Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846

by Various

Part VI.

A la lid, nacionales valientes!
Al combate á la gloria volad!
Guerra y muerte á tiranos y esclavos,
Guerra y despues habra paz!
Himno de Valladolíd.

It still wanted an hour of daybreak, on the 16th day of July 1835, when the stillness, that during the previous four or five hours had reigned undisturbed in the quiet streets of Artajona, was broken by the clang of the diana. But a few notes of the call had issued from the brazen throats of bugle and trumpet, when a notable change took place in the appearance of the town. Lights, of which previously only a solitary one had here and there proceeded from the window of a guard-room, or of some early-rising orderly-sergeant, now glimmered in every casement; the streets were still empty, save of the trumpeters, who stood at the corners, puffing manfully at their instruments; but on all sides was audible a hum like that of a gigantic bee-hive, mingled with a slight clashing of arms, and with the neighing of numerous horses, who, as well as their masters, had heard and recognized the well-known sounds. Two or three minutes elapsed, and then doors were thrown open, and the deserted streets began to assume a more lively appearance. Non-commissioned officers, their squad-rolls in their hands, took their station in front of the houses where their men were billeted; in the stables, dragoons lighted greasy iron lamps, and, suspending them against the wall, commenced cleaning and saddling their horses; the shutters of the various wine-houses were taken down, and drowsy, nightcapped taberneros busied themselves in distributing to innumerable applicants the tiny glassful of anisado, which, during the whole twenty-four hours, is generally the sole spirituous indulgence permitted himself by the sober Spanish soldier. A few more minutes passed; the revéille had ceased to sound, and on the principal square of the town a strong military band played, with exquisite skill and unison, the beautiful and warlike air of the hymn of Valladolid.

"A la lid, nacionales valientes!
Al combate, á la gloria volad!"

"To the strife, brave nationals; to the strife, and to glory!" sang many a soldier, the martial words of the song recalled to his memory by the soul-stirring melody, as, buckling on sabre or shouldering musket, he hurried to the appointed parade. The houses and stables were now fast emptying, and the streets full. The monotonous "Uno, dos," of the infantry, as they told off, was drowned in the noise of the horses' feet and the jingle of accoutrements of the cavalry-men clattering out of their stables. By the light of a few dingy lanterns, and of the stronger illumination proceeding from the windows, whole battalions were seen assembled, resting on their arms, and presently they began to move out of the town. Outside of Artajona, the right wing of the army, under command of General Gurrea, formed up, and marched away in the direction of Mendigorria.

The sun had but just risen when this division, after driving in the Carlist cavalry pickets, which had been pushed up to within half a league of Artajona, halted and took position to the right of the high-road between that town and Mendigorria. The ground thus occupied is level, and opposite to nearly the centre of a line of low hills, which, after running for some distance parallel to the Arga, recedes at either extremity, thus forming the flattened arc of a circle, of which the river is the chord. Between the hills, which are inconsiderable and of gradual slope, and the river, runs the high-road from Puente de la Reyna to Larraga; and in rear of their more southerly portion, known as La Corona, opposite to the place where the road from Artajona passes through a dip or break in their continuity, are the town and bridge of Mendigorria. Upon these hills the Carlists, who had passed the night in the last-named town, now formed themselves, their main body upon the eastern slope, their reserves upon the western or reverse side. They were still bringing their masses into position, when the Christino right came upon the ground, and for awhile, although the distance between the hostile forces was not great, no shot was fired on either side. By and by, however, the dark figures of the Carlist guerillas were seen racing down the hills, the Christino skirmishers advanced to meet them, and soon a sharp irregular fire of musketry, and the cloud of smoke which spread over the middle ground between the armies, announced that the fight, or at least the prelude to it, had begun. This desultory sort of contest was of short duration. Several Carlist battalions moved forward, a gallant attack was made on the Christino position, and as gallantly repelled: commanded by a brave and skilful officer, and favoured by a judicious choice of ground, the Queen's troops, although opposed to vastly superior numbers, and without their cavalry, which had remained with the reserve, repulsed repeated assaults, and held their own without serious loss, until, towards ten o'clock, the heads of columns of the centre of the army, under the commander-in-chief himself, made their appearance from the direction of Artajona. Almost at the same time, the left wing, with Espartero at its head, arrived from Larraga, where it had slept. Some little manœuvring took place, and then the whole Christino army appeared formed up, Cordova on either side of the high-road, Espartero on his left, nearer to the Arga, Gurrea on his right. By a rather singular arrangement, the whole force of cavalry, under General Lopez, was left in reserve, considerably in rear of the left wing, and at a full mile and a half from the centre; with the exception of one squadron, which, as well as his habitual escort, had accompanied General Cordova. That squadron was commanded by Luis Herrera.

A stranger who, on the morning referred to, should, for the first time, have walked through the ranks of the Carlist army, would have found much that was curious and interesting to note. The whole disposable military force of what the Christinos called the Faction, was there assembled, and a motley crew it appeared. Had stout hearts and strong arms been as rare in their ranks as uniformity of garb and equipment, the struggle would hardly have been prolonged for four years after the date we write of. But it would be difficult to find in any part of Europe, perhaps of the world, men of more hardy frame, and better calculated to make good soldiers, than those composing many of the Carlist battalions. Amongst them the Navarrese and Guipuzcoans were pre-eminent; sinewy, broad-chested, narrow-flanked fellows, of prodigious activity and capacity for enduring fatigue. The Guipuzcoans especially, in their short grey frocks and red trousers, their necks bare, the shirt-collar turned back over their shoulders, with their bronzed faces and wiry mustaches, leathern belts, containing cartridges, buckled tightly round their waists, and long bright-barrelled muskets in their hands, were the very beau-idéal of grenadiers. Beside these, the Biscayans and some of the Castilians, undersized and unsoldierly-looking, showed to much disadvantage. Other battalions were composed in great part of Christino prisoners, who, having had the choice given them between death and service under Don Carlos, had chosen the latter, but who now seemed to have little stomach for a fight against their former friends. The whole of the Carlist cavalry, even then not very numerous, was also there. The grim-visaged priest Merino, ever the stanchest partisan of absolutism, bestrode his famous black horse, and headed a body of lancers as fierce and wild-looking as himself; Pascual Real, the dashing major of Ferdinand's guard, who in former days, when he took his afternoon ride in the Madrid prado, drew all eyes upon him by the elegance of his horsemanship, marshalled the Alavese hussars; and, in a third place, some squadrons of Navarrese, who had left the fat pastures of the valley of Echauri to be present at the expected fight, were ranged under the orders of the young and gallant Manolin.

But whoever had the opportunity of observing the Carlist army on that day and a month previously, saw a mighty difference in the spirit pervading it. He who had been its soul, whose prestige gave confidence to the soldier, and whose acknowledged superiority of talent prevented rivalry amongst the chiefs, was now no more; his death had been followed by a reverse, the only really serious one the Carlists had yet encountered, and dissension was already springing up amongst the followers of the Pretender. Intrigue was at work, rival interests were brought into play; there was no longer amongst the officers that unity of purpose which alone could have given the cause a chance of success; nor amongst the men that unbounded confidence in their leader, which on so many occasions had rendered them invincible. The spring of '35 had been a season of triumph for the Carlists; the summer was to be one of disasters.

