he joined Colonel Carnicer, who had already planted on the ramparts of Morella the standard of Charles the Fifth.

Six years have elapsed since the termination of the civil war in Arragon and Valencia, and we should scarcely hope to interest English readers by raking up its details. In taking the volumes named at foot for the subject of an article, our intention is rather to give a correct notion of the character of a man who by one party has been extolled as a hero, by another stigmatized as a savage. A brief sketch of his career, and a few personal anecdotes, will afford the best means of deciding which of these epithets he may with most justice claim.

For the first sixteen months of the war, Cabrera acted as subordinate to Carnicer, chief of the Arragonese Carlists; and during that time he in no way distinguished himself, save by occasional acts of cruelty. His presumption and want of military knowledge caused the loss of more than one action—especially that of Mayals in Catalonia, in which, as it was then thought, the Arragonese faction received its death-blow. This unlucky encounter was followed by various lesser ones, equally disastrous; and at the commencement of 1835, the Carlist chiefs in the eastern provinces of the Peninsula were reduced to wander in the mountains at the head of scanty and disheartened bands, seeking shelter from the Queen’s troops, against whom they were totally unable to make a stand. Furious at this state of things, and still more so at the conduct of Carnicer, to whose lenity with the prisoners and population he attributed their reverses, discontented also with his obscure and subaltern position, Cabrera, who represented in Arragon the apostolical or ultra-absolutist party, and who on that account had influential supporters at the court of Charles the Fifth, resolved upon a bold attempt to get rid of his chief and command in his stead. Abandoning his post, he set out for Navarre, in company with a clever and resolute female of considerable personal attractions, intended as a propitiatory offering to the royal widower whose favour he was about to solicit. On his arrival he obtained a private audience of Don Carlos, to whom he represented himself as capable of commanding in Arragon, and of achieving the triumph of the King’s cause. He exposed his plan of campaign, accused Carnicer of weakness and mistaken humanity, and urged the necessity of severe and sanguinary measures. The result of his representations, and of the pleadings of his friends, some of whom were the Pretender’s most esteemed counsellors, was his return to Arragon, bearing a despatch by which Carnicer was ordered to make over his command to Cabrera, and to present himself at headquarters in Navarre. On the ninth of March 1835, Cabrera assumed the supreme command, and Carnicer, in obedience to his instructions, set out for the Basque country. On his road he fell into the hands of the Christinos, and was shot at Miranda del Ebro.

Public opinion amongst the Carlists unhesitatingly attributed to Cabrera the death of his former superior. Under pretence of their serving him as guides, he had prevailed upon Carnicer to take with him two officers whom he pointed out. These were also made prisoners; but although the Eliot convention was not yet in existence, and quarter was rarely given, both of them were exchanged after a very short delay. The information received by the Christino authorities, of the route that Carnicer was to follow, was sent from the village of Palomar on a day when Cabrera was quartered there. Other circumstances confirmed the suspicion of foul play, and that Carnicer had been betrayed by his own party; and so generally was the treachery imputed to Cabrera, that he at last took notice of the charge, and used every means to check its discussion. So long as a year afterwards, he shot at Camarillas the brother of one of the two officers who had accompanied Carnicer, for having been so imprudent as to say that the latter had been sold by Cabrera.[B] Such severity produced, of course, a directly opposite effect to that desired by its author; for although Cabrera pretexted other motives, its real ones were evident, and all men remained convinced of his guilt. Subsequently the Carlist general Cabañero threw the alleged calumny in his face in presence of several persons, and instead of repelling it with his sword, Cabrera submitted patiently to the imputation.

[B] By a remarkable coincidence, this execution occurred on the 16th of February 1836, on the same day and at the very same hour that Cabrera’s mother was shot at Tortosa. To this latter unfortunate and cruel act, which has been absurdly urged as a justification of Cabrera’s atrocities, further reference will presently be made.

Justly distrustful of those about him, Carnicer, when passing the night in the mountains, was wont to change his sleeping place after all his companions had retired to rest. On one occasion, in the neighbourhood of Alacon, a soldier who had lain down upon the couch prepared for his general, was assassinated by a pistol-shot. Cabrera was in the encampment, and although the perpetrator of the deed was never positively known, rumour laid the crime at his door. Whether or not the dark suspicion was well founded, the establishment of its justice would scarcely add a shade of blackness to the character of Ramon Cabrera.

Already, during a period of eighteen months, the kingdoms of Arragon and Valencia had groaned beneath the calamities of civil war. Their cattle driven, their granaries plundered, their sons dragged away to become unwilling defenders of Don Carlos, the unfortunate inhabitants could scarcely conceive a worse state than that of continual alarm and insecurity in which they lived. They had yet to learn that what they had hitherto endured was light to bear, compared to the atrocious system introduced by the ruthless successor of Carnicer. From the day that Cabrera assumed the command, the war became a butchery, and its inflictions ceased to be confined to the armed combatants on either side. Thenceforward, the infant in the cradle, the bedridden old man, the pregnant matron, were included amongst its victims. A mere suspicion of liberal opinions, the possession of a national guardsman’s uniform, a glass of water given to a wounded Christino, a distant relationship to a partisan of the Queen, was sentence of death. The rules of civilized warfare were set at nought, and Cabrera, in obedience to his sanguinary instincts, committed his murders not only when they might possibly advance, but even when they must positively injure, the cause of him whom he styled his sovereign. “Those days that I do not shed blood,” said he, in July 1837, when waiting in the ante-chamber of Don Carlos with Villareal, Merino, Cuevillas, and other generals, “I have not a good digestion.” During the five years of his command, his digestion can rarely have been troubled.

The task of recording the exploits and cruelties of Cabrera, and the history of the war in which he took so prominent a part, has been undertaken by three Spaniards of respectability and talent; the principal of whom, Don Francisco Cabello, was formerly political chief of the province of Teruel, in the immediate vicinity of Cabrera’s strongholds. There he had abundant opportunities of gathering information concerning the Carlist leader. In the book before us he does not confine himself to bare assertion, but supplies an ample appendix of justificatory documents, without which, indeed, many of the atrocious facts related would find few believers.

The Carlist troops in Arragon and Valencia were of very different composition from those in Navarre and Biscay. In the latter provinces, an intelligent and industrious peasantry rose to defend certain local rights and immunities, whose preservation, they were taught to believe, was bound up with the success of Don Carlos. In Eastern Spain the mass of the respectable and labouring classes were of liberal opinions, and the ranks of the faction were swelled by the dregs and refuse of the population. Highwaymen and smugglers, escaped criminals, profligate monks, bad characters of every description, banded together under command of chiefs little better than themselves, but who, by greater energy, or from having a smattering of military knowledge, gained an ascendancy over their fellows. In these motley hordes of reprobates, who, after a time, schooled by experience and defeat, were formed into regular battalions, capable of contending, with chances of success, against equal numbers of the Queen’s troops, the clergy played a conspicuous part. Rare were the encounters between Christinos and Carlists, in which some sturdy friar did not lose his life whilst heading and encouraging the latter; after every action cowls and breviaries formed part of the spoil; scarce one of the rebel leaders but had his clerical staff of chaplains, sharing in, often stimulating, his cruelties and excesses. Those monks who did not openly take the field, busied themselves in promoting disaffection amongst the Queen’s partisans. The most subversive sermons were daily preached; the confessional became the vehicle of insidious and treasonable admonitions; the liberal section of the clergy was subjected to cruel molestation and injustice. All these circumstances, added to the scandal and discord that reigned in the convents, loudly called for the suppression of the latter. Not only the government, which saw and suffered from the rebellion so enthusiastically shared in and promoted by the monks, but the very founders of the orders, could they have revisited Spain, would have advised their abolition. The following curious extract from the book now under review gives a striking picture of Spanish monastic doings in the nineteenth century.

“If, in the year 1835, St Bernard could have accompanied us on our visit to the monastery of Beruela in the Moncayo, surely he would have been indignant, and would have chastised the monks; surely he himself would have solicited the extinction of his order. Out of thirty monks, very few confessed, and only two or three knew how to preach; every one breakfasted and said mass just when he thought proper; by nine in the morning they might be seen wandering about the neighbouring country and gardens, or shooting small birds near the gates of the monastery; at eleven, they assembled in a cell to play monté with visitors from the neighbouring towns and villages, winning and losing thousands of reals. During dinner, instead of having some grave and proper book read aloud to them, one of their number related obscene stories for the amusement of his companions; at dessert the finest wines were served, the monks played upon the piano, and sang indecent songs. The siesta passed away the afternoon, until, towards evening, these self-denying anchorites roused themselves from their slumbers, and resumed their favourite amusements of birding and tale-telling. At nightfall the green-cloth was again spread, and the cards were in full activity; sometimes six or eight of the monks got upon their mules, and rode a distance of two or three leagues to a ball, dressed in the height of the fashion. The writer of these pages once asked the prior to let him see the paintings executed by the brotherhood; he was conducted to the apartments of the abbot, and in the most secluded of them was shown a wretched daub, of which the subject was shamefully coarse and disgusting. * * * Many of the women of the neighbouring village of Vera went by the names of the monks; and so great became the scandal, that, on one occasion, when the national guards were sent upon an expedition, the alcalde issued an order prohibiting their wives to walk in the direction of the monastery. One woman, who disobeyed the injunction, was made to pay a fine, and narrowly escaped having her head shaved in the public marketplace.”

The monks prosecuted the alcalde for this abuse of authority; but in the course of the trial so many scandalous revelations were made concerning them, that the over-zealous official got off with a very light punishment. His proclamation, the sentence of the Audiencia of Saragossa, and some other documents confirming the truth of the above allegations against the monastery, are given in the appendix to Señor Cabello’s book. “Certainly,” continues that gentleman, “all monasteries were not like that of Beruela. There were many virtuous, enlightened, and laborious monks; but if these were too numerous to be styled the exceptions, they at any rate composed the minority.”

To return to Cabrera. His first act, upon assuming the supreme command, was to collect the scattered remnant of Carnicer’s faction, which amounted but to three hundred infantry and forty horsemen. With these he commenced operations, limited at first, owing to the scanty numbers of his band, to marauding expeditions amongst the villages, whence he retreated to the mountains on the approach of the Queen’s forces. His cruelties soon made him universally dreaded in the districts he overran. To the militia especially he gave no quarter, slaying them unmercifully, wherever he could lay hands upon them, even when they capitulated on promise of good treatment. He was seconded by Quilez, El Serrador, Llangostera, and other partisans, as desperate, and nearly as bloodthirsty, as himself. With extraordinary and stupid obstinacy, the Madrid government persisted in treating the Arragonese rebellion as unimportant; and instead of at once sending a sufficient force for its suppression, allowed the insurgents to gain ground, recruit their forces, capture fortified places, and ravage the country, setting at defiance the feeble garrisons, and gallant but unavailing efforts of the national guard.

On the 11th of September, at day-break, Cabrera suddenly appeared in the town of Rubielos de Mora. Believing him far away, the garrison were taken entirely by surprise, and after a brief skirmish in the streets, retreated to a fortified convent. Here they made a vigorous defence, and no efforts of the Carlists were sufficient to dislodge them; until at dawn upon the 12th, after a siege of twenty-four hours, the Christinos perceived the points of the assailants’ pickaxes piercing the wall that divided the convent from an adjoining house. They set fire to the house, but unfortunately a high wind fanned the flames, which speedily communicated to the convent. Even then the besieged continued to defend themselves, but at last, overcome by fatigue, hunger, and thirst, scorched, bruised, and exhausted, they accepted the terms offered by the besiegers. Their lives were to be spared, and they were to retain their clothes and whatever property they had about them. Cabrera and Forcadell signed the agreement; and sixty-five national guardsmen and soldiers of the regiment of Ciudad Real marched out of the burning convent, and were escorted by the Carlists in the direction of Nogueruelas. On reaching a plain near that town, known as the Dehesa, or Pasture, Cabrera ordered a halt, that his soldiers might eat their rations. The prisoners also were supplied with food. The meal over, the Carlist chief formed his infantry and cavalry in a circle, made the captives strip off every part of their clothing, and bade them run. No sooner did they obey his order, than they were charged with lance and bayonet, and slaughtered to a man. It was a fine feast of blood for Cabrera and his myrmidons. On the body of one victim twenty-six wounds were afterwards counted. When Cabrera departed, the authorities of the adjacent town buried the bodies; but at the end of the war, in the year 1841, upon the anniversary of the massacre, their remains were disinterred and removed to Rubielos with much pomp and religious ceremony.