Subsequent events sufficiently proved that Cordova was not the man to command an army. Diplomacy was his forte; and he might also, as a general, claim some merit for combinations in the cabinet. It was during his command that the plan was formed for enclosing the Carlists within certain fortified limits, in hopes that they would exhaust the resources of the country, and with a view to preserve other provinces from the contagion of Carlism.[3] Great credit was given him for this scheme, which was carried out after many severe fights, and at great expense of life; but neither of the advantages expected from it was ever realized. In the field, Cordova was not efficient; he lacked resource and promptitude; and the command of a division was the very utmost to which his military talents entitled him to aspire. As before mentioned, however, his confidence and pretensions were unbounded, his partisans numerous, and the event of this day's fight was such as greatly to increase the former, and raise the admiration of the latter.

It was eleven o'clock before the two armies were drawn up opposite to each other in order of battle, and even then neither party seemed inclined immediately to assume the offensive. Clouds of skirmishers were thrown out along the whole line, bodies of troops advanced to support them, the artillery began to thunder, but still a fight was for a short time avoided, and, like wary chess-players at the commencement of a game, the two generals contented themselves with manœuvres. Presently, however, from the Carlist centre a column of cavalry advanced, and forming front, charged a regiment of the royal guard, the foremost of Cordova's division. The guards were broken, and suffered considerably; those who escaped the sabres and lances of the horsemen being driven back, some to the centre and some upon the left wing. The cavalry seemed, for a moment, disposed to push their advantage; but the steady fire with which they were received by several squares of infantry, thinned their ranks, and, in their turn, they retreated in disorder. They had scarcely rejoined the main body when the advance was sounded along the whole Christino line, and the army moved forward to a general charge. At first the Carlists stood firm, and opened a tremendous fire upon the advancing line, but the gaps that it caused were speedily filled up; the Christinos poured in one deadly volley, gave a fierce cheer, and rushed on with the bayonet. The Carlists wavered, their whole army staggered to and fro; first companies, then battalions disbanded themselves, and pressed in confusion to the rear, and at last the entire line gave way; and the numerous host, seized with a panic, commenced a hasty and tumultuous retreat. The reserves on the opposite side of the hill were broken by the stream of fugitives that came pouring down upon them; the cavalry, who endeavoured to make a stand, were thrown into disorder, and pushed out of their ranks in the same manner. In vain did the Carlist officers exert themselves to restore order—imploring, threatening, even cutting at the soldiers with their swords. Here and there a battalion or two were prevailed upon to turn against the foe; but such isolated efforts could do little to restore the fortune of the day. The triumphant tide of the Christinos rolled ever forwards; the plunging fire of their artillery carried destruction into the ranks of the discomfited Carlists; the rattling volleys of small-arms, the clash of bayonets, the exulting shouts of the victors, the cries of anguish of the wounded, mingled in deafening discord. Amidst this confusion, a whole battalion of Carlists, the third of Castile, formed originally of Christino prisoners, finding themselves about to be charged by a battalion of the guard, reversed their muskets, and shouting "Viva Isabel!" ranged themselves under the banners to which they had formerly belonged, taking with them as prisoners such of their officers as did not choose to follow their example. Generals Villareal and Sagastibelza, two of the bravest and most respected of the Carlist leaders, were severely wounded whilst striving to restore order, and inspire their broken troops with fresh courage. Many other officers of rank fell dead upon the field while similarly engaged; the panic was universal, and the day irretrievably lost.

"The cavalry! the cavalry!" exclaimed a young man, who now pressed forward into the mêlée. He wore a long, loose civilian's coat, a small oilskin-covered forage cap, and had for his sole military insignia an embroidered sword-belt, sustaining the gilt scabbard of the sabre that flashed in his hand. His countenance was pale and rather sickly-looking, his complexion fairer than is usual amongst Spaniards; a large silk cravat was rolled round his neck, and reached nearly to his ears, concealing, it was said, the ravages of disease. His charger was of surpassing beauty; a plumed and glittering staff rode around him; behind came a numerous escort.

"The cavalry! the cavalry!" repeated Cordova, for he it was. "Where is Lopez and the cavalry?"

But, save his own escort and Herrera's squadron, no cavalry was forthcoming. Lopez remained unpardonably inactive, for want of orders, as he afterwards said; but, under the circumstances, this was hardly an extenuation. The position of the Carlists had been, in the first instance, from the nature of the ground, scarcely attackable by horse, at least with any prospect of advantage; but now the want of that arm was great and obvious. Cordova's conduct in leaving his squadrons so far in the rear, seems, at any rate, inexplicable. It was by unaccountable blunders of this sort, that he and others of the Christino generals drew upon themselves imputations of lukewarmness, and even of treachery.

An aide-de-camp galloped up to Herrera, whose squadron had been stationed with the reserve of the centre. His horse, an Isabella-coloured Andalusian, with silver mane and tail, of the kind called in Spain Perla, was soaked with sweat and grey with foam. The rider was a very young man, with large fiery black eyes, thin and martially-expressive features, and a small mustache shading his upper lip. He was a marquis, of one of the noblest families in Spain. He seemed half mad with excitement.

"Forward with your squadron!" shouted he, as soon as he came within earshot. The word was welcome to Herrera.

"Left wheel! forward! gallop!"

And, with the aide-de-camp at his side, he led his squadron along the road to Mendigorria, which intersects the hills whence the Carlists were now being driven. They had nearly reached the level ground on the other side, when they came in sight of several companies of infantry, who made a desperate stand. Their colonel, a Navarrese of almost gigantic stature—his sword, which had been broken in the middle, clutched firmly in his hand, his face streaming with blood from a slash across the forehead, his left arm hanging by his side, disabled by a severe wound—stood in front of his men, who had just repulsed the attack of some Christino infantry. On perceiving the cavalry, however, they showed symptoms of wavering.

"Steady!" roared the colonel, knitting his bleeding brow. "The first man who moves dies by my hand!"

In spite of the menace, two or three men ventured to steal away, and endeavoured to leave the road unobserved. The colonel sprang like a tiger upon one of them.

"Cobarde! muera!" cried the frantic Carlist, cleaving the offender to the eyes with the fragment of his sword. The terrible example had its effect; the men stood firm for a moment, and opened a well-aimed fire on the advancing cavalry.

"Jesus Cristo!" exclaimed the young aide-de-camp. Herrera looked at him. His features were convulsed with pain. One more name which he uttered—it was that of a woman—reached Herrera's ears, and then he fell from his saddle to the earth; and the dragoons, unable to turn aside, trampled him under foot. There was no time for reflection. "Forward! forward!" was the cry, and the horsemen entered the smoke. On the right of the Carlists, in front, stood their dauntless colonel, waving his broken sabre, and shouting defiance. Firm as a rock he awaited the cavalry. Struck by his gallantry, Herrera wished to spare his life.

"Rinde te!" he cried; "yield!"

"Jode te!" was the coarse but energetic reply of the Carlist, as he dealt a blow which Herrera with difficulty parried. At the same moment a lance-thrust overthrew him. There were a few shouts of rage, a few cries for mercy; here and there a bayonet grated against a sabre, but there was scarcely a check in the speed; such of the infantry as stood to receive the charge were ridden over, and Herrera and his squadron swept onwards towards the bridge of Mendigorria.

Now it was that the Carlists felt the consequences of that enormous blunder in the choice of a position, which, either through ignorance or over confidence, their generals had committed. With the Arga flowing immediately in their rear, not only was there no chance of rallying them, but their retreat was greatly embarrassed. One portion of the broken troops made for the bridge, and thronged over it in the wildest confusion, choking up the avenue by their numbers; others rushed to the fords higher up the stream, and dashing into the water, some of them, ignorant of the shallow places, were drowned in the attempt to cross. Had the Christino cavalry been on the field when the rout began, the loss of the vanquished would have been prodigious; as it was, it was very severe. The Christino soldiery, burning to revenge former defeats, and having themselves suffered considerably at the commencement of the fight, were eager in the pursuit, and gave little quarter. In less than two hours from the beginning of the action, the country beyond the Arga was covered with fugitives, flying for their lives towards the mountains of Estella. Narrow were the escapes of many upon that day. Don Carlos had been praying during the action in the church at Mendigorria; and so sudden was the overthrow of his army, that he himself was at one time in danger of being taken. A Christino officer, according to a story current at the time, had come up with him, and actually stretched out his hand to grasp his collar, when a bullet struck him from his saddle.

Dashing over the bridge, Herrera and his squadron spurred in pursuit. Their horses were fresh, and they soon found themselves amongst the foremost, when suddenly a body of cavalry, which, although retiring, kept together and exerted itself to cover the retreat, faced about, and showed a disposition to wait their arrival. The Carlists were superior in numbers, but that Herrera neither saw nor cared for; and, rejoicing at the prospect of opposition to overcome, he waved his sword and cheered on his men. At exactly the same moment the hostile squadrons entered the opposite sides of a large field, and thundered along to the encounter, pounding the dry clods beneath their horses' hoofs, and raising a cloud of dust through which the lance-points sparkled in the sunlight, whilst above it the fierce excited features of the men were dimly visible. Nearer they came, and nearer; a shout, a crash, one or two shrill cries of anguish—a score of men and horses rolled upon the ground, the others passed through each other's ranks, and then again turning, commenced a furious hand-to-hand contest. The leader of the Carlists, a dark-browed, powerful man, singled out Herrera for a fierce attack. The fight, however, lasted but a few moments, and was yet undecided when the Christino infantry came up. A few of the surviving Carlists fled, but the majority, including their colonel, were surrounded and made prisoners. They were sent to the rear with an escort, and the chase was continued.

It was nightfall before the pursuit entirely ceased, and some hours later before Herrera and his dragoons, who, in the flush of victory, forgot fatigue, arrived at Puente de la Reyna, where, and at Mendigorria, the Christino army took up their quarters. Sending the squadron to their stables, Herrera, without giving himself the trouble to demand a billet, repaired to an inn, where he was fortunate enough to obtain a bed—no easy matter in the crowded state of the town. The day had been so busy, that he had had little time to reflect further on the intelligence brought by Paco, of whom he had heard nothing since the morning. And now, so harassed and exhausted was he by the exertions and excitement of the day, that even anxious thoughts were insufficient to deprive him of the deep and refreshing slumber of which he stood in such great need.

The morning sun shone brightly through the half-closed shutters of his apartment, when Herrera was awakened by the entrance of Paco. In the street without he heard a great noise and bustle; and, fearful of having slept too long, he sprang from his bed and began hastily to dress. Without saying a word, Paco threw open the window and beckoned to him. He hastened to look out. In front of the inn was an open plaza, now crowded with men and horses. A large body of troops were drawn up under arms, officers were assembled in groups, discussing the victory of the preceding day; and in the centre of the square, surrounded by a strong guard, stood several hundred Carlist prisoners. On one side of these were collected the captured horses both of men and officers, for the most part just as they had been taken, saddled and bridled, and their coats caked with dry sweat. Paco drew Herrera's attention to a man in officer's uniform, who stood, with folded arms and surly dogged looks, in the front rank of the prisoners. His eyes were fixed upon the ground, and he only occasionally raised them to cast vindictive glances at a party of officers of the Christino guards, who stood at a short distance in his front, and who seemed to observe him with some curiosity.

"You see yonder colonel?" said Paco to Herrera. "Do you know him?"

"Not I," replied Herrera. "Yet, now I look again—yes. He is one of my prisoners of yesterday. He commanded a body of cavalry which charged us."

"Likely, likely," said Paco. "Do you know his name?"

"How should I?" answered Herrera.

"I will tell it you. It is Baltasar de Villabuena."

Herrera uttered an exclamation of surprise. "Impossible!" said he.

"Certain; I have seen him too often to mistake him."

Herrera made no reply. His hasty toilet finished, he bade Paco remain where he was, and descended to the street. He approached the group of guardsmen already mentioned.

"Your next move, gentlemen?" said he, after the usual salutation.

"To Pampeluna with the prisoners," was the reply. "A reconnoissance en force has gone out, but it may go far, I expect, before meeting with a Carlist. They are completely broken, and at this moment I doubt if there is one within a day's march."

"Yes," said another officer, "they are far enough off, if still running. Caremba! what legs the fellows have! We caught a few, though, yesterday afternoon, in spite of their powdering along. Old acquaintances, too, some of them," he added.

"Indeed!" said Herrera.

"Yes; fellows who have served and marched side by side with us. Look there, for instance; do you see that sullen, black-looking dog squinting at us with such a friendly expression?"

"Who is he?" enquired Herrera.

"Baltasar de Villabuena, an old captain of our's before the war. He resigned when Zumalacarregui took the field, and joined the Carlists, and it seems they've made him a colonel. A surly, ill-conditioned cur he always was, or we should not be standing here without a word of kindness or consolation to offer him."

To the surprise of the guardsmen, Herrera, before the officer had done speaking, walked up to the prisoner in question.

"Colonel Villabuena?" said he, slightly touching his cap.

"That is my name," replied the prisoner, sullenly.

"We met yesterday, I believe," said Herrera, with cold politeness. "If I am not mistaken, you commanded the squadron which charged mine in the early part of the retreat."

Baltasar nodded assent.

"Is your horse amongst those yonder?" continued Herrera.

"It is," replied Baltasar, who, without comprehending the drift of these questions, began to entertain hopes that his rank and former comradeship with many officers of the Christino army were about to obtain him an indulgence rarely accorded, during that war, to prisoners of any grade—the captured Carlists being looked upon by their adversaries rather as rebels and malefactors than as prisoners of war, and treated accordingly. He imagined that his horse was about to be restored to him, and that he would be allowed to ride to Pampeluna.

"Yonder bay stallion," said he, "with a black sheepskin on the saddle, is mine."

Herrera approached the officer commanding the guard over the prisoner, spoke a few words to him, and returned to Baltasar.

"You will please to accompany me," said he.

Baltasar complied, and captive and captor advanced to the horses.

"This is mine," said Colonel Villabuena, laying his hand upon the neck of a powerful bay charger.

Without saying another word, Herrera raised the sheepskin covering the holsters, and withdrew from them a brace of pistols, which he carefully examined. They were handsomely mounted, long-barrelled, with a small smooth bore, and their buts were inlaid with a silver plate, upon which a coronet and the initials E. de V. were engraved.

"These pistols, I presume, are also yours?"

"They are so," was the answer.

"You will observe, sir," continued Herrera, showing the pistols to the officer on guard, who had followed him, "that I have taken these pistols from the holsters of this officer, Colonel Baltasar de Villabuena, who acknowledges them to be his. Look at them well; you may have to recognise them on a future day. I shall forthwith explain to the general-in-chief my motives for taking possession of them."