Such were the pastimes of Cabrera, such was the faith he kept with those who confided in his word. The barbarous execution detailed above was one of many that occurred in the first year of his command. Up to the month of February 1836, the number of his victims, slain after the battle, in cold blood, often in defiance of capitulation, sometimes on mere suspition of liberalism, amounted to one hundred and eighty-one. This does not include murders committed on the highways and in the mountains, but those only of which there were abundant witnesses, and that are proved by dates and documents. Amongst the slaughtered, were children and old men. Two lads of sixteen and seventeen years of age were shot at Codoñera in presence of their mother. When she implored Cabrera’s mercy, he told her that her sons should be spared if her husband would give himself up and take their place. On hearing this reply, worthy of a Caligula or a Nero, the unhappy woman swooned away, and the infant at her breast fell dead from her arms as if struck by lightning. The shock to the mother had killed the child. All these atrocities were committed whilst Cabrera’s mother yet lived unmolested in Tortosa.

Meanwhile the Christino general Nogueras, busied in the pursuit of the rebels, passed his whole time in the mountains, often not entering a town for a month together, except to get pay or shoes for his troops. Wherever he went, he was assailed by the tears and lamentations of bereaved wives and mothers. If he paused at Calatayud, they told him of the death of nine national guards shot at Castejoncillo; at Caspe, the weeping widows and orphans of five others presented themselves before him; at Teruel he was horrified by the narrative of the massacre of the Dehesa; when he traversed the plains of Alpuente, the Carrascal of Yesa, where forty prisoners had been bayoneted, was pointed out to his notice; in the Maestrazgo he found universal mourning for sixty-one nationals, pitilessly butchered at Alcanar; in each hamlet where he halted for the night, the authorities complained to him of the most barbarous ill-treatment at the hands of Cabrera. Not a village did he pass through, whose alcalde had not been brutally bastinadoed. From his companions, his visitors, his guides, he heard continually of Cabrera’s cruelties. In the whole district nothing, else was talked of. The sole thought of the liberal party was how to put a period to them, and to be avenged upon their perpetrator. The most humane and peaceable men urged a system of reprisals, as both legitimate and likely to be efficacious. Such a system, Nogueras, yielding to the public voice, and enraged at the murder of two alcaldes, whom Cabrera had causelessly shot, at last resolved to adopt. He demanded the execution of Cabrera’s mother, in the vain hope that it would strike terror into the rebel chief, and check his excesses. Most unhappy was the impulse to which he yielded. The act itself was cruel and hasty; its consequences were terrible. But such was the state of feeling in Arragon at that time, that, until those consequences were felt, many approved the deed. The captain-general of Arragon, Don Francisco Serrano, a man noted for humanity and mildness, deemed the measure advisable, and even announced it with satisfaction in a proclamation, by which he declared a similar fate to be in reserve for Cabrera’s sisters, and for the relatives of the other rebel chiefs, if the Carlists persisted in their atrocities. Hitherto the whole odium of the fate of a forlorn old woman, who perhaps deplored as much as any one the enormities committed by her son, has rested upon Nogueras. This is hardly fair. Ill-advised, and in a moment of just irritation, he urged a request, too hastily complied with, speedily repented, and which, according to the conviction of Señor Cabello, he would himself have retracted had he not been absent from Tortosa when its accomplishment took place. A more unfortunate act, to whomsoever it may chiefly be imputed, could not have been devised. It was at once repudiated by the Spanish government, by the Cortes and the nation. In the eyes of Europe, it went far to convert Cabrera from a pitiless butcher into an injured victim. At a distance from the theatre of war, the nine score unfortunates whom he had massacred in cold blood were forgotten or overlooked. Pity for the mother’s fate procured oblivion for the previous crimes of the son. Filial affection and regret, working upon an impassioned nature, were urged in extenuation of his subsequent excesses. His massacres became holocausts, offered by a pious child to the manes of a murdered parent.

In Valderobles, on the 20th of February, Cabrera received intelligence of his mother’s death. Its first result was a ferocious proclamation, by an article of which he decreed the death of four women, one of them the lady of a Christino colonel, then in his power. Had he shot them at once, in the first heat of anger and heaviness of grief, the act, however barbarous and severe, would have been palliated by circumstances; but for seven days he dragged those unfortunate women with him on all his marches, compelling them to wander barefoot over the rugged Mountains of Arragon. So great were the sufferings of these poor creatures, that even Cabrera’s aides-de-camp, albeit not very tender-hearted, interceded for them with their chief. At last, on the 27th February, having returned to Valderobles, three of the women were released from their misery by a violent death. This execution was followed by many others. Seven and twenty national guards, taken prisoners at Liria, were kept alive for two or three days, and then massacred at Chiva. On the 17th of April, the ferryman of Olva, who acted as spy to Cabrera, and who was shot after the war, in the year 1841, brought information to the Carlist camp that two companies of Christino soldiers, quartered in the hamlet of Alcotas, kept but a careless watch, and might easily be surprised. Cabrera immediately set out, the ferryman acting as guide, and fell upon the Christinos before they were aware of his approach. They defended themselves bravely; but their ammunition being expended, and themselves surrounded, they capitulated on promise of quarter. Cabrera’s chaplain, Father Escorihuela, was the person who prevailed on them to surrender, solemnly assuring them that their lives should be spared. A few hours later, this same priest heard the confession of the officers previously to their execution. To the soldiers, even the last consolations of religion were refused. Unshriven, they were shot to the last man.

But enough of such sanguinary details. Notwithstanding a severe defeat sustained a short time previously at Molina, Cabrera, in the spring of 1836, found himself at the head of four thousand infantry and three hundred dragoons. He displayed extraordinary activity; improved the organisation of his forces, and put them upon the footing of a regular army. Owing to these ameliorations, and to the culpable negligence of the Spanish government, who left the Army of the Centre unprovided with the commonest necessaries for campaigning, he was now able to abandon his former haunts in the mountains of Beceite, and to advance into the open country. Seeing the necessity of a stronghold for his stores and hospitals, and as a place of refuge in case of a reverse, he fixed upon the town of Cantavieja, which, from its size, the strength of its walls, its central position in the territory of his operations, and especially from the difficulty of bringing artillery over the steep and bad roads leading to it, was peculiarly suited to his purpose. He set to work to fortify it; and in spite of the representations made to the Madrid government by the inhabitants of the province, who foresaw the evils that would accrue to them from its fortification, he was allowed, without interruption or molestation, to put it in a state of defence. The energy and skill exhibited by him at this period were wonderfully great, and would have done honour to an older soldier. He formed capacious hospitals, and vast depots for food and other stores; established powder manufactories, and workshops for armourers and tailors; and leaving a strong garrison in the place, again took the field.

Some sharp fighting now occurred, and the Christinos had the worst of it in several encounters; until at last the minister of war, roused from his apathy, sent strong reinforcements to Arragon and Valencia. Amongst others, General Narvaez, at the head of a brilliant brigade, was detached from the army of the north, and after a rapid march of nine days, during which he crossed nearly the whole north-eastern corner of Spain from the Bay of Biscay to the Mediterranean, arrived at Teruel, and commenced operations with an activity that inspired the Arragonese with fresh hopes of a prompt termination of the war. He was in the field, and hard upon the heels of a Carlist corps commanded by a chief known as the Organist, when an orderly, bearing despatches from Madrid, came up at speed. “Yonder rebels,” said Narvaez, after reading his letters, and pointing to the enemy, “may truly say that they exist by royal order.” The despatches directed him instantly to quit Arragon, and pursue Gomez, who had left Biscay on his celebrated expedition to the southern provinces of Spain.

It is significant of the little estimation in which Cabrera was held by the generals of the Navarrese and Biscayan faction, that when Gomez, finding himself hard pressed by the Queen’s troops, sent to Arragon for assistance, he did not address himself to Cabrera, who commanded in chief in that province, but to Quilez and El Serrador, subordinate partisans. Nevertheless Cabrera joined him, not with a body of troops, but accompanied only by his aides-de-camp and staff, and by one of his clerical mentors, the canon Cala y Valcarcel. Gomez treated him with great contempt, and would give him no command in his division; but he still continued with him, and was present at the defeat of Villarrobledo, where Diego Leon with his hussars routed Gomez, taking the whole of his baggage, twelve hundred prisoners, and two thousand muskets. When the Carlists occupied Cordova, Cabrera was one of the first men in the town, which he entered with a handful of cavalry, under the command of Villalobos, to whom he had attached himself, and who was killed by a shot fired from a window. If Gomez disliked Cabrera, Cabrera, on his side, heartily despised Gomez. To have captured three thousand national guardsmen in Cordova, and not to have shot at least a couple of thousands of them—to have spared the fifteen hundred men composing the garrison of Almaden, were inexcusable weaknesses in the eyes of the Arragonese leader. Moreover, his name was omitted in the despatches and proclamations announcing the triumphs of the division; and at this he was indignant, viewing it as a stain upon his reputation, and a dishonour to his rank. At last, so troublesome did he become, constantly murmuring at whatever was done, and even conspiring to promote mutiny amongst the men, that Gomez, in order not to shoot him, which he otherwise would have been compelled to do, insisted upon their parting company. On the 3d of November, Cabrera, with his staff, orderlies, and a small escort, set out for the mountains of Toledo. His numbers increased by the accession of some parties of Carlist cavalry, picked up on the road, he passed through La Mancha, and made for the Ebro, intending to visit Don Carlos at Oñate. But whilst seeking a ford, he was surprised by the cavalry of Irribarren. The lances of Leon and the sabres of Buenvenga made short work of it with the astonished rebels. Cabrera and a handful of men escaped, and only paused at midnight, when exhausted by their long flight, in the village of Arévalo. Scarcely had they taken up their quarters, when a column of Christino infantry dashed into the place, bayoneting all before them. Unacquainted with the localities, Cabrera wandered about the streets, seeking an exit; and finally, favoured by the darkness, and after receiving a stab from a knife, and another from a bayonet, he succeeded in escaping to the neighbouring forest. Here he was found by one of his officers, who conveyed him to the house of a village priest, named Moron, where he was concealed and taken care of till his wounds were healed. At the commencement of 1837 he found himself well enough to travel, and started for Arragon, escorted by a squadron of cavalry and a few light infantry, whom he had sent for from the Maestrazgo. But he had been tracked by Christino spies, and Señor Cabello, then political chief of Teruel, had information of his route. This he communicated to the military governor, an old and dilatory officer, who moved out with a small body of troops, intending to surprise Cabrera at Camañas, one of his halting places, and hoping to gain in the field the promotion which he would have done better to have awaited within the walls of his citadel. At a village, four hours’ march from Camañas, he paused, and wasted a day in sending out spies to ascertain the movements of the enemy. His emissaries at last returned; but only to tell him that Cabrera had rested at Camañas from ten in the morning till one in the afternoon, and had then continued his journey, travelling in a wretched carriage, and escorted by a hundred sleepy infantry, and as many horsemen, whose beasts were unshod, and half dead with fatigue. It was too late to pursue; and thus, owing to the sluggishness and incapacity of this officer, Cabrera escaped, probably without knowing it, from one of the greatest risks he had yet run.

The disastrous result of the various expeditions which, under Gomez, Garcia, and others, had left the Basque provinces for the interior of Spain, had not yet convinced Don Carlos that his cause was unpopular. Deceived by his flatterers, who assured him that his appearance would every where be the signal for a general uprising in his favour, he crossed the Ebro in the month of May with sixteen battalions and nine squadrons. Victorious at Huesca, at Gra, in Catalonia, his army was utterly routed by the Baron de Meer and Diego Leon; and his sole thought then became how to recross the Ebro, and take refuge at Cantavieja, under the wing of his faithful Cabrera. Orders were sent to the latter chief to come and meet his sovereign. He obeyed, and by his assistance the passage of the river was accomplished. It was shortly before this time that Cabrera, whilst witnessing the conflagration of a village set on fire by his command, was struck by lightning, which killed one of his aides-de-camp, and threw him senseless from his horse. At first it was thought that he also was dead; but bleeding restored him, and the next day he was again in the saddle, burning, plundering, and shooting. His atrocities at this period surpass belief, and are too horrible to recapitulate. The curious in such matters may find them set down in all their hideous details, in the pages of Señor Cabello. Whether on account of his cruelties, or of his other bad qualities, most of the Carlist generals in Arragon about this time refused to act with him, and even loaded him with abuse. Cabañero actually challenged him to fight—a challenge which he did not think proper to accept. The same chief repeatedly told Don Carlos that he would rather serve as a private soldier in the army of Navarre than as a general under the orders of Cabrera. Quilez, who hated Cabrera as the assassin of his friend and countryman Carnicer, published an address to the Arragonese troops, calling upon them to leave the standard of the vile, dissolute, and cowardly Catalonian who disgraced them by his cruelties. He invited their attention to the ruined and miserable condition of their province since Cabrera had commanded there, and urged them to petition Don Carlos to give them a general more worthy of defending his rights and leading them to victory. So high did the quarrel run, and so widely did it spread, that the Arragonese and Catalonian battalions were near coming to blows. Don Carlos supported Cabrera, and Quilez and Cabañero, with their divisions, separated themselves from the army, and went to make war elsewhere.