The officer received the pistols, examined them carefully, and returned them to Herrera. Baltasar looked on with a perplexed and uneasy air. Just then the brigadier, who was to command the column proceeding to Pampeluna, rode into the plaza. The drums beat, and the troops stood to their arms.

"Return to your place," said Herrera, sternly, to the prisoner. "We shall shortly meet again."

And whilst Baltasar, alike disappointed and astonished at the strange conduct of the Christino officer, resumed his place in the captive ranks, Herrera betook himself to the quarters of the commander-in-chief.

This time Torres made no difficulty about introducing his friend into the general's apartment. Cordova was lying at length upon a sofa in a large cool room, a cigar in his mouth, a quantity of despatches on a table beside him, two or three aides-de-camp and secretaries writing in an adjoining chamber. He received Herrera kindly, complimented him on his conduct in the preceding day's fight, and informed him that particular mention had been made of him in his despatch to Madrid. After an interview of some duration, Herrera left the house, with leave of absence for a fortnight, signed by Cordova himself, in his pocket. Proceeding to the barracks, he made over the squadron to his second in command; and then mounting his horse, attended by Paco, and followed by half a dozen dragoons, he took the road to the Ebro.

In a street of Logroño, not far from the entrance of the town, stands one of those substantial and antiquated dwellings, remnants of the middle ages, which are of no unfrequent occurrence in Spain, and whose massive construction seems to promise as many more centuries of existence as they have already seen. It is the property, and at times the abode, of the nobleman whose arms are displayed, elaborately carved on stone, above the wide portal—a nobleman belonging to that section of the Spanish aristocracy, who, putting aside old prejudices, willingly adhered to the more liberal and enlightened order of things to which the death of Ferdinand was the prelude. In a lofty and spacious apartment of this mansion, and on the evening of the first day after that of Herrera's departure from Puente de la Reyna, we find Count Villabuena reclining in an easy-chair, and busied with thoughts, which, it might be read upon his countenance, were of other than a pleasant character. Since last we saw him, full of life and strength, and still active and adventurous as a young man, encountering fatigues and dangers in the service of his so-called sovereign, a great and sad change had taken place in the Count, and one scarcely less marked in his hopes and feelings. The wound received by him in the plains of Alava, although severe and highly dangerous, had not proved mortal; and when Herrera sought his body with the intention of doing the last mournful honours to the protector of his youth, and father of his beloved Rita, he perceived, to his extreme joy, that life had not entirely fled. On a litter, hastily and rudely constructed of boughs, the Count was conveyed to Vittoria, where he no sooner arrived, than by the anxious care of Herrera, half the surgeons in the town were summoned to his couch. For some days his life was in imminent peril; but at last natural strength of constitution, and previous habits of temperance, triumphed over the wound, and over the conclave of Sangrados who had undertaken his case. The Count recovered, gradually it is true, and without a prospect of ever regaining his former firm health; but still, to Herrera's great delight, and owing in a great measure to the care he lavished upon him, his life was at last pronounced entirely out of danger.

Upon arriving at Vittoria with his sorely wounded friend, duty had compelled Herrera to report his capture; but although the prisoner was considered a most important one, his state was so hopeless, that Luis had little difficulty in obtaining permission to become his sole jailer, pledging himself to reproduce him in case he should recover. When the Count got better, and became aware of his position, he insisted upon Herrera's informing the authorities of his convalescence, and of his readiness to proceed to any place of confinement they might appoint. Herrera's high character and noble qualities had made him many friends, some of them persons of influence, and he now successfully exerted himself to obtain a favour which was probably never before or afterwards conceded to a prisoner during the whole course of that war. Count Villabuena was allowed his parole, and was moreover told, that on pledging himself to retire to France, and to take no further share, direct or indirect, in the Carlist rebellion, he should obtain his release. One other condition was annexed to this. Two colonels of the Queen's army, who were detained prisoners by the Carlists, were to be given up in exchange for his liberty.

When these terms, so unexpectedly favourable, were communicated to the Count, he lost no time in addressing a letter to Don Carlos, informing him of his position, and requesting him to fulfil that portion of the conditions depending on him, by liberating the Christino officers. With shattered health, he could not hope, he said, again to render his Majesty services worth the naming; his prayers would ever be for his success, but they were all he should be able to offer, even did an unconditional release permit him to rejoin his sovereign. In the same letter he implored Don Carlos to watch over the safety of his daughter, and cause her to be conducted to France under secure escort. This letter dispatched, by the medium of a flag of truce, the Count sought and obtained permission to remove to the town of Logroño, where an old friend, the Marquis of Mendava, had offered him an asylum till his fate should be decided upon.

Long and anxiously did the Count await a reply to his letter, but weeks passed without his receiving it. Three days before the battle of Mendigorria, the Christino army passed through Logroño on its way northwards, and the Count had the pleasure of a brief visit from Herrera. A few hours after the troops had again marched away, a courier arrived from Vittoria, bringing the much wished-for answer. It was cold and laconic, written by one of the ministers of Don Carlos. Regret was expressed for the Count's misfortune, but that regret was apparently not sufficiently poignant to induce the liberation of two important prisoners, in order that a like favour might be extended to one who could no longer be of service to the Carlist cause.

Although enveloped in the verbiage and complimentary phrases which the Spanish language so abundantly supplies, the real meaning of the despatch was evident enough to Count Villabuena. Courted when he could be of use, he was now, like a worthless fruit from which pulp and juice had been expressed, thrown aside and neglected. It was a bitter pang to his generous heart to meet such ingratitude from the prince whom he had so much loved, and for whose sake he had made enormous sacrifices. To add to his grief, the only answer to his request concerning his daughter was a single line, informing him that she had left Segura several weeks previously, and that her place of abode was unknown.

Depressed and heartsick, the Count lay back in his chair, shading his eyes with his hand, and musing painfully on the events of the preceding two years. His estates confiscated, his health destroyed, separated from his only surviving child, and her fate unknown to him, himself a prisoner—such were the results of his blind devotion to a worthless prince and a falling principle. Great, indeed, was the change which physical and mental suffering had wrought in the Conde de Villabuena. His form was bowed and emaciated, his cheek had lost its healthful tinge; his hair, in which, but a short three months previously, only a few silver threads were perceptible, telling of the decline of life rather than of its decay, now fell in grey locks around his sunken temples. For himself individually, the Count grieved not; he had done what he deemed his duty, and his conscience was at rest; but he mourned the ingratitude of his king and party, and, above all, his heart bled at the thought of his daughter, abandoned friendless and helpless amongst strangers. The news of the preceding day's battle had reached him, but he took small interest in it; he foresaw that many more such fights would be fought, and countless lives be sacrificed, before peace would revisit his unhappy and distracted country.

From these gloomy reflections Count Villabuena was roused by the sudden opening of his door. The next instant his hand was clasped in that of Luis Herrera, who, hot with riding, dusty and travel-stained, gazed anxiously on the pale, careworn countenance of his old and venerable friend. On beholding Luis, a beam of pleasure lighted up the features of the Count.

"You at least are safe!" was his first exclamation. "Thank Heaven for that! I should indeed be forlorn if aught happened to you."

There was an accent of unusually deep melancholy in the Count's voice which struck Herrera, and caused him for an instant to imagine that he had already received intelligence of his cousin's treachery, and of Rita's captivity. Convinced, however, by a moment's reflection, that it was impossible, he dreaded some new misfortune.