In the month of July there were forty thousand infantry and four thousand cavalry in the province of Teruel; for nearly four years the district had been devastated and plundered by the Carlists, and the harvest was not yet ripe. Under these circumstances the troops were half-starved. The Carlist soldiers received no bread and only half rations of meat. Even in the towns, and for ready money, provisions were unobtainable. The Conde de Luchana, who then commanded the Christinos, did all that general could do, more than could be expected of any commander—all, in short, that he was wont to do, when the opportunity offered, for the cause of liberty and of his Queen. Thinking that the surrounding country would not supply rations because the impoverished government could not pay cash for them, he drew upon his private funds, and sent a commissioner with large sums of money to Teruel, to purchase all the corn that could be obtained. This was so little that it did not yield two days’ rations to each soldier. At last Espartero and his division were summoned to the defence of Madrid, then menaced by Zaratiegui. During his absence occurred the action of Herrera, in which General Buerens, greatly outnumbered, was defeated with considerable loss. But this reverse was soon revenged. Encouraged by their recent success, Don Carlos and Cabrera approached Madrid by forced marches. Their movements had been so eccentric and rapid that they had thrown most of the Christino generals off the scent. Espartero was an exception. After driving away Zaratiegui, he had returned to Arragon. He now hurried back to Madrid, and entered its gates a few hours after the arrival of the Pretender within sight of that city, amidst the acclamations of the national guards, who, until then, formed the sole garrison of the capital. Don Carlos retired, Espartero followed, came up with him on the 19th of September, and so mauled his army that he entirely gave up his mad project of establishing himself in Madrid, sent Cabrera back to Arragon, and scampered off in the direction of the Basque provinces. He was followed up by Espartero and Lorenzo, overtaken and beaten at Covarubbias and at Huerta del Rey, and finally entered Biscay in lamentable plight, his illusions dissipated, his hopes of one day sitting upon the throne of his ancestors entirely destroyed. Five months had elapsed since he left Navarre, and strange had been their vicissitudes. Surrounded in Sanguesa by bishops, ministers, generals, and courtiers, in Espejo a handful of Chapel-churris were his sole defenders. Enthroned and almost worshipped at Huesca in the mountains of Bronchales he had been glad to accept the support and guidance of a shepherd. One day holding a levee, the next he was unable to write a letter in safety. At Barbastro he bestowed places and honours upon his adherents; at El Pobo he had not wherewith to reward the servants who waited on him. Strange transitions, bitterly felt! By the failure of the expedition all his prospects were blighted. A loan, and his recognition by the Northern powers, both promised him contingently on his entering Madrid, were now more remote than ever. That nothing might be wanting to the discomfiture of this ill-starred prince, even the hypocrisy of his character was discovered and exposed. Several of his letters to the Princess of Beira were intercepted by General Oraa, and published in the Spanish newspapers. Although written by one professedly so devout and austere, their contents were both trivial and licentious.

The year 1838 opened disastrously for the Christinos. The strong town and fort of Morella fell into the hands of Cabrera. Situated on a hill in the valley formed by the highest sierras of the Maestrazgo, and at the point of junction of Arragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, difficult of approach, and protected by defiles and rivers, chief town of a corregimiento or department, and possessing considerable wealth both agricultural and manufacturing, it was, of all others, the place most coveted by the Carlists. For a long time previously to its capture, an officer of the faction, Paul Alio by name, had been entrusted with its blockade. His orders were to employ every possible means to win over the garrison or accomplish a coup de main. Various attempts had proved unsuccessful, when, at the moment that he least expected it, he was suddenly enabled to accomplish his objects. An artilleryman, a deserter from the castle, offered to scale the walls with twenty men, to surprise the sentinel upon the platform, and subsequently the whole guard. The idea was caught at; ladders were made according to the measure which the traitor had brought of the exact height of the walls, and on the dark and rainy night of the 25th January a party of Carlists crept up the hill, planted and climbed the ladders, stabbed the sentry, who was asleep in his box, overcame the guard, and fired upon the town. In vain did the unfortunate governor, Don Bruno Portillo, endeavour to make his way into the fort; he was repulsed and wounded, and before morning he and the remains of the garrison were compelled to abandon Morella. Although an old and respected officer, he was accused of treachery, or at least of want of vigilance. The latter might perhaps be imputed to him, but there appear to have been no sufficient grounds for the former charge. Eager to wash out the stain upon his reputation, he returned to Morella, when General Oraa made his unsuccessful attack upon it a few months later, and died leading the forlorn-hope, the first man upon the breach.

The capture of Morella was a great triumph for Cabrera, whose chief stronghold it became. It assured him the dominion of a large and fertile tract of country. From its towers, lofty though they were, the banner of Isabella the Second could nowhere be descried, save on the coasts of the Mediterranean and the distant banks of the Ebro. The termination of the war seemed less likely than ever.

It was about a month after the surprise of Morella, that General Cabañero, encouraged by the recent success of his party, eager for distinction, and perhaps jealous of Cabrera’s reputation, attempted the most daring and dashing enterprise of the whole war. He conceived the hope of capturing in one night, and with three thousand men, a fortress that had defended itself for two months against the best generals of Napoleon, backed by seventy thousand veterans, and a hundred pieces of artillery. The capital of Arragon, the heroic city of Saragossa, was the high game at which Cabañero ventured to fly. Had he succeeded, he would have commanded the Ebro and the communication between Navarre and Catalonia, and might have installed Don Carlos in the palace of Alonzo the Fifth, and of Ferdinand the Catholic. Making one march from Alloza, a distance of four-and-twenty hours, he arrived late at night in the environs of Saragossa. Provided with ladders by the owner of a neighbouring country-house, who was in his confidence, he caused a few soldiers to scale the wall, and open the gate of the Virgin de la Carmen, through which he marched. Some vivas given for Cabañero and Carlos Quinto roused the nearest inhabitants, and preserved the main guard from a surprise. Shots were fired, and the alarm spread. By this time Cabañero was far into the town, posting his battalions in the squares and open places. In every street the Carlist drums were beating, and several houses were broken open and entered. It was a terrible moment for the inhabitants of Saragossa. Startled from their sleep, without chiefs to direct or previous plan to guide them, none knew what measures to adopt. Some few ran to the public squares, and were taken prisoners; but the majority, recovering from their first panic, adopted the best and surest means of ridding the city of the unexpected foe. In an instant every window was thrown open, and bristled with the muskets of the national guards. They could not be confident of victory, for they were totally ignorant of the number of their enemies; but if the triumph was to be for the latter, the Sargossans were determined that it should cost them dear. When the much-wished-for daylight appeared, the battle ceased to be from the balconies; the nationals, and about two hundred soldiers of various regiments who happened to be in the town, descended to the streets, and after a sharp but short struggle, drove out the daring intruders. The loss of the Carlists was a thousand men, inclusive of seven hundred prisoners; that of the Saragossans amounted to about one hundred and twenty.

Various strange incidents occurred during this night-attack. A French writer who visited Arragon during the civil war, relates an anecdote of two drummers who came up with each other at midnight in the streets of Saragossa, both plying their sticks with extraordinary vigour, but to very different tunes.

“Why do you beat the chamade?” demanded one.

“Why do you beat to arms?” retorted the other.

“I obey my orders.”

“And I mine.”

At that moment a passing lantern lit up the Carlist boina of the one, and the blue national guard’s uniform of the other. The drummers stared at each other for a moment, and then, instead of drawing their swords and setting to, which one would have thought the most natural course to adopt, they continued their march side by side, each indulging in his own particular rub-a-dub. The rights of the sheepskin were mutually respected.

The results of Cabañero’s attack were a cross of honour conferred upon the national guards, who had made so gallant a defence, and the death of the governor, Esteller, who was assassinated by the populace two days afterwards. His conduct during the fight had been marked by extreme weakness, and even cowardice. He entirely lost his presence of mind, could give no orders, and remained shut up in his house in spite of all the efforts of his aides-de-camp and secretaries to get him out into the street. He would not even allow his servants and orderlies to fire from the balconies, and his windows were the only ones in Saragossa that continued closed during that eventful night. The next day he was imprisoned, and it was intended to bring him to trial; but on the following morning a mob composed of the lowest of the people repaired to his place of confinement, brought him out into the streets and there murdered him. At the time the delinquents remained unpunished, but seven years later, in 1845, the sons of Esteller revived the affair, and procured the condemnation to ten years’ galleys of one Chorizo, the leader of the marranos, or lazzaroni of Saragossa. Chorizo, literally Sausage, whose real name was Melchior Luna, was a butcher by trade, and a sort of popular demagogue amongst the lower orders of his fellow citizens. But according to Señor Cabello, his condemnation was unjust; and instead of sharing in the murder of Esteller, he had done his utmost to protect him, even risking his own life to save that of the unfortunate governor. After a lapse of seven years it was difficult to get at the real facts of the case; and the chief effect of the trial has been to publish the pusillanimity of General Esteller, concerning which the people of Saragossa had previously observed a generous silence.

On the 1st of October 1838, the Christino general Pardinas, with five battalions and a regiment of cavalry, encountered Cabrera near the town of Maella. The forces were about equal on either side, and at first the Christinos had the advantage. But Pardinas having thrown his left too forward, it was cut off and surrounded. Without waiting for help from the centre and right wing, the battalions fell into confusion and surrendered themselves prisoners, thereby grievously compromising the remainder of the division. Astounded at the sudden loss of one third of his force, Pardinas made desperate efforts to preserve order; but all was in vain, and his heroic efforts and example served but to procure him an honourable death, thereby saving him the pain of reporting the most unfortunate and disgraceful action of the whole war. More than three-fifths of the division were killed or taken prisoners. The fate of the latter could not be doubtful, for Cabrera was their captor. Whilst still on the field of battle, with the groans of the wounded and dying sounding in his ears, he sent an order to Major Espinosa to kill a number of dragoons of the regiment del Rey, whom he had made prisoners. Espinosa replied, that, the action once over, he had forgotten how to use his lance. Cabrera, however, had little difficulty in finding a more pliant agent. The unhappy dragoons were stripped naked and bayoneted: Espinosa was deprived of his command and of future opportunities of distinction. The same afternoon Cabrera shot twenty-seven wounded, in hospital at Maella. Amongst his prisoners were ninety-six sergeants. These he crammed into a dark and narrow dungeon, and after a few days, proposed to them to take service in the rebel army. They all refused, and one of them imprudently added, “Sooner die than serve with robbers.” These words were reported to Cabrera, and he sought to discover the man who had uttered them; but although the other ninety-four well knew who it was, no menaces could induce them to betray their comrade. Any one but Cabrera would have been touched by such courage and constancy, but he only found in it a pretext for murder. The ninety-six sergeants were shot at Horcayo. Similar enormities now followed in rapid succession; until the exasperation in Saragossa and Valencia became extreme, and the inhabitants tumultuously assembled, demanding reprisals. These it was not safe to refuse. General Mendez Vigo, commanding at Valencia, and who ventured to deny them, was shot in the streets. Juntas were formed, and Carlist prisoners were executed. One of these unfortunates, when marching to his doom, was heard to exclaim, “Not to the people of Valencia, but to the infamous Cabrera, do I ascribe my death.” There was a great outcry made at the time, especially by persons who knew nothing of the real facts of the case, concerning these reprisals, which were in fact unavoidable. Cabrera’s atrocities had reached such a pitch, that disaffection was widely spreading in Arragon and Valencia. The people, finding themselves constantly in mourning for the death of some near relative, murdered by his orders, murmured against the government which could not protect them, and accused their rulers of Carlism and treachery, of cowardice and indifference. There was danger, almost a certainty indeed, of an insurrection, in which every Carlist prisoner and a vast number of innocent persons would inevitably have been sacrificed. Cabrera would listen to no proposals for exchanges, but persisted in shooting all who fell into his hands. Without reckoning the innumerable captives dead from hunger and cruel treatment, or those murdered on the march and in the Carlist depots, but counting only such as were shot and stabbed before witnesses, Cabrera had killed, previously to his mother’s death, one hundred and eighty-one soldiers and nationals; and seven hundred and thirty subsequently to that event, and up to the 1st of November 1838. His subalterns had slain three hundred and seventy more, making a total of twelve hundred and eighty. Under these circumstances, there was nothing for it but a system of retaliation. This, General Van Halen and the juntas adopted, and after a very short time the good effect was manifest. The imprecations of the Carlist prisoners, and the murmurs of his party, reached the ears of Cabrera in tones so menacing, that he was compelled to listen. The treaty for exchange of prisoners and cessation of reprisals, signed by him and Van Halen, caused much discontent amongst the coffeehouse politicians of the Puerta del Sol; but those who had experience of the war, and who dwelt in its district, appreciated the firmness of the Christino general, as well as the docility and true dignity with which he signed the honourable name of a brave soldier beside that of the assassin Count of Morella.

Anticipating an attack upon the fort of Segura, to whose possession he attached great importance, Cabrera took measures for its defence. For this, if the inhabitants of the town did not unite in it, a very large garrison was necessary. Cabrera endeavoured, therefore, by great promises, to win over the townspeople, menacing them at the same time with the destruction of their town if they did not comply with his wishes. They held a meeting, and its result was a declaration that they would never take up arms against the Queen, and that sooner than do so, they would submit to be driven from their dwellings, and become wanderers in the woods. Cabrera took them at their word, and in a few days the plough might have passed over the site of Segura. The magnificent church, the public edifices, and three hundred and fifty houses, were razed to the ground. The castle alone was preserved. The inhabitants themselves had been compelled to accomplish the work of destruction; and when that was done, sixteen hundred men, women, and children emigrated to the neighbouring villages, or took shelter in the caves and hollows of the pine forests. In this circumstance, it is hard to say which is most striking, the barbarity of the destroyer, or the courageous patriotism of the victims. The expected siege of the castle soon followed, but the inclemency of the weather compelled Van Halen to raise it. He was removed from the command, and Nogueras, who was to succeed him, being attacked by illness, the army in Arragon remained for a while without a competent chief. Cabrera took advantage of this, prosecuted the war with great activity and vigour, and captured some fortified places. Amongst others, he laid siege to Montalban, which was desperately defended for fifty days. At the end of that time, the town being reduced to ruins, the garrison and inhabitants evacuated it, and retired to Saragossa. During the siege, there occurred a trait worthy of Cabrera. The medicines for the wounded being expended, the colonel of the national guards spoke from the walls to the Carlist general, and begged permission to send to the nearest village for a fresh supply. There were many wounded Carlists in the town hospital, and it was expected, therefore, that the request would be granted. Cabrera refused it, but, feigning compassion, advised Vicente to hoist a flag upon the hospital, that it might be respected by the besiegers’ artillery. The flag was hoisted, and instantly became a mark for every gun the Carlists had. In the course of that day, sixty-six shells fell into the hospital, killing many of the wounded, and, amongst others, thirteen Carlist prisoners. During this siege, a young woman, two-and-twenty years of age, Manuela Cirugeda by name, emulous of the example of the Maid of Saragossa, served as a national guard, and fought most valiantly, until incapacitated by illness, the result of her fatigues and exertions.

Were it his only crime, Cabrera’s treatment of his prisoners in the dungeons of Morella, Benifasa, and other places, would suffice to brand him with eternal infamy. From the commencement of the war till he was driven out of the country, twelve thousand soldiers and two thousand national guards fell into his hands. Half of the first named, and two-thirds of the latter, died of hunger, ill treatment, and of the diseases produced by the stifling atmosphere of their prisons, by the bad quality of their food, and the state of general destitution in which they were left. Those who bore up against their manifold sufferings only regained their liberty to enter an hospital, incapacitated for further military service. It took months to rid them of the dingy, copper-coloured complexion acquired in their damp and filthy prisons, and some of them never lost it. When the prisoners taken in the action of Herrera arrived at Cantavieja, they were barefooted, and for sole raiment many had but a fragment of matting, wherewith to cover their nakedness, and defend themselves from the weather. They were thrust into a convent, and no one was allowed to communicate with them: even mothers, who anxiously strove to convey a morsel of bread to their starving sons, were pitilessly driven away. Sick and squalid, they were marched off to Beceite, and on the road more than two hundred were murdered. Those who paused or sat down, overcome by fatigue, were disposed of with the bayonet; some fainted from exhaustion, and had their heads crushed with large stones, heaped upon them by their guards. The muleteers, who compassionately lent their beasts to the wounded or dying, were unmercifully beaten. On reaching Beceite, the daily ration of each prisoner was two ounces of raw potatoes. After repeated entreaties of the inhabitants they were at last allowed to leave their prison by detachments, in order to clean the streets; and by this means they were enabled to receive the assistance which the very poorest of the people stinted themselves and their children to afford them. In spite of the prohibitions of the Carlist authorities, bread, potatoes, and maize ears were thrown into the streets for their relief. But even of these trifling supplies they were presently deprived, for an epidemic broke out amongst them, and they were forbidden to leave their prison lest they should communicate it to the troops. Will it be believed that in a Christian country, and within the last ten years, men were reduced to such extremities as to devour the dead bodies of their companions? Such was the case. It has been printed fifty times, and hundreds of living witnesses are ready to attest it. When the Carlist colonel Pellicer, the savage under whose eyes these atrocities occurred, discovered the horrible means by which his wretched captives assuaged the pangs of hunger, he became furious, caused the prisoners to be searched, and shot and bayoneted those who had preserved fragments of their frightful meal. The poor creatures thus condemned marched to death with joy and self-gratulation; those who remained accused themselves of a similar crime, and entreated that they also might be shot. Twelve hundred entered the prison; two hundred left it; and of these, thirty were massacred upon the road because they were too weak to march. In the appendix to his book, Señor Cabello gives the diary of a survivor, an officer of the regiment of Cordova. The cruelties narrated in it exceed belief. They are nevertheless confirmed by unimpeachable evidence. The following extract is from a document dated the 20th of March 1844, and signed by fifteen respectable inhabitants of Beceite.

“During the abode of the said prisoners in this town, each day twelve or fourteen of them died from hunger and misery. It was frequently observed, when they were conveyed from the prison to the cemetery, that some of them still moved, and made signs with their hands not to bury them; some even uttered words, but all in vain—dead or alive, those who once left the prison were buried, and only one instance was known of the contrary occurring. The chaplain of a Carlist battalion had gone to the burying-ground to see if the graves were deep enough, and whilst standing there, one of a pile of corpses pulled him by the coat. This attracted his attention, and he had the man carried to the hospital. * * * There would be no end to our narrative if we were to give a detailed account of the sufferings of these prisoners; so great were they, as at last to shock even the commandant of the depot, Don Juan Pellicer, who was heard to exclaim more than once that he wished somebody would blow out his brains, for he was sick of beholding so much misery and suffering. The few inhabitants who remained in the town behaved well, and notwithstanding that the Carlists robbed them of all they had, and that it was made a crime to help the prisoners, they managed in secret to give them some relief, especially to the officers. The facts here set down are true and certain, and of them more than a hundred eyewitnesses still exist.”

When the war in Biscay and Navarre was happily concluded by the convention of Vergara, the Duke de la Victoria invited Cabrera to follow the example of the other Carlist generals, offering to him and to the rebel troops under his command the same terms that had been conceded to those in the Basque provinces. But the offer, generous though it was, and undeserved by men who had made war like savages rather than as Christians, was contemptuously spurned. Those best acquainted with the character of Cabrera, were by no means surprised at the refusal. They foresaw that he would redouble his atrocities, and only yield to brute force. These anticipations were in most respects realised.

In the months of October 1839, Espartero, with the whole army of the North, consisting of forty thousand infantry, three thousand cavalry, and the corresponding artillery, entered lower Arragon. Anxious to economise the blood of his countrymen, trusting that Cabrera would open his eyes to the inutility of further resistance, confiding also, in some degree, in the promises of certain Carlist chiefs included in the treaty of Vergara, and who expected by their influence to bring over large bodies of the rebels, the Duke de la Victoria remained inactive during the winter, merely blockading the Carlists within their lines. Meanwhile Cabrera, debilitated by six years of anxiety and agitation, and by the dissolute life he had led from a very early age, and preyed upon by vexation and rage occasioned him by the convention of Vergara, fell seriously ill, and for some time his life was in peril. Contrary to expectation, he recovered; but sickness or reflection had unmanned him, and it is certain that in his last campaign he displayed little talent and less courage. Not so his subordinates. The Arragonese Carlists fought like lions, and the final triumph of the Queen’s army and of their distinguished leader was not achieved without a desperate struggle.

The first appearance of spring was the signal of action for the Christinos. Even before the inclement season had entirely passed away, in the latter days of February 1840, Espartero attacked Segura. One day’s well-directed cannonade knocked the fort about the ears of the garrison, and in spite of the proverb, Segura serà segura, ó de Ramon Cabrera sepultura, the place capitulated. The defence of Castellote was longer, and extraordinarily obstinate. Pelted with shot and shell, the walls mined and blown up and reduced to ruins, its garrison, with a courage worthy of a better cause, still refused to surrender, hoisted a black banner in sign of no quarter, and received a flag of truce with a volley. The position of the castle, on the summit of a steep and rugged rock, rendered it almost impossible to form a column of attack and take it by assault. At last, however, this was attempted, and after a desperate combat of an hour’s duration, and great loss on the part of the assailants, the latter established themselves in a detached building at the eastern extremity of the fortress. The besieged still defended themselves, hurling down hand-grenades and masses of stone, until at last, exhausted and overcome, they hung out a white flag. By their obstinate defence of an untenable post, when they had no hope of relief, they had forfeited their lives. Fortunately their conqueror was no Cabrera.

“They were Spaniards,” said Espartero in his despatch to Madrid, “blinded and deluded men who had fought with the utmost valour, and I could not do less than view them with compassion.” Their lives were spared, and the wounded were carried to the hospital in the arms of their recent opponents.

Cabrera had sworn to die before giving up Morella, but when the time came his heart failed him. He visited the town, harangued the garrison and inhabitants from the balcony of his quarters, and told them that he had come to share their fate. A day or two later he marched away, taking with him all his particular friends and favourites, and left Morella to take care of itself. It was the last place attacked by Espartero. The siege lasted eleven days, but Cabrera did not come to its relief; dissension arose amongst the garrison, and surrender ensued. Three thousand prisoners, including a number of Carlist civil functionaries, a quantity of artillery, ammunition, and other stores, fell into the hands of the victors. Morella taken, the war in Arragon was at an end.

Determined that his last act should be worthy of his whole career, Cabrera, now upon his road to France, precipitated into the Ebro a number of national guards, whom he carried with him as captives. Others were shot, and some few were actually dragged across the frontier, bound hand and foot, and only liberated by the French authorities. Such wanton cruelty is the best refutation of the arguments of certain writers, who have maintained that Cabrera was severe upon principle, with the sole objects of intimidating the enemy, and of furthering the cause of his king. On the eve of his departure from Spain, himself a fugitive, the self-styled sovereign a captive in a foreign land, what end, save the gratification of his insatiable thirst of blood, could be attained by the massacre of prisoners? At last, on the sixth of July 1840, he delivered his country from the presence of the most execrable monster that has disgraced her modern annals. On that day, at the head of twenty battalions and two hundred cavalry, Cabrera entered France.

By superficial persons, unacquainted with facts, attempts have been made to cast upon the whole Spanish nation the odium incurred by a small section of it. The cruelties of Cabrera and his likes, have been taken as an index to the Spanish character, wherein ferocity has been asserted to be the most conspicuous quality. Nothing can be more unjust and fallacious than such a theory. Cabrera’s atrocities were viewed and are remembered in Spain with as deep a horror as in England or France. Those who shared in them were a minute fraction of the population, and even of these, many acted on compulsion, and shuddered at the crimes they were obliged to witness and abet. Is the character of a nation to be argued from the excesses of its malefactors, even when, banded together and in military array, they assume the style and title of an army? Assuredly not. The Carlist standard, uplifted in Arragon, became a rallying point for the scum of the whole Spanish people. Under Cabrera’s banner, murder was applauded, plunder tolerated, vice of every description freely practised. And accordingly, escaped galley slaves, ruined profligates, the worthless and abandoned, flocked to its shelter. To these may be added the destitute, stimulated by their necessities; the ignorant and fanatical, led away by crafty priests; the unreflecting and unscrupulous, seeking military distinction where infamy alone was to be reaped. Bad example, seduction, even force, each contributed its quota to the army of Cabrera. From the commencement, the war was of a very different nature in Navarre and in Arragon. Both chiefs and soldiers were of different origin, and fought for different ends. To Navarre repaired those men of worth and respectability who conscientiously upheld the rights of Don Carlos; the battalions were composed of peasants and artisans. In Arragon and Valencia, a few desperate and dissolute ruffians, such as Cabrera, Llangostera, Quilez, Pellicer, assembled under their orders the refuse of the jails.

“The Navarrese recruit,” says Señor Cabello, “when he set out to join the Carlists, took leave of his friends and relatives, and even of the alcalde of his village; the volunteer into the faction of Arragon, departed by stealth after murdering and robbing some private enemy or wealthy neighbour. The Biscayan Carlist, going on leave to visit his mistress, took her at most a flower gathered in the gardens of Bilboa, when a soldier of Cabrera revisited his home, he carried with him the spoils of some slaughtered family or plundered dwelling. All Spain knew Colonel Zumalacarregui; but only the lay brothers of St Domingo de Tortosa, or the gendarmes of Villafranca, could give an account of Cabrera or the Serrador. To treat with the former was to treat with one who, a short time previously, had commanded with distinction the first light infantry regiment of the Spanish army. To negotiate with the latter was to condescend to an equality with the Barbudo or José Maria.”[C]

[C] Celebrated Spanish robbers.