"You are dejected, sir," he said. "What has again occurred to grieve you?—The reverse sustained by your friends"—

"No, no," interrupted the Count, with a bitter smile—"not so. My friends, as you call them, seem little desirous of my poor sympathy. Luis, read this."

As he spoke, he held out the letter received from the secretary of Don Carlos.

"It was wisely said," continued the Count, when Herrera had finished its perusal, "'put not your trust in princes.' Thus am I rewarded for devotion and sacrifices. Hearken to me, Luis. It matters little, perhaps, whether I wear out the short remnant of my days in captivity or in exile; but my daughter, my pure, my beautiful Rita, what will become of her—alas! what has become of her? My soul is racked with anxiety on her account, and I curse the folly and imprudence that led me to re-enter this devoted land. My child—my poor child—can I forgive myself for perilling your defenceless innocence in this accursed war!"

His nerves unstrung by illness, and overcome by his great affliction, the usually stern and unbending Villabuena bowed his head upon his hands and sobbed aloud. Inexpressibly touched by this outburst of grief in one to whose nature such weakness was so foreign, Herrera did his utmost to console and tranquillize his friend. The paroxysm was short, and the Count regained his former composure. Although dreading the effect of the communication, Herrera felt it absolutely necessary to impart at once the news brought by Paco. He proceeded accordingly in the task, and as cautiously as possible, softening the more painful parts, suggesting hopes which he himself could not feel, and speaking cheeringly of the probability of an early rescue. The Count bore the communication as one who could better sustain certain affliction than killing suspense.

"Something I know," said he, when Herrera paused, "of the convent you mention, and still more of its abbess. Carmen de Forcadell was long celebrated, both at Madrid and in her native Andalusia, for her beauty and intrigues. Her husband was assassinated by one of her lovers, as some said, and within three years of his death, repenting, it was believed, of her dissolute life, she took the veil. Once, I know, Baltasar was her reputed lover; but whatever may now be his influence over her, I cannot think she would allow my daughter to be ill treated whilst within her walls. No, Herrera, the danger is, lest the villain may remove my Rita, and place her where no shield may stand between her and his purposes."

"Do not fear it," replied Herrera, in his turn reassured by the Count's moderation. "Your cousin was taken in the action of the 16th, and is now a prisoner at Pampeluna."

"Indeed!" exclaimed the Count, his face brightening with satisfaction. "It is good news, indeed."

"Better than you even think, perhaps. You have preserved the ball that was extracted from your wound?"

"I have," replied the Count, "at your request. What of it?"

"So long," said Herrera, "as no advantage could be gained from my communication, I would not shock you with a statement that even now will cause you serious pain. You remember, sir, that at the time of receiving your wound you were at a very short distance from me, and that your cousin was at a still less one from you, in your rear. As you advanced towards the intervening stream, my eyes, conducted by chance, or something better, fixed on your cousin, who at the moment drew a pistol from his holster. You were but a few paces from him, when I saw him deliberately—I could not be mistaken—deliberately vary his aim from myself to you. The pistol was fired—you fell from your horse, struck by his hand. You seem surprised. The deed was as inexplicable to me until from your own lips I heard who the officer was—that there had been serious disagreement between you—and that his temper was violent, and character bad. Coupled with what my own eyes saw, the bullet itself, far too small for a carbine ball, convinced me that it had proceeded from a pistol. Instinctively, rather than from any anticipation of its being hereafter useful, I requested you to preserve the ball, and to-day an extraordinary chance enables me to verify my suspicions. Let the bullet be now produced."

Astounded by what he heard, but still incredulous, the Count summoned his attendant.

"Bring me the bullet that I bade you keep," said the Count.

"And desire my orderly," added Herrera, "to bring me the brace of pistols he will find in my valise."

In a few moments both commands were obeyed. The bullet was of very small calibre, and, not having encountered any bone, had preserved its rotundity without even an indentation.

"Do you recognize these pistols?" said Herrera, showing the Count those which he had taken from Baltasar's holsters. "This coronet and initials proclaim them to have been once your own."

"They were so," replied the Count, taking one of them in his hand—"a present to my cousin soon after he joined us. I remember them well; he carried them on the day that I was wounded."

"Behold!" said Herrera, who placed the bullet in the muzzle of the pistol, into the barrel of which it slid, fitting there exactly. Shocked and confounded by this proof of his kinsman's villany, the Count dropped the other pistol and remained sad and silent.

"You doubt no longer?" said Herrera.

"May it not have been accident?" said the Count, almost imploringly. "No Villabuena could commit so base and atrocious a crime."

"None but he," said Herrera. "I watched him as he took his aim, not twenty paces from you. With half a doubt, I would have bitten my tongue from my mouth before an accusation should have passed it against the man in whose favour indeed I have no cause to be prejudiced. Count Villabuena, the shot was fired with intent. For that I pledge my honour and salvation."

There was a pause.

"But my daughter," said the Count; "you forget her, Luis. She must be rescued. How does this fiend's imprisonment render that rescue easier?"

"Thus," replied Herrera. "Yesterday I had an interview with Cordova, and told him every thing; the abduction of Rita, and Baltasar's attempt on your life. Of the latter I engaged to furnish ample proofs. Cordova, as I expected, was indignant, and would have shot the offender had I consented to the act. Upon reflection, however, he himself saw reasonable objections to a measure so opposed to the existing treaty for exchange of prisoners, and feared retaliation from the enemy. After some discussion it was agreed that the proof of Baltasar's attempt upon your life should be submitted, and, if found satisfactory, that the prisoner should be placed at my disposal. In that event his liberty, nay, his life, must depend upon his consenting, unreservedly, to write to the convent, to desire the abbess to set Rita at liberty, and to provide for her safe conduct into France. Until then, Baltasar, by the general's order, remains in solitary confinement at Pampeluna."

"Good," said the Count approvingly.

"I had a threefold object in coming hither," continued Herrera. "To obtain proof of Baltasar's guilt, to comfort you with the hopes of Rita's safety, and to take you with me to Pampeluna. Baltasar of course believes you dead; he will the more readily abandon his designs when he finds that you still live."

"Rightly reasoned," said the Count. "Why should we now delay another instant? Your news, Herrera, has made me young and strong again."

"We will set out to-morrow," said Herrera. "A column of troops march at daybreak for Pampeluna, and we can avail ourselves of their escort."

His hopes revived and energies restored by the intelligence Luis had brought, the Count would have preferred starting without a moment's delay; but Herrera, although not less impatient, insisted on waiting till the next day. Although the principal force of the Carlists had been driven back into Western Navarre, the road to Pampeluna was not safe without a strong escort, and Herrera himself had incurred no small risk in traversing it as he had done, with only half a dozen dragoons. Count Villabuena yielded to his representations, and the following morning witnessed their departure.