Even in the inevitable confusion of civil war, a distinction may and must be made between the man who takes up arms to defend a principle, and him who makes the unhappy dissensions of his country a stepping-stone to his own ambition, a pretext for the indulgence of the worst vices and most unhallowed passions.

MY COLLEGE FRIENDS. NO. IV.
Charles Russell, the Gentleman Commoner.

Chap. II.

It was the last night of the boat races. All Oxford, town and gown, was on the move between Iffley and Christchurch meadow. The reading man had left his ethics only half understood, the rowing man his bottle more than half finished, to enjoy as beautiful a summer evening as ever gladdened the banks of Isis. One continued heterogeneous living stream was pouring on from St “Ole’s” to King’s barge, and thence across the river in punts, down to the starting-place by the lasher. One moment your tailor puffed a cigar in your face, and the next, just as you made some critical remark to your companion on the pretty girl you just passed, and turned round to catch a second glimpse of her, you trod on the toes of your college tutor. The contest that evening was of more than ordinary interest. The new Oriel boat, a London-built clipper, an innovation in those days, had bumped its other competitor easily in the previous race, and only Christchurch now stood between her and the head of the river. And would they, could they, bump Christchurch to-night? That was the question to which, for the time being, the coming examination, and the coming St Leger, both gave way. Christchurch, that had not been bumped for ten years before—whose old blue and white flag stuck at the top of the mast as if it had been nailed there—whose motto on the river had so long been “Nulli secundus?” It was an important question, and the Christchurch men evidently thought so. Steersman and pullers had been summoned up from the country, as soon as that impertinent new boat had begun to show symptoms of being a dangerous antagonist, by the rapid progress she was making from the bottom towards the head of the racing-boats. The old heroes of bygone contests were enlisted again, like the Roman legionaries, to fight the battles of their “vexillum,” the little three-cornered bit of blue and white silk before mentioned; and the whole betting society of Oxford were divided into two great parties, the Oriel and the Christchurch, the supporters of the old, or of the new dynasty of eight oars.

Never was signal more impatiently waited for than the pistol-shot which was to set the boats in motion that night. Hark! “Gentlemen, are—you—ready?” “No, No!” shouts some umpire, dissatisfied with the position of his own boat at the moment. “Gentlemen, are you ready?” Again “No, no, no!” How provoking! Christchurch and Oriel both beautifully placed, and that provoking Exeter, or Worcester, or some boat that no one but its own crew takes the slightest interest in to-night, right across the river! And it will be getting dusk soon. Once more—and even Wyatt, the starter, is getting impatient—“Are you ready?” Still a cry of “No, no,” from some crew who evidently never will be satisfied. But there goes the pistol. They’re off, by all that’s glorious! “Now Oriel!” “Now Christchurch!” Hurrah! beautifully are both boats pulled—how they lash along the water! Oriel gains evidently! But they have not got into their speed yet, and the light boat has the best of it at starting. “Hurrah, Oriel, its all your own way!” “Now, Christchurch, away with her!” Scarcely is an eye turned on the boats behind; and, indeed, the two first are going fast away from them. They reach the Gut, and at the turn Oriel presses her rival hard. The cheers are deafening; bets are three to one. She must bump her! “Now, Christchurch, go to work in the straight water!” Never did a crew pull so well, and never at such disadvantage. Their boat is a tub compared with the Oriel. See how she buries her bow at every stroke. Hurrah, Christchurch! The old boat for ever! Those last three strokes gained a yard on Oriel! She holds her own still! Away they go, those old steady practised oars, with that long slashing stroke, and the strength and pluck begins to tell. Well pulled, Oriel! Now for it! Not an oar out of time, but as true together as a set of teeth! But it won’t do! Still Christchurch, by sheer dint of muscle, keeps her distance, and the old flag floats triumphant another year.

Nearly hustled to death in the rush up with the racing boats, I panted into the stern sheets of a four-oar lying under the bank, in which I saw Leicester and some others of my acquaintance. “Well, Horace,” said I, “what do you think of Christchurch now?” (I had sufficient Tory principle about me at all times to be a zealous supporter of the “old cause,” even in the matter of boat-racing.) “How are your bets upon the London clipper, eh?” “Lost, by Jove,” said he; “but Oriel ought to have done it to-night; why, they bumped all the other boats easily, and Christchurch was not so much better; but it was the old oars coming up from the country that did it. But what on earth is all that rush about up by the barges? They surely are not going to fight it out after all?”

Something had evidently occurred which was causing great confusion; the cheering a moment before had been deafening from the partisans of Christchurch, as the victorious crew, pale and exhausted with the prodigious efforts they had made, mustered their last strength to throw their oars aloft in triumph, and then slowly, one by one, ascended into the house-boat which formed their floating dressing-room; it had now suddenly ceased, and confused shouts and murmurs, rather of alarm than of triumph, were heard instead: men were running to and fro on both banks of the river, but the crowd both in the boats on the river and on shore made it impossible for us to see what was going on. We scrambled up the bank, and were making for the scene of action, when one of the river-officials ran hastily by in the direction of Iffley.

“What’s the matter, Jack?”

“Punt gone down, sir,” he replied without stopping; “going for the drags.”

“Anybody drowning?” we shouted after him.

“Don’t know how many was in her, sir,” sung out Jack in the distance. We ran on. The confusion was terrible; every one was anxious to be of use, and more likely therefore to increase the danger. The punt which had sunk had been, as usual on such occasions, overloaded with men, some of whom had soon made good their footing on the neighbouring barges; others were still clinging to their sides, or by their endeavours to raise themselves into some of the light wherries and four oars, which, with more zeal than prudence, were crowding to their assistance, were evidently bringing a new risk upon themselves and their rescuers. Two of the last of the racing eights, too, coming up to the winning-post at the moment of the accident, and endeavouring vainly to back water in time, had run into each other, and lay helplessly across the channel, adding to the confusion, and preventing the approach of more efficient aid to the parties in the water. For some minutes it seemed that the disaster must infallibly extend itself. One boat, whose crew had incautiously crowded too much to one side in their eagerness to aid one of the sufferers in his struggles to get on board, had already been upset, though fortunately not in the deepest water, so that the men, with a little assistance, easily got on shore. Hundreds were vociferating orders and advice, which few could hear, and none attended to. The most effectual aid that had been rendered was the launching of two large planks from the University barge, with ropes attached to them, which several of those who had been immersed succeeded in reaching, and so were towed safely ashore. Still, however, several were seen struggling in the water, two or three with evidently relaxing efforts; and the unfortunate punt; which had righted and come up again, though full of water, had two of her late passengers clinging to her gunwale, and thus barely keeping their heads above the water’s edge. The watermen had done their utmost to be of service, but the University men crowded so rashly into every punt that put off to the aid of their companions, that their efforts would have been comparatively abortive had not one of the pro-proctors jumped into one, with two steady hands, and authoritatively ordering every man back who attempted to accompany him, reached the middle of the river, and having rescued those who were in most imminent danger, succeeded in clearing a sufficient space round the spot to enable the drags to be used, (for it was quite uncertain whether there might not still be some individuals missing.) Loud cheers from each bank followed this very sensible and seasonable exercise of authority; another boat, by this example, was enabled to disencumber herself of superfluous hands, and by their united exertions all who could be seen in the water were soon picked up and placed in safety. When the excitement had in some degree subsided, there followed a suspense which was even more painful, as the drags were slowly moved again and again across the spot where the accident had taken place. Happily our alarm proved groundless. One body was recovered, not an University man, and in his case the means promptly used to restore animation were successful. But it was not until late in the evening that the search was given up, and even the next morning it was a sensible relief to hear that no college had found any of its members missing.

I returned to my rooms as soon as all reasonable apprehension of a fatal result had subsided, though before the men had left off dragging, and was somewhat surprised, and at first amused, to recognise, sitting before the fire in the disguise of my own dressing-gown and slippers, Charles Russell.

“Hah! Russell, what brings you here at this time of night?” said I; “however, I’m very glad to see you.”

“Well, I’m not sorry to find myself here, I can tell you; I have been in a less comfortable place to-night.”

“What do you mean?” said I, as a suspicion of the truth flashed upon me—“Surely”——

“I have been in the water, that’s all,” replied Russell quietly; “don’t be alarmed, my good fellow, I’m all right now. John has made me quite at home here, you see. We found your clothes a pretty good fit, got up a capital fire at last, and I was only waiting for you to have some brandy and water. Now, don’t look so horrified, pray.”

In spite of his good spirits, I thought he looked pale; and I was somewhat shocked at the danger he had been in—more so from the suddenness of the information.

“Why,” said I, as I began to recall the circumstance, “Leicester and I came up not two minutes after it happened, and watched nearly every man that was got out. You could not have been in the water long then, I hope?”

“Nay, as to that,” said Russell, “it seemed long enough to me, I can tell you, though I don’t recollect all of it. I got underneath a punt or something, which prevented my coming up as soon as I ought.”

“How did you get out at last?”

“Why, that I don’t quite remember; I found myself on the walk by King’s barge; but they then had to turn me upside down, I fancy, to empty me. I’ll take that brandy by itself, Hawthorne, for I think I have the necessary quantity of water stowed away already.”

“Good heavens! don’t joke about it; why, what an escape you must have had!”

“Well, seriously then, Hawthorne, I have had a very narrow escape, for which I am very thankful; but I don’t want to alarm any one about it, for fear it should reach my sister’s ears, which I very much wish to avoid, for the present at all events. So I came up to your rooms here as soon as I could walk. Luckily, John saw me down at the water, so I came up with him, and got rid of a good many civil people who offered their assistance; and I have sent down to the lodgings to tell Mary I have staid to supper with you; so I shall get home quietly, and she will know nothing about this business. Fortunately, she is not in the way of hearing much Oxford gossip, poor girl!”

Russell sat with me about an hour, and then, as he said he felt very comfortable, I walked home with him to the door of his lodgings, where I wished him good-night, and returned.

I had intended to have paid him an early visit the next morning; but somehow I was lazier than usual, and had scarcely bolted my commons in time to get to lecture. This over, I was returning to my rooms, when my scout met me.

“Oh, sir,” said he, “Mr Smith has just been here, and wanted to see you, he said, particular.”

Mr Smith? Of all the gentlemen of that name in Oxford, I thought I had not the honour of a personal acquaintance with one.

“Mr Russell’s Mr Smith, sir,” explained John: “the little gentleman as used to come to his rooms so often.”

I walked up the staircase, ruminating within myself what possible business “poor Smith” could have with me, of whom he had usually appeared to entertain a degree of dread. Something to do with Russell, probably. And I had half resolved to take the opportunity to call upon him, and try to make out who and what he was, and how he and Russell came to be so intimately acquainted. I had scarcely stuck old Herodotus back into his place on the shelf, however, when there came a gentle tap at the door, and the little Bible-clerk made his appearance. All diffidence and shyness had wholly vanished from his manner. There was an earnest expression in his countenance which struck me even before he spoke. I had scarcely time to utter the most commonplace civility, when, without attempt at explanation or apology, he broke out with—“Oh, Mr Hawthorne, have you seen Russell this morning?”

“No,” said I, thinking he might possibly have heard some false report of the late accident—“but he was in my rooms last night, and none the worse for his wetting.”

“Oh, yes, yes! I know that; but pray, come down and see him now—he is very, very ill, I fear.”

“You don’t mean it? What on earth is the matter?”

“Oh! he has been in a high fever all last night! and they say he is worse this morning—Dr Wilson and Mr Lane are both with him—and poor Miss Russell!—he does not know her—not know his sister; and oh, Mr Hawthorne, he must be very ill; and they won’t let me go to him!” And poor Smith threw himself into a chair, and fairly burst into tears.

I was very much distressed too: but, at the moment, I really believe I felt more pity for the poor lad before me, than even apprehension for my friend Russell. I went up to him, shook his hand, and begged him to compose himself. Delirium, I assured him—and tried hard to assure myself—was the usual concomitant of fever, and not at all alarming. Russell had taken a chill, no doubt, from the unlucky business of the last evening, but there could not be much danger in so short a time. “And now, Smith,” said I, “just take a glass of wine, and you and I will go down together, and I dare say we shall find him better by this time.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” he replied; “you are very kind—very kind indeed—no wine, thank you—I could not drink it: but oh! if they would only let me see him. And poor Miss Russell! and no one to attend to him but her!—but will you come down now directly?”

My own anxiety was not less than his, and in a very few minutes we were at the door of Russell’s lodgings. The answer to our inquiries was, that he was in much the same state, and that he was to be kept perfectly quiet; the old housekeeper was in tears; and although she said Dr Wilson told them he hoped there would be a change for the better soon, it was evident that poor Russell was at present in imminent danger.

I sent up my compliments to Miss Russell to offer my services in any way in which they could be made available; but nothing short of the most intimate acquaintance could have justified any attempt to see her at present, and we left the house. I thought I should never have got Smith from the door; he seemed thoroughly overcome. I begged him to come with me back to my rooms—a Bible-clerk has seldom too many friends in the University, and it seemed cruel to leave him by himself in such evident distress of mind. Attached as I was to Russell myself, his undisguised grief really touched me, and almost made me reproach myself with being comparatively unfeeling. At any other time, I fear it might have annoyed me to encounter as I did the inquisitive looks of some of my friends, as I entered the College gates arm-in-arm with my newly-found and somewhat strange-looking acquaintance. As it was, the only feeling that arose in my mind was a degree of indignation that any man should venture to throw a supercilious glance at him; and if I longed to replace his shabby and ill-cut coat by something more gentlemanly in appearance, it was for his sake, and not my own.

And now it was that, for the first time, I learnt the connexion that existed between the Bible-clerk and the quondam gentleman-commoner. Smith’s father had been for many years a confidential clerk in Mr Russell’s bank; for Mr Russell’s bank it was solely, the Smith who had been one of the original partners having died some two generations back, though the name of the firm, as is not unusual, had been continued without alteration. The clerk was a poor relation, in some distant degree, of the some-time partner: his father, too, had been a clerk before him. By strict carefulness, he had saved some little money during his many years of hard work: and this, by special favour on the part of Mr Russell, he had been allowed to invest in the bank capital, and thereby to receive a higher rate of interest than he could otherwise have obtained. The elder Smith’s great ambition—indeed it was his only ambition—for the prosperity of the bank itself he looked upon as a law of nature, which did not admit of the feeling of hope, as being a fixed and immutable certainty—his ambition was to bring up his son as a gentleman. Mr Russell would have given him a stool and a desk, and he might have aspired hereafter to his father’s situation, which would have assured him £250 per annum. But somehow the father did not wish the son to tread in his own steps. Perhaps the close confinement, and unrefreshing relaxations of a London clerk, had weighed heavily upon his own youthful spirits: perhaps he was anxious to spare the son of his old age—for, like a prudent man, he had not married until late in life—from the unwholesome toils of the counting-house, varied only too often by the still less wholesome dissipation of the evening. At all events, his visions for him were not of annually increasing salaries, and future independence: of probable partnerships, and possible lord mayoralties; but of some cottage among green trees, far away in the quiet country, where, even as a country parson, people would touch their hats to him as they did to Mr Russell himself, and where, when the time should come for superannuation and a pension—the house had always behaved liberally to its old servants—his own last days might happily be spent in listening to his son’s sermons, and smoking his pipe—if such a thing were lawful—in the porch of the parsonage. So while the principal was carefully training his heir to enact the fashionable man at Oxford, and in due time to take his place among the squires of England, and shunning, as if with a kind of remorseful conscience, to make him a sharer in his own contaminating speculations; the humble official too, but from far purer motives, was endeavouring in his degree, perhaps unconsciously, to deliver his boy from the snares of Mammon. And when Charles Russell was sent to the University, many were the enquiries which Smith’s anxious parent made, among knowing friends, about the expenses and advantages of an Oxford education. And various, according to each individual’s sanguine or saturnine temperament, were the answers he obtained, and tending rather to his bewilderment than information. One intimate acquaintance assured him, that the necessary expenses of an under-graduate need not exceed a hundred pounds per annum: another—he was somewhat of a sporting character—did not believe any young man could do the thing like a gentleman under five. So Mr Smith would probably have given up his darling project for his son in despair, if he had not fortunately thought of consulting Mr Russell himself upon the point; and that gentleman, though somewhat surprised at his clerk’s aspiring notions, good-naturedly solved the difficulty as to ways and means, by procuring for his son a Bible-clerk’s appointment at one of the Halls, upon which he could support himself respectably, with comparatively little pecuniary help from his friends. With his connexions and interest, it was no great stretch of friendly exertion in behalf of an old and trusted servant; but to the Smiths, father and son, both the munificence which designed such a favour, and the influence which could secure it, tended if possible to strengthen their previous conviction, that the power and the bounty of the house of Russell came within a few degrees of omnipotence. Even now, when recent events had so fearfully shaken them from this delusion; when the father’s well-earned savings had disappeared in the general wreck with the hoards of wealthier creditors, and the son was left almost wholly dependent on the slender proceeds of his humble office; even now, as he told me the circumstances just mentioned, regret at the ruined fortunes of his benefactors seemed in a great measure to overpower every personal feeling. In the case of the younger Russell, indeed, this gratitude was not misplaced. No sooner was he aware of the critical situation of his father’s affairs, and the probability of their involving all connected with him, than, even in the midst of his own harassing anxieties, he turned his attention to the prospects of the young Bible-clerk, whose means of support, already sufficiently narrow, were likely to be further straitened in the event of a bankruptcy of the firm. His natural good-nature had led him to take some little notice of young Smith on his first entrance at the University, and he knew his merits as a scholar to be very indifferent. The obscure suburban boarding-school at which he had been educated, in spite of its high-sounding name—“Minerva House,” I believe—was no very sufficient preparation for Oxford. When the Greek and the washing are both extras, at three guineas per annum, one clean shirt in the week, and one lesson in Delectus, are perhaps as much as can reasonably be expected. Poor Smith had, indeed, a fearful amount of uphill work, to qualify himself even for his “little-go.” Charles Russell, not less to his surprise than to his unbounded gratitude, inasmuch as he was wholly ignorant of his motives for taking so much trouble, undertook to assist and direct him in his reading: and Smith, when he had got over his first diffidence, having a good share of plain natural sense, and hereditary habits of plodding, made more rapid progress than might have been expected. The frequent visits to Russell’s rooms, whose charitable object neither I nor any one else could have guessed, had resulted in a very safe pass through his first formidable ordeal, and he seemed now to have little fear of eventual success for his degree, with a strong probability of being privileged to starve upon a curacy thereafter. But for Russell’s aid, he would, in all likelihood, have been remanded from his first examination back to his father’s desk, to the bitter mortification of the old man at the time, and to become an additional burden to him on the loss at once of his situation and his little capital.

Poor Smith! it was no wonder that, at the conclusion of his story, interrupted constantly by broken expressions of gratitude, he wrung his hands, and called Charles Russell the only friend he had in the world. “And, oh! if he were to die! Do you think he will die?”

I assured him I hoped and trusted not, and with the view of relieving his and my own suspense, though it was little more than an hour since we had left his door, we went down again to make enquiries. The street door was open, and so was that of the landlady’s little parlour, so we walked in at once. She shook her head in reply to our inquiries. “Dr Wilson has been up-stairs with him, sir, for the last hour nearly, and he has sent twice to the druggist’s for some things, and I fancy he is no better at all events.”

“How is Miss Russell?” I inquired.

“Oh, sir, she don’t take on much—not at all, as I may say; but she don’t speak to nobody, and she don’t take nothing: twice I have carried her up some tea, poor thing and she just tasted it because I begged her, and she wouldn’t refuse me, I know—but, poor dear young lady! it is very hard upon her, and she all alone like.”

“Will you take up my compliments—Mr Hawthorne—and ask if I can be of any possible service?” said I, scarce knowing what to say or do. Poor girl! she was indeed to be pitied; her father ruined, disgraced, and a fugitive from the law; his only son—the heir of such proud hopes and expectations once—lying between life and death; her only brother, her only counsellor and protector, now unable to recognise or to speak to her—and she so unused to sorrow or hardship, obliged to struggle on alone, and exert herself to meet the thousand wants and cares of illness, with the added bitterness of poverty.

The answer to my message was brought back by the old housekeeper, Mrs Saunders. She shook her head, said her young mistress was very much obliged, and would be glad if I would call and see her brother tomorrow, when she hoped he would be better; “But oh, sir!” she added, “He will never be better any more! I know the doctors don’t think so, but I can’t tell her, poor thing—I try to keep her up, sir; but I do wish some of her own friends were here—she won’t write to any body, and I don’t know the directions”—and she stopped, for her tears were almost convulsing her.

I could not remain to witness misery which I could do nothing to relieve; so I took Smith by the arm—for he stood by the door half-stupified, and proceeded back towards college. He had to mark the roll at his own chapel that evening; so we parted at the top of the street, after I had made him promise to come to breakfast with me in the morning. Russell’s illness cast a universal gloom over the college that evening; and when the answer to our last message, sent down as late as we could venture to do, was still unfavourable, it was with anxious anticipation that we awaited any change which the morrow might bring.

The next day passed, and still Russell remained in the same state. He as in a high fever, and either perfectly unconscious of all around him, or talking in that incoherent and yet earnest strain, which is more painful to those who have to listen to and to soothe than even the total prostration of the reason. No one was allowed to see him; and his professional attendants, though they held out hopes founded on his youth and good constitution, acknowledged that every present symptom was most unfavourable.

The earliest intelligence on the third morning was, that the patient had passed a very bad night, and was much the same; but in the course of an hour or two afterwards, a message came to me to say that Mr Russell would be glad to see me. I rushed, rather than ran, down to his lodgings, in a perfect exultation of hope, and was so breathless with haste and excitement when I arrived there, that I was obliged to pause a few moments to calm myself before I raised the carefully muffled knocker. My joy was damped at once by poor Mrs Saunders’ mournful countenance.

“Your master is better, I hope—is he not?” said I.

“I am afraid not, sir; but he is very quiet now: and he knew his poor dear sister; and then he asked if any one had been to see him, and we mentioned you, sir; and then he said he should like to see you very much, and so Miss made bold to send to you—if you please to wait, sir, I’ll tell her you are here.”

In a few moments she returned—Miss Russell would see me if I would walk up.

I followed her into the little drawing-room, and there, very calm and very pale, sat Mary Russell. Though her brother and myself had now so long been constant companions, I had seen but very little of her; on the very few evenings I had spent with Russell at his lodgings she had merely appeared to make tea for us, had joined but little in the conversation, and retired almost before the table was cleared. In her position, this behaviour seemed but natural; and as, in spite of the attraction of her beauty, there was a shade of that haughtiness and distance of manner which we had all at first fancied in her brother, I had begun to feel a respectful kind of admiration for Mary Russell, tinged, I may now venture to admit—I was barely twenty at the time—with a slight degree of awe. Her very misfortunes threw over her a sort of sanctity. She was too beautiful not to rivet the gaze, too noble and too womanly in her devotion to her brother not to touch the affections, but too cold and silent—almost as it seemed too sad—to love. Her brother seldom spoke of her; but when he did it was in a tone which showed—what he did not care to conceal—his deep affection and anxious care for her; he watched her every look and movement whenever she was present; and if his love erred in any point, it was, that it seemed possible it might be even too sensitive and jealous for her own happiness.

The blinds were drawn close down, and the little room was very dark; yet I could see at a glance the work which anguish had wrought upon her in the last two days, and, though no tears were to be seen now, they had left their traces only too plainly. She did not rise, or trust herself to speak; but she held out her hand to me as if we had been friends from childhood. And if thorough sympathy, and mutual confidence, and true, but pure affection, make such friendship, then surely we became so from that moment. I never thought Mary Russell cold again—yet I did not dream of loving her—she was my sister in every thing but the name.

I broke the silence of our painful meeting—painful as it was, yet not without that inward throb of pleasure which always attends the awakening of hidden sympathies. What I said I forget; what does one, or can one say, at such moments, but words utterly meaningless, so far as they affect to be an expression of what we feel? The hearts understand each other without language, and with that we must be content.

“He knew me a little while ago,” said Mary Russell at last; “and asked for you; and I knew you would be kind enough to come directly if I sent.”

“Surely it must be a favourable symptom, this return of consciousness?”

“We will hope so: yes, I thought it was and oh! how glad I was! But Dr Wilson does not say much, and I fear he thinks him weaker. I will go now and tell him you are come.”

“You can see him now if you please,” she said when she returned; “he seems perfectly sensible still and, when I said you were here, he looked quite delighted.” She turned away, and, for the first time, her emotion mastered her.

I followed her into her brother’s room. He did not look so ill as I expected; but I saw with great anxiety, as I drew nearer his bed, that his face was still flushed with fever, and his eye looked wild and excited. He was evidently, however, at present free from delirium, and recognised me at once. His sister begged him not to speak much, or ask questions, reminding him of the physician’s strict injunctions with regard to quiet.