Three days' marching brought the Count and Herrera to Pampeluna, whither Cordova and his victorious army had preceded them. Count Villabuena had reckoned too much upon his lately recovered strength; and, although the marches had not been long, he reached Pampeluna in a very exhausted state. It was evening when they arrived, and so crowded was the town with troops that they had some difficulty in obtaining quarters, which they at last found in the house of one of the principal tradesmen of the place. Leaving the Count to repose from his fatigues, Herrera went to visit Cordova, whom he informed of the positive certainty he had now obtained of Baltasar's culpability. The proofs of it might certainly, in a court of law, have been found insufficient, but Cordova took a military view of the case; his confidence in Herrera was great, his opinion of Baltasar, whom he had known in the service of Ferdinand, very bad; and finally, the valid arguments adduced by Luis left him no moral doubt of the prisoner's guilt. He gave the necessary orders for the admission of Herrera and Count Villabuena into the prison. The next day, however, the Count was still so fatigued and unwell from the effects of his journey, that it was found necessary to call in a physician, who forbade his leaving the house. The Count's impatience, and the pressing nature of the matter in hand, would have led him to disregard the prohibition, and at once proceed to the prison, which was at the other extremity of the town, had not Herrera, to conciliate his friend's health with the necessity for prompt measures, proposed to have the prisoner brought to him. An order to that effect was readily granted by Cordova, and, under proper escort, Don Baltasar was conducted to the Count's quarters.

It would be erroneous to suppose, that, during the late war in Spain, adherents of Don Carlos were only to be found in the districts in which his standard was openly raised. In many or most of the towns best affected to the liberal cause, devoted partisans of the Pretender continued to reside, conforming to the established order of things, and therefore unmolested. In most instances their private opinions were suspected, in some actually known; but a few of them were so skilful in concealing their political bias and partialities, as to pass for steady and conscientious favourers of the Queen's government. Here was one and no unimportant cause of the prolongation of the war; the number of spies thus harboured in the very heart of the Christino camp and councils. By these men intelligence was conveyed to the Carlists, projected enterprises were revealed, desertion amongst the soldiery and disaffection amongst the people, stimulated and promoted. Many of these secretly-working agents were priests, but there was scarcely a class of the population, from the nobleman to the peasant, and including both sexes, in which they were not to be found. Innumerable were the plans traversed by their unseen and rarely detectable influence. On many a dark night, when the band of Zurbano, El Mochuelo, or some other adventurous leader, issued noiselessly from the gates of a town, opened expressly for their egress, to accomplish the surprise of distant post or detachment, a light in some lofty window, of no suspicious appearance to the observer uninformed of its meaning, served as a beacon to the Carlists, and told them that danger was abroad. The Christinos returned empty-handed and disappointed from their fruitless expedition, cursing the treachery which, although they could not prove it, they were well assured was the cause of their failure.

One of the most active, but, at the same time, of the least suspected, of these subtle agents, was a certain Basilio Lopez, cloth-merchant in the city of Pampeluna. He was a man past the middle age, well to do in the world, married and with a family, and certainly, to all appearance, the last person to make or meddle in political intrigues of any kind, especially in such as might, by any possibility, peril his neck. Whoever had seen him, in his soberly cut coat, with his smooth-shaven, sleek, demure countenance and moderately rotund belly, leaning on the half-door of his Almacen de Paños, and witnessed his bland smile as he stepped aside to give admission to a customer or gossip, would have deemed the utmost extent of his plottings to be, how he should get his cloths a real cheaper or sell them at a real more than their market value. There was no speculation, it seemed, in that dull placid countenance, save what related to ells of cloth and steady money-getting. Beyond his business, a well-seasoned puchero and an evening game at loto, might have been supposed to fill up the waking hours and complete the occupations of the worthy cloth-dealer. His large, low-roofed, and somewhat gloomy shop was, like himself, of respectable and business-like aspect, as were also the two pale-faced, elderly clerks who busied themselves amongst innumerable rolls of cloth, the produce of French and Segovian looms. Above the shop was his dwelling-house, a strange, old-fashioned, many-roomed building, with immensely thick walls, long, winding corridors, ending and beginning with short flights of steps, apartments panneled with dark worm-eaten wood, lofty ceilings, and queer quaintly-carved balconies. It was a section of a line of building forming half the side of a street, and which, in days of yore, had been a convent of monks. Its former inmates, as the story went, had been any thing but ascetics in their practices, and at last so high ran the scandal of their evil doings, that they were fain to leave Pampeluna and establish themselves in another house of their order, south of the Ebro. Some time afterwards the convent had been subdivided into dwelling-houses, and one of these had for many years past been in the occupation of Basilio the cloth-merchant. Inside and out the houses retained much of their old conventual aspect, the only alterations that had been made consisting in the erection of partition walls, the opening of a few additional doors and windows, and the addition of balconies. One of the latter was well known to the younger portion of the officers in garrison at Pampeluna; for there, when the season permitted, the two pretty, black-eyed daughters of Master Basilio were wont to sit, plying their needles with a diligence which did not prevent their sometimes casting a furtive glance into the street, and acknowledging the salutation of some passing acquaintance or military admirer of their graces and perfections.

In this house was it that Herrera and the Count had obtained quarters, and thither, early upon the morrow of their arrival at Pampeluna, Baltasar was conducted. The passage through the streets of a Carlist prisoner, whose uniform denoted him to be of rank, had attracted a little crowd of children and of the idlers ever to be found in Spanish towns; and some of these loitered in front of the house after its door had closed behind Baltasar and his escort. The entrance of the prisoner did not pass unnoticed by Basilio Lopez, who was at his favourite post at the shop-door. His placid physiognomy testified no surprise at the appearance of such unusual visitors; and no one, uninterested in observing him, would have noticed that, as Baltasar passed him, the cloth-merchant managed to catch his eye, and made a very slight, almost an imperceptible sign. It was detected by Baltasar, and served to complete his perplexity, which had already been raised to a high pitch by the different circumstances that had occurred during his brief captivity. He had first been puzzled by Herrera's conduct at Puente de la Reyna; the importance attached by the Christino officer to the possession and identification of his pistols was unaccountable to him, never dreaming of its real motive. Then he could not understand why he was placed in a separate prison, and treated more as a criminal than as a prisoner of war, instead of sharing the captivity and usage of his brother officers. And now, to his further bewilderment, he was conducted to a dwelling-house, before entering which, a man, entirely unknown to him, made him one of the slight but significant signs by which the adherents of Don Carlos were wont to recognise each other. He had not yet recovered from this last surprise, when he was ushered into a room where three persons were assembled. One of these was an aide-de-camp of Cordova, Herrera was another, and in the third, to his unutterable astonishment and consternation, Baltasar recognized Count Villabuena.

There was a moment's silence, during which the cousins gazed at each other; the Count sternly and reproachfully, Baltasar with dilated eyeballs and all the symptoms of one who mistrusts the evidence of his senses. But Baltasar was too old an offender, too hardened in crime and obdurate in character, to be long accessible to emotion of any kind. His intense selfishness caused his own interests and safety to be ever uppermost in his thoughts, and the first momentary shock over, he regained his presence of mind, and was ready to act his part. Affecting extreme delight, he advanced with extended hand towards the Count.

"Dare I believe my eyes?" he exclaimed. "A joyful surprise, indeed, cousin."

"Silence, sir!" sternly interrupted the Count. "Dissimulation will not serve you. You are unmasked—your crimes known. Repent, and, if possible, atone them."

Baltasar recoiled with well-feigned astonishment.

"My crimes!" he indignantly repeated. "What is this, Count? Who accuses me—and of what?"

Without replying, Count Villabuena looked at Herrera, who approached the door and pronounced a name, at which Baltasar, in spite of his self-command, started and grew pale. Paco entered the apartment.

"Here," said the Count, "is one witness of your villany."

"And here, another," said Herrera, lifting a handkerchief from the table and exhibiting Baltasar's pistols.

The Carlist colonel staggered back as if he had received a blow. All that he had found inexplicable in the events of the last few days was now explained; he saw that he was entrapped, and that his offences were brought home to him. With a look of deadly hate at Herrera and the Count, he folded his arms and stood doggedly silent.

In few words Herrera now informed Baltasar of the power vested in him by Cordova, and stated the condition on which he might yet escape the punishment of his crimes. These, however, Baltasar obstinately persisted in denying; nor were any threats sufficient to extort confession, or to prevail with him to write the desired letter to the abbess. Assuming the high tone of injured innocence, he scoffed at the evidence brought against him, and swore solemnly and deliberately that he was ignorant of Rita's captivity. Paco, he said, as a deserter, was undeserving of credit, and had forged an absurd tale in hopes of reward. As to the pistols, nothing was easier than to cast a bullet to fit them, and he vehemently accused Herrera of having fabricated the account of his firing at his cousin. A violent and passionate discussion ensued, highly agitating to the Conde in his then weak and feverish state. Finding, at length, that all Herrera's menaces had no effect on Baltasar's sullen obstinacy, Count Villabuena, his heart wrung by suspense and anxiety, condescended to entreaty, and strove to touch some chord of good feeling, if, indeed, any still existed, in the bosom of his unworthy kinsman.

"Hear me, Baltasar," he said; "I would fain think the best I can of you. Let us waive the attempt on my life; no more shall be said of it. Gladly will I persuade myself that we have been mistaken; that my wound was the result of a chance shot either from you or your followers. Irregularly armed, one of them may have had pistols of the same calibre as yours. But my daughter, my dear poor Rita! Restore her, Baltasar, and let all be forgotten. On that condition you have Herrera's word and mine that you shall be the very first prisoner exchanged. Oh, Baltasar, do not drive to despair an old man, broken-hearted already! Think of days gone by, never to return; of your childhood, when I have so often held you on my knee; of your youth, when, in spite of difference of age, we were for a while companions and friends. Think of all this, Baltasar, and return not evil for good. Give me back my Rita, and receive my forgiveness, my thanks, my heartfelt gratitude. Your arm shall be stronger in the fight, your head calmer on your pillow, for the righteous and charitable act."

In the excitement of this fervent address, the Count had risen from his chair, and stood with arms extended, and eyes fixed upon the gloomy countenance of Baltasar. His lips quivering with emotion, his trembling voice, pale features, and long grey hair; above all, the subject of his entreaties—a father pleading for the restoration of his only child—and his passionate manner of urging them, rendered the scene inexpressibly touching, and must have moved any but a heart of adamant. Such a one was that of Baltasar, who stood with bent brow and a sneer upon his lip, cold, contemptuous, and relentless.

"Brave talk!" he exclaimed, in his harshest and most brutal tones; "brave talk, indeed, of old friendship and the like! Was it friendship that made you forget me in Ferdinand's time, when your interest might have advanced me? When you wanted me, I heard of you, but not before; and better for me had we never met. You lured me to join a hopeless cause, by promises broken as soon as claimed. You have ruined my prospects, treated me with studied scorn, and now you talk, forsooth, of old kindness and friendship, and sue—to me in chains—for mercy! It has come to that! The haughty Count Villabuena craves mercy at the hands of a prisoner! I answer you, I know nothing of your daughter; but I also tell you, Count, that if all yonder fellow's lies were truth, and I held the keys of her prison, I would sooner wear out my life in the foulest dungeon than give them up to you. But, pshaw! she thinks little enough about you. She has found her protector, I'll warrant you. There are smart fellows and comely amongst the king's followers, and she won't have wanted for consolation."

It seemed as if Baltasar's defenceless condition was hardly to protect him from the instant punishment of his vile insinuation. With a deep oath, Herrera half drew his sword, and made a step towards the calumniator of his mistress. But his indignation, great though it was, was checked in its expression, and entirely lost sight of, owing to a sudden outbreak of the most furious and uncontrolled anger on the part of the Count. His face, up to that moment so pale, became suffused with blood, till the veins seemed ready to burst; his temples throbbed visibly, his eyes flashed, his lips grew livid, and his teeth chattered with fury.

"Scoundrel!" he shouted, in a voice which had momentarily regained all its power—"scoundrel and liar! Assassin, with what do you reproach me? Why did I cast you off, and when? Never till your own vices compelled me. What promise did I make and not keep? Not one. Base traducer, disgrace to the name you bear! so sure as there is a God in heaven, your misdeeds shall meet their punishment here and hereafter!"

During this violent apostrophe, Baltasar, who, at Herrera's threatening movement, had glanced hurriedly around him as if seeking a weapon of defence, resumed his former attitude of indifference. Leaning against the wall, he stood with folded arms, and gazed with an air of insolent hardihood at the Count, who had advanced close up to him, and who, carried away by his anger, shook his clenched hand almost in his cousin's face. Suddenly, however, overcome and exhausted by the violence of his emotions, and by this agitating scene, the Count tottered, and would have fallen to the ground, had not Herrera and Torres hurried to his support. They placed him in his chair, into which he helplessly sank; his head fell back, the colour again left his cheeks, and his eyes closed.

"He has fainted," cried Herrera.

The Count was indeed insensible. Torres hastened to unfasten his cravat.

"Air!" exclaimed Torres; "give him air!"

Herrera ran to the window and threw it open. Water was thrown upon the Count's face, but without reviving him; and his swoon was so deathlike, that for a moment his anxious friends almost feared that life had actually departed.

"Let him lie down," said Torres, looking around for a sofa. There was none in the room.

"Let us place him on his bed," cried Herrera. And, aided by Torres and Paco, he carefully raised the Count and carried him into an adjoining room, used as a bedchamber. Baltasar remained in the same place which he had occupied during the whole time of the interview, namely, on the side of the room furthest from the windows, and with his back against the wall.

It has already been said that Baltasar de Villabuena had few friends. In all Pampeluna there was probably not one man, even amongst his former comrades of the guard, who would have moved a step out of his way to serve or save him; and certainly, in the whole city, there were scarcely half a dozen persons who, through attachment to the Carlist cause, would have incurred any amount of risk to rescue one of its defenders. Most fortunately for Baltasar, it was in the house of one of those rare but strenuous adherents of Don Carlos that he now found himself. Scarcely had the Count and his bearers passed through the doorway between the two rooms, when a slight noise close to him caused Baltasar to turn. A pannel of the chamber wall slid back, and the sleek rotund visage of the man who had exchanged signs with him as he entered the house, appeared at the aperture. His finger was on his lips, and his small grey eyes gleamed with an unusual expression of decision and vigilance. One lynx-like glance he cast into the apartment, and then grasping the arm of Baltasar, he drew, almost dragged him through the opening. The pannel closed with as little noise as it had opened.

Ten seconds elapsed, not more, and Herrera, who, in his care for the Count, had momentarily forgotten the prisoner, hurried back into the apartment. Astonished to find it empty, but not dreaming of an escape, he ran to the antechamber. The corporal and two soldiers, who had escorted Baltasar, rose from the bench whereon they had seated themselves, and carried arms.

"And the prisoner?" cried Herrera.

They had not seen him. Herrera darted back into the sitting-room.

"Where is the prisoner?" exclaimed Torres, whom he met there.

"Escaped!" cried Herrera. "The window! the window!"