“Dr Wilson forgets, my love, that it is as necessary at least for the mind to be quiet as the tongue,” said Russell with an attempt to smile; and then, after a pause, he added, as he took my hand, “I wanted to see you, Hawthorne; I know I am in very great danger; and, once more, I want to trouble you with a confidence. Nay, nothing very important; and pray, don’t ask me, as I see you are going to do, not to tire myself with talking: I know what I am going to say, and will try to say it very shortly; but thinking is at least as bad for me as speaking.” He paused again from weakness; Miss Russell had left the room. I made no reply. He half rose, and pointed to a writing-desk on a small table, with keys in the lock. I moved towards it, and opened it, as I understood his gestures; and brought to him, at his request, a small bundle of letters, from which he selected one, and gave it me to read. It was a banker’s letter, dated some months back, acknowledging the receipt of three hundred pounds to Russell’s credit, and enclosing the following note:—

“Sir,—Messrs —— are directed to inform you of the sum of £300 placed to your credit. You will be wrongly advised if you scruple to use it. If at any time you are enabled, and desire it, it may be repaid through the same channel.

“One of your Father’s Creditors.”

“I have never touched it,” said Russell, as I folded up the note.

“I should have feared you would not,” said I.

“But now,” he proceeded, “now things seem changed with me. I shall want money—Mary will; and I shall draw upon this unseen charity; ay, and gratefully. Poor Mary!”

“You are quite right, my dear Russell,” said I, eager to interrupt a train of thought which I saw would be too much for him. “I will manage all that for you, and you shall give me the necessary authority till you get well again yourself,” I added in a tone meant to be cheerful.

He took no notice of my remark. “I fear,” said he, “I have not been wise counsellor to my poor sister. She had kind offers from more than one of our friends, and might have had a home more suited to her than this has been, and I allowed her to choose to sacrifice all her own prospects to mine!”

He turned his face away, and I knew that one painful thought besides was in his mind—that they had been solely dependent on her little income for his support at the University since his father’s failure.

“Russell,” said I gently, “this conversation can surely do no good; why distress yourself and me unnecessarily? Come, I shall leave you now, or your sister will scold me. Pray, for all our sakes, try to sleep; you know how desirable it is, and how much stress Dr Wilson has laid upon your being kept perfectly calm and quiet.”

“I will, Hawthorne, I will try; but oh, I have so much to think of!”

Distressed and anxious, I could only take my leave of him for the present, feeling how much there was, indeed, in his circumstances to make rest even more necessary, and more difficult to obtain, for the mind than for the body.

I had returned to the sitting-room, and was endeavouring to give as hopeful answers as I could to Miss Russell’s anxious inquiries as to what I thought of her brother, when a card was brought up, with a message that Mr Ormiston was below, and “would be very glad if he could see Miss Russell for a few moments, at any hour she would mention, in the course of the day.”

Ormiston! I started, I really did not know why. Miss Russell started also, visibly; did she know why? Her back was turned to me at the moment; she had moved, perhaps intentionally, the moment the message became intelligible, so that I had no opportunity of watching the effect it produced, which I confess I had an irrepressible anxiety to do. She was silent, until I felt my position becoming awkward: I was rising to take leave, which perhaps would have made hers even more so, when, half turning round towards me, with a tone and gesture almost of command, she said, “Stay!” and then, in reply to the servant, who was still waiting, “Ask Mr Ormiston to walk up.”

I felt the few moments of expectation which ensued to be insufferably embarrassing. I tried to persuade myself it was my own folly to think them so. Why should Ormiston not call at the Russells, under such circumstances? As college tutor, he stood almost in the relation of a natural guardian to Russell; Had he not at least as much right to assume the privilege of a friend of the family as I had, with the additional argument, that he was likely to be much more useful in that capacity? He had known them longer, at all events, and any little coolness between the brother and himself was not a matter, I felt persuaded, to be remembered by him at such moment, or to induce any false punctilio which might stand in the way of his offering his sympathy and assistance, when required. But the impression on my mind was strong—stronger, perhaps, than any facts within my knowledge fairly warranted—that between Ormiston and Mary Russell there either was, or had been, some feeling which, whether acknowledged or unacknowledged—whether reciprocal or on one side only—whether crushed by any of those thousand crosses to which such feelings, fragile as they are precious, are liable, or only repressed by circumstances and awaiting its developement—would make their meeting under such circumstances not that of ordinary acquaintances. And once again I rose, and would have gone; but again Mary Russell’s sweet voice—and this time it was an accent of almost piteous entreaty, so melted and subdued were its tones, as if her spirit was failing her—begged me to remain—“I have something—something to consult you about—my brother.”

She stopped, for Ormiston’s step was at the door. I had naturally—not from any ungenerous curiosity to scan her feelings—raised my eyes to her countenance while she spoke to me, and could not but mark that her emotion amounted almost to agony. Ormiston entered; whatever his feelings were, he concealed them well; not so readily, however, could he suppress his evident astonishment, and almost as evident vexation, when he first noticed my presence: an actor in the drama for whose appearance he was manifestly unprepared. He approached Miss Russell, who never moved, with some words of ordinary salutation, but uttered in a low and earnest tone, and offered his hand, which she took at once, without any audible reply. Then turning to me, he asked if Russell were any better? I answered somewhat indefinitely, and Miss Russell, to whom he turned as for a reply, shook her head, and, sinking into a chair, hid her face in her hands. Ormiston took a seat close by her, and after a pause of a moment said,

“I trust your very natural anxiety for your brother makes you inclined to anticipate more danger than really exists, Miss Russell: but I have to explain my own intrusion upon you at such a moment”—and he gave me a glance which was meant to be searching—“I called by the particular request of the Principal, Dr Meredith.”

Miss Russell could venture upon no answer, and he went on, speaking somewhat hurriedly and with embarrassment.

“Mrs Meredith has been from home some days, and the Principal himself has the gout severely; he feared you might think it unkind their not having called, and he begged me to be his deputy. Indeed he insisted on my seeing you in person, to express his very sincere concern for your brother’s illness, and to beg that you will so far honour him—consider him sufficiently your friend, he said—as to send to his house for any thing which Russell could either want or fancy, which, in lodgings, there might be some difficulty in finding at hand. In one respect, Miss Russell,” continued Ormiston in somewhat a more cheerful tone, “your brother is fortunate in not being laid up within the college walls; we are not very good nurses there, as Hawthorne can tell you, though we do what we can; yet I much fear this watching and anxiety have been too much for you.”

Her tears began to flow freely; there was nothing in Ormiston’s words, but their tone implied deep feeling. Yet who, however indifferent, could look upon her helpless situation, and not be moved? I walked to the window, feeling terribly out of place where I was, yet uncertain whether to go or stay; for my own personal comfort, I would sooner have faced the collected anger of a whole common-room, called to investigate my particular misdemeanours; but to take leave at this moment seemed as awkward as to stay; besides, had not Miss Russell appeared almost imploringly anxious for me to spare her a tête-à-tête?

“My poor brother is very, very ill, Mr Ormiston,” she said at last, raising her face, from which every trace of colour had again disappeared, and which seemed now as calm as ever. “Will you thank Dr Meredith for me, and say I will without hesitation avail myself of his most kind offers, if any thing should occur to make his assistance necessary.”

“I can be of no use myself in any way?” said Ormiston with some hesitation.

“I thank you, no,” she replied; and then, as if conscious that her tone was cold, she added—“You are very kind: Mr Hawthorne was good enough to say the same. Every one is very kind to us, indeed; but”—and here she stopped again, her emotion threatening to master her; and Ormiston and myself simultaneously took our leave.

Preoccupied as my mind had been by anxiety on Russell’s account, it did not prevent a feeling of awkwardness when I found myself alone with Mr Ormiston outside the door of his lodgings. It was impossible to devise any excuse at the moment for turning off in a different direction, as I felt very much inclined to do; for the little street in which he lived was not much of a thoroughfare. The natural route for both of us to take was that which led towards the High Street, for a few hundred steps the other way would have brought us out into the country, where it is not usual for either tutors or under-graduates to promenade in cap and gown, as they do, to the great admiration of the rustics, in our sister university. We walked on together, therefore, feeling—I will answer at least for one of us—that it would be an especial relief just then to meet the greatest bore with whom we had any pretence of a speaking acquaintance, or pass any shop in which we could frame the most threadbare excuse of having business, to cut short the embarrassment of each other’s company. After quitting any scene in which deep feelings have been displayed, and in which our own have been not slightly interested, it is painful to feel called upon to make any comment on what has passed; we feel ashamed to do so in the strain and tone which would betray our own emotion, and we have not the heart to do so carelessly or indifferently. I should have felt this, even had I been sure that Ormiston’s feelings towards Mary Russell had been nothing more than my own; whereas, in fact, I was almost sure of the contrary; in which case it was possible that, in his eyes, my own locus standi in that quarter, surprised as I had been in an apparently very confidential interview, might seem to require some explanation which would be indelicate to ask for directly, and which it might not mend matters if I were to give indirectly without being asked. So we proceeded some paces up the little quiet street, gravely and silently, neither of us speaking a word. At last Ormiston asked me if I had seen Russell, and how I thought him? adding, without waiting for a reply, “Dr Wilson, I fear from what he told me, thinks but badly of him.”

“I am very sorry to hear you say so,” I replied; and then ventured to remark how very wretched it would be for his sister, in the event of his growing worse, to be left at such a time so utterly helpless and alone.

He was silent for some moments. “Some of her friends,” he said at last, “ought to come down; she must have friends, I know, who would come if they were sent for. I wish Mrs Meredith were returned—she might advise her.”

He spoke rather in soliloquy than as addressing me, and I did not feel called upon to make any answer. The next moment we arrived at the turn of the street, and, by what seemed a mutual impulse, wished each other good-morning.

I went straight down to Smith’s rooms, at —— Hall, to get him to come and dine with me; for I pitied the poor fellow’s forlorn condition, and considered myself in some degree bound to supply Russell’s place towards him. A Bible-clerk’s position in the University is always more or less one of mortification and constraint. It is true that the same academical degree, the same honours—if he can obtain them—the same position in after life—all the solid advantages of a University education, are open to him, as to other men; but, so long as his undergraduateship lasts, he stands in a very different position from other men, and he feels it—feels it, too, through three or four of those years of life when such feelings are most acute, and when that strength of mind which is the only antidote—which can measure men by themselves and not by their accidents—is not as yet matured either in himself or in the society of which he becomes a member. If, indeed, he be a decidedly clever man, and has the opportunity early in his career of showing himself to be such, then there is good sense and good feeling enough—let us say, to the honour of the University, there is sufficient of that true esprit du corps, a real consciousness of the great objects for which men are thus brought together—to ensure the acknowledgment from all but the most unworthy of its members, that a scholar is always a gentleman. But if he be a man of only moderate abilities, and known only as a Bible-clerk, then, the more he is of a gentleman by birth and education, the more painful does his position generally become. There are not above two or three in residence in most colleges, and their society is confined almost wholly to themselves. Some old schoolfellow, indeed, or some man who “knows him at home,” holding an independent rank in college, may occasionally venture upon the condescension of asking him to wine—even to meet a friend or two with whom he can take such a liberty; and even then, the gnawing consciousness that he is considered an inferior—though not treated as such—makes it a questionable act of kindness. Among the two or three of his own table, one is the son of a college butler, another has been for years usher at a preparatory school; he treats them with civility, they treat him with deference; but they have no tastes or feelings in common. At an age, therefore, which most of all seeks and requires companionship, he has no companions; and the period of life which should be the most joyous, becomes to him almost a purgatory. Of course, the radical and the leveller will say at once, “Ay, this comes of your aristocratic distinctions; they ought not to be allowed in universities at all.” Not so: it comes of human nature; the distinction between a dependent and an independent position will always be felt in all societies, mark it outwardly as little as you will. Humiliation, more or less, is a penalty which poverty must always pay. These humbler offices in the University were founded by a charity as wise as benevolent, which has afforded to hundreds of men of talent, but of humble means, an education equal to that of the highest noble in the land, and, in consequence, a position and usefulness in after life, which otherwise they could never have hoped for. And if the somewhat servile tenure by which they are held, (which in late years has in most colleges been very much relaxed,) were wholly done away with, there is reason to fear the charity of the founders would be liable to continual abuse, by their being bestowed upon many who required no such assistance. As it is, this occurs too often; and it is much to be desired that the same regulations were followed in their distribution, throughout the University, which some colleges have long most properly adopted: namely, that the appointment should be bestowed on the successful candidate after examination, strict regard being had to the circumstances of all the parties before they are allowed to offer themselves. It would make their position far more definite and respectable, because all would then be considered honourable to a certain degree, as being the reward of merit; instead of which, too often, they are convenient items of patronage in the hands of the Principal and Fellows, the nomination to them depending on private interest, which by no means ensuring the nominee’s being a gentleman by birth, while it is wholly careless of his being a scholar by education, and tends to lower the general standing of the order in the University.

This struck me forcibly in Smith’s case. Poor fellow! with an excellent heart and a great deal of sound common sense, he had neither the breeding nor the talent to make a gentleman of. I doubt if an University education was any real boon to him. It ensured him four years of hard work—harder, perhaps, than if he had sat at a desk all the time—without the society of any of his own class and habits, and with the prospect of very little remuneration ultimately. I think he might have been very happy in his own sphere, and I do not see how he could be happy at Oxford. And whether he or the world in general ever profited much by the B.A. which he eventually attached to his name, is a point at least doubtful.

I could not get him to come and dine with me in my own college. He knew his own position, as it seemed, and was not ashamed of it; in fact, in his case, it could not involve any consciousness of degradation; and I am sure his only reason for refusing my invitations of that kind was, that he thought it possible my dignity might be compromised by so open an association with him. He would come over to my rooms in the evening to tea, he said; and he came accordingly. When I told him in the morning that Russell had inquired very kindly after him, he was much affected; but it had evidently been a comfort to him to feel that he was not forgotten, and during the hour or two which we spent together in the evening, he seemed much more cheerful.

“Perhaps they will let me see him to-morrow, if he is better?” he said, with an appealing look to me. I assured him I would mention his wish to Russell, and his countenance at once brightened up, as if he thought only his presence were needed to ensure our friend’s recovery.

But the next morning all our hopes were dashed again; delirium had returned as had been feared, and the feverish symptoms seemed to gain strength rather than abate. Bleeding, and the usual remedies had been had recourse to already to a perilous extent, and in Russell’s present reduced state, no further treatment of the kind could be ventured upon. “All we can do now, sir,” said Dr Wilson, “is little more than to let nature take her course. I have known such cases recover.” I did not ask to see Mary Russell that day; for what could I have answered to her fears and inquiries? But I thought of Ormiston’s words; surely she ought to have some friend—some one of her own family, or some known and tried companion of her own sex, would surely come to her at a moment’s notice, did they but know of her trying situation. If—if her brother were to die—she surely would not be left here among strangers, quite alone? Yet I much feared, from what had escaped him at our last interview, that they had both incurred the charge of wilfulness for refusing offers of assistance at the time of their father’s disgrace and flight, and that having, contrary to the advice of their friends, and perhaps imprudently, taken the step they had done in coming to Oxford, Mary Russell, with something of her brother’s spirit, had made up her mind now, however heavy and unforeseen the blow that was to fall, to suffer all in solitude and silence. For Ormiston, too, I felt with an interest and intensity that was hourly increasing. I met him after morning chapel, and though he appeared intentionally to avoid any conversation with me, I knew by his countenance that he had heard the unfavourable news of the morning; and it could be no common emotion that had left its visible trace upon features usually so calm and impassible.

From thoughts of this nature, indulged in the not very appropriate locality of the centre of the quadrangle, I was roused by the good-humoured voice of Mrs Meredith—“our governess,” as we used to call her—who, with the doctor himself, was just then entering the College, and found me right in the line of her movements towards the door of “the lodgings.” I was not until that moment aware of her return, and altogether was considerably startled as she addressed me with—“Oh! how do you do, Mr Hawthorne? you young gentlemen don’t take care of yourselves, you see, when I am away—I am so sorry to hear this about poor Mr Russell! Is he so very ill? Dr Meredith is just going to see him.”

I coloured up, I dare say, for it was a trick I was given to in those days, and, in the confusion, replied rather to my own thoughts than to Mrs Meredith’s question.

“Mrs Meredith! I really beg your pardon,” I first stammered out as a very necessary apology, for I had nearly stumbled over her—“May I say how very glad I am you are returned, on Miss Russell’s account—I am sure ”——

“Really, Mr Hawthorne, it is very natural I suppose, but you gentlemen seem to expend your whole sympathy upon the young lady, and forget the brother altogether! Mr Ormiston actually took the trouble to write to me about her”——

“My dear!” interposed the Principal.

“Nay, Dr Meredith, see how guilty Mr Hawthorne looks! and as to Mr Ormiston”—“Well, never mind,” (the doctor was visibly checking his lady’s volubility,) “I love the poor dear girl so much myself, that I am really grieved to the heart for her. I shall go down and see her directly, and make her keep up her spirits. Dr Wilson is apt to make out all the bad symptoms he can—I shall try if I can’t cure Mr Russell myself, after all; a little proper nursing in those cases is worth a whole staff of doctors—and, as to this poor girl, what can she know about it? I dare say she sits crying her eyes out, poor thing, and doing nothing—I’ll see about it. Why, I wouldn’t lose Mr Russell from the college for half the young men in it—would I, Dr Meredith?”

I bowed, and they passed on. Mrs Principal, if somewhat pompous occasionally, was a kind-hearted woman; I believe an hour scarcely elapsed after her return to Oxford, before she was in Russell’s lodgings, ordering every thing about as coolly as if it were in her own house, and all but insisting on seeing the patient and prescribing herself for him in spite of all professional injunctions to the contrary. The delirium passed off again, and though it left Russell sensibly weaker, so weak, that when I next was admitted to see him with Smith, he could do little more than feebly grasp our hands, yet the fever was evidently abated; and in the course of the next day, whether it was to be attributed to the remedies originally used, or to his own youth and good constitution, or to Mrs Meredith’s experienced directions in the way of nursing, and the cheerful spirit which that good lady, in spite of a little fussness, succeeded generally in producing around her, there was a decided promise of amendment, which happily each succeeding hour tended gradually to fulfil. Ormiston had been unremitting in his inquiries; but I believe had never since sought an interview either with the brother or sister. I took advantage of the first conversation Russell was able to hold with me, to mention how very sincerely I believed him to have felt the interest he expressed. A moment afterwards, I felt almost sorry I had mentioned the name—it was the first time I had done so during Russell’s illness. He almost started up in bed, and his face glowed again with more than the flush of fever, as he caught up my words.

“Sincere, did you say? Ormiston sincere! You don’t know the man as I do. Inquired here, did he? What right has he to intrude his”——

“Hush, my dear Russell,” I interposed, really almost alarmed at his violence. “Pray, don’t excite yourself—I think you do him great injustice; but we will drop the subject, if you please.”

“I tell you, Hawthorne, if you knew all, you would despise him as much as I do.”

It is foolish to argue with an invalid—but really even my friendship for Russell would not allow me to bear in silence an attack so unjustifiable, as it seemed to me, on the character of a man who had every claim to my gratitude and respect. I replied therefore, somewhat incautiously, that perhaps I did know a little more than Russell suspected.

He stared at me with a look of bewilderment. “What do you know?” he asked quickly.

It was too late to hesitate or retract. I had started an unfortunate subject; but I knew Russell too well to endeavour now to mislead him. “I have no right perhaps to say I know any thing; but I have gathered from Ormiston’s manner, that he has very strong reasons for the anxiety he has shown on your account. I will not say more.”

“And how do you know this? Has Mr Ormiston dared ”——

“No, no, Russell,” said I, earnestly; “see how unjust you are, in this instance.” I wished to say something to calm him, and it would have been worse than useless to say any thing but the truth. I saw he guessed to what I alluded; and I gave him briefly my reasons for what I thought, not concealing the interview with his sister, at which I had unintentionally been present.

It was a very painful scene. When he first understood that Ormiston had sought the meeting, his temper, usually calm, but perhaps now tried by such long hours of pain and heaviness, broke out with bitter expressions against both. I told him, shortly and warmly, that such remarks towards his sister were unmanly and unkind; and then he cried, like a chidden and penitent child, till his remorse was as painful to look upon as his passion. “Mary! my own Mary! even you, Hawthorne, know and feel her value better than I do! I for whom she has borne so much.”

“I am much mistaken,” said I, “if Ormiston has not learned to appreciate her even yet more truly. And why not?”

“Leave me now,” he said; “I am not strong enough to talk; but if you wish to know what cause I have to speak as I have done of your friend Ormiston, you shall hear again.”

So exhausted did he seem by the excess of feeling which I had so unfortunately called forth, that I would not see him again for some days, contenting myself with learning that no relapse had taken place, and that he was still progressing rapidly towards recovery.

I had an invitation to visit my aunt again during the Easter vacation, which had already commenced, and had only been prevented from leaving Oxford by Russell’s alarming state. As soon, therefore, as all danger was pronounced over, I prepared to go up to town at once, and my next visit to Russell was in fact to wish him good-by for two or three weeks. He was already sitting up, and fast regaining strength. He complained of having seen so little of me lately, and asked me if I had seen his sister. “I had not noticed it until the last few days,” he said—“illness makes one selfish, I suppose; but I think Mary looks thin and ill—very different from what she did a month back.”

But watching and anxiety, as I told him, were not unlikely to produce that effect; and I advised him strongly to take her somewhere for a few weeks for change of air and scene. “It will do you both good,” I said; “and you can draw another L.50 from your unknown friend for that purpose; it cannot be better applied, and I should not hesitate for a moment.”

“I would not,” he replied, “if I wanted money; but I do not. Do you know that Dr Wilson would take no fee whatever from Mary during the whole of his attendance; and when I asked him to name some sufficient remuneration, assuring him I could afford it, he said he would never forgive me if I ever mentioned the subject again. So what remains of the fifty you drew for me, will amply suffice for a little trip somewhere for us. And I quite agree with you in thinking it desirable, on every account, that Mary should move from Oxford—perhaps altogether—for one reason, to be out of the way of a friend of yours.”

“Ormiston?”

“Yes, Ormiston; he called here again since I saw you, and wished to see me; but I declined the honour. Possibly,” he added bitterly, “as we have succeeded in keeping out of jail here, he thinks Mary has grown rich again.” And then he went on to tell me, how, in the days of his father’s reputed wealth, Ormiston had been a constant visitor at their house in town, and how his attentions to his sister had even attracted his father’s attention, and led to his name being mentioned as likely to make an excellent match with the rich banker’s daughter. “My father did not like it,” he said, “for he had higher views for her, as was perhaps excusable—though I doubt if he would have refused Mary any thing. I did not like it for another reason: because I knew all the time how matters really stood, and that any man who looked for wealth with my sister would in the end be miserably disappointed. What Mary’s own feelings were, and what actually passed between her and Ormiston, I never asked; but she knew my views on the subject, and would, I am certain, never have accepted any man under the circumstances in which she was placed, and which she could not explain. I did hope and believe, however, then, that there was sufficient high principle about Ormiston to save Mary from any risk of throwing away her heart upon a man who would desert her upon a change of fortune. I think he loved her at the time—as well as such men as he can love any one; but from the moment the crash came—Ormiston, you know, was in town at the time—there was an end of every thing. It was an opportunity for a man to show feeling if he had any; and though I do not affect much romance, I almost think that, in such a case, even an ordinary heart might have been warmed into devotion; but Ormiston—cold, cautious, calculating as he is—I could almost have laughed at the sudden change that came over him when he heard the news. He pretended, indeed, great interest for us, and certainly did seem cut up about it; but he had not committed himself, I conclude, and took care to retreat in time. Thank Heaven! even if Mary did ever care for him, she is not the girl to break her heart for a man who proves so unworthy of her regard. But why he should insist on inflicting his visits upon us now, is what I cannot make out, and what I will not endure.”

I listened with grief and surprise. I knew well, that not even the strong prejudice which I believed Russell to have always felt against Ormiston, would tempt him to be guilty of misrepresentation: and, again, I gave him credit for too much penetration to have been easily deceived. Yet I could not bring myself all at once to think so ill of Ormiston. He had always been considered in pecuniary matters liberal almost to a fault, that he really loved Mary Russell, I felt more than ever persuaded; and, at my age, it was hard to believe that a few thousand pounds could affect any man’s decision in such a point, even for a moment. Why, the very fact of her being poor and friendless was enough to make one fall in love with such a girl at once! So when Russell, after watching the effect of his disclosure, misconstruing my silence, proceeded to ask somewhat triumphantly—“Now, what say you of Mr Ormiston?”—I answered at once, that I was strongly convinced there was a mistake.

“Ay,” rejoined he with a sneering laugh; “on Ormiston’s part, you mean; decidedly there was.”

“I mean,” said I, “there has been some misunderstanding, which time may yet explain: I do not, and will not believe him capable of what you impute to him. Did you ever ask your sister for a full and unreserved explanation of what has passed between them?”

“Never; but I know that she has shunned all intercourse with him as carefully as I have, and that his recently renewed civilities have given her nothing but pain.” My own observation certainly tended to confirm this: So, changing the subject—for it was one on which I had scarce any right to give an opinion, still less offer advice, asked whether I could do any thing for him in town; and, after exchanging a cordial good-by with Miss Russell, in whose appearance I was sorry to see confirmation of her brother’s fears for her health, I took my leave, and the next morning saw me on the top of “The Age,” on my way to town.

There I received a letter from my father, in which he desired me to take the opportunity of calling upon his attorney, Mr Rushton, in order to have some leases and other papers read and explained to me, chiefly matters of form, but which would require my signature upon my coming of age. It concluded with the following P.S.:—