They rushed to the open window. It was at the side of the house, and looked out upon a narrow street, having a dead wall for some distance along one side, and little used as a thoroughfare. At that moment not a living creature was to be seen in it. The height of the window from the ground did not exceed a dozen feet, offering an easy leap to a bold and active man, and one which, certainly, no one in Baltasar's circumstances would for a moment have hesitated to take. Herrera threw himself over the balcony, and dropping to the ground, ran off down a neighbouring lane, round the corner of which he fancied, on first reaching the window, that he saw the skirt of a man's coat disappear. Leaving the Count, who was now regaining consciousness, in charge of Paco, Torres hurried out to give the alarm and cause an immediate pursuit.

But in vain, during the whole of that day, was the most diligent search made throughout the town for the fugitive Carlist. Every place where he was likely to conceal himself, the taverns and lower class of posadas, the parts of the town inhabited by doubtful and disreputable characters, the houses of several suspected Carlists, were in turn visited, but not a trace of Baltasar could be found, and the night came without any better success. Herrera was furious, and bitterly reproached himself for his imprudence in leaving the prisoner alone even for a moment. His chief hope, a very faint one, now was, that Baltasar would be detected when endeavouring to leave the town. Strict orders were given to the sentries at the gates, to observe all persons going out of Pampeluna, and to stop any of suspicious appearance, or who could not give a satisfactory account of themselves.

The hour of noon, upon the day subsequent to Baltasar's disappearance, was near at hand, and the peasants who daily visited Pampeluna with the produce of their farms and orchards, were already preparing to depart. The presence of Cordova's army, promising them a great accession of custom, and the temporary absence from the immediate vicinity of the Carlist troops, who frequently prevented their visiting Christino towns with their merchandise, had caused an unusual concourse of country-people to Pampeluna during the few days that the Christino army had already been quartered there. Each morning, scarcely were the gates opened when parties of peasants, and still more numerous ones of short-petticoated, brown-legged peasant women, entered the town, and pausing upon the market-place, proceeded to arrange the stores of fowls, fruit, vegetables, and similar rustic produce, which they had brought on mules and donkeys, or in large heavy baskets upon their heads. Long before the sun had attained a sufficient height to cast its beams into the broad cool-looking square upon which the market was held, a multitude of stalls had been erected, and were covered with luscious fruits and other choice products of the fertile soil of Navarre. Piles of figs bursting with ripeness; melons, green and yellow, rough and smooth; tomatas; scarlet and pulpy; grapes in glorious bunches of gold and purple; cackling poultry and passive rabbits; the whole intermingled with huge heaps of vegetables, and nose-gays of beautiful flowers, were displayed in wonderful profusion to the gaze of the admiring soldiers, who soon thronged to the scene of bustle. As the morning advanced, numerous maid-servants, trim, arch-looking damsels, with small neatly-shod feet, basket on arm, and shading their complexion from the increasing heat of the sun under cotton parasols of ample dimensions, tripped along between the rows of sellers, pausing here and there to bargain for fruit or fowl, and affecting not to hear the remarks of the soldiers, who lounged in their neighbourhood, and expressed their admiration by exclamations less choice than complimentary. The day wore on; the stalls were lightened, the baskets emptying, but the market became each moment more crowded. Little parties of officers emerged from the coffee-houses where they had breakfasted, and strolled up and down, criticizing the buxom forms and pretty faces of the peasant girls; here and there a lady's mantilla appeared amongst the throng of female heads, which, for the most part, were covered only with coloured handkerchiefs, or left entirely bare, protected but by black and redundant tresses, the boast of the Navarrese maidens. Catalonian wine-sellers, their queer-shaped kegs upon their backs, bartered their liquor for the copper coin of the thirsty soldiers; pedlars displayed their wares, and sardineras vaunted their fish; ballad-singers hawked about copies of patriotic songs; mahogany-coloured gitanas executed outlandish, and not very decent, dances; whilst here and there, in a quiet nook, an itinerant gaming-table keeper had erected his board, and proved that he, of all others, best knew how to seduce the scanty and hard-earned maravedis from the pockets of the pleasure-seeking soldiery.

But, as already mentioned, the hour of noon now approached, and marketing was over for that day. The market-place, and its adjacent streets, so thronged a short time previously, became gradually deserted under the joint influence of the heat and the approaching dinner hour. The peasants, some of whom came from considerable distances, packed up their empty baskets, and, with lightened loads and heavy pockets, trudged down the streets leading to the town gates.

At one of these gates, leading out of the town in a northerly direction, several of the men on guard were assembled, amusing themselves at the expense of the departing peasantry, whose uncouth physiognomy and strange clownish appearance afforded abundant food for the quaint jokes and comical remarks of the soldiers. The market people were, for the most part, women, old men, and boys; the able-bodied men from the country around Pampeluna, having, with few exceptions, left their homes, either voluntarily or by compulsion, to take service in the Carlist ranks. Beneath the projecting portico of the guard-house, sat a sergeant, occupied, in obedience to orders given since the escape of Baltasar, in surveying the peasants as they passed with a keen and scrutinizing glance. For some time, however, this military Cerberus found no object of suspicion in any of the passers-by. Lithe active lads, greyhaired old men, and women whose broad shoulders and brawny limbs might well have belonged to disguised dragoons, but who, nevertheless, were unmistakeably of the softer sex, made up the different groups which successively rode or walked through the gate. Gradually the departures became less numerous, and the sergeant less vigilant; he yawned, stretched himself in his chair, rolled up a most delicate cigarrito between his large rough fingers, and lighting it, puffed away with an appearance of supreme beatitude.

"Small use watching," said he to a corporal. "The fellow's not likely to leave the town in broad daylight, with every body on the look-out for him."

"True," was the answer. "He'll have found a hiding-place in the house of some rascally Carlist. There are plenty in Pampeluna."

"Well," said the first speaker, "I'm tired of this, and shall punish my stomach no longer. Whilst I take my dinner, do you take my place. Stay, let yonder cabbage-carriers pass."

The peasants referred to by the sergeant, were a party of half a dozen women, and nearly as many lads and men, who just then showed themselves at the end of the street, coming towards the gate. Most of them were mounted on rough mountain ponies and jackasses, although three or four of the women trudged afoot, with pyramids of baskets balanced upon their heads, the perspiration streaming down their faces from the combined effects of the sun and their load. The last of the party was a stout man, apparently some five-and-forty years of age, dressed in a jacket and breeches of coarse brown cloth, and seated sideways on a scraggy mule, in such a position that his back was to the guard-house as he passed it. On the opposite side of the animal hung a pannier, containing cabbages and other vegetables; the unsold residue of the rider's stock in trade. The peasant's legs, naked below the knee, were tanned by the sun to the same brown hue as his face and bare throat; his feet were sandalled, and just above one of his ankles, a soiled bandage, apparently concealing a wound, was wrapped. A broad-brimmed felt hat shaded his half-closed eyes and dull stolid countenance, and the only thing that in any way distinguished him from the generality of peasants was his hair, which was cut short behind, instead of hanging, according to the usual custom of the province, in long ragged locks over the coat collar.

Occupied with his cigar and gossip, the sergeant vouchsafed but a careless and cursory glance to this party, and they were passing on without hindrance, when, from a window of the guard-house, a voice called to them to halt.

"How now, sergeant!" exclaimed the young ensign on guard. "What is the meaning of this? Why do these people pass without examination?"

The negligent sergeant rose hastily from his chair, and, assuming an attitude of respect, faltered an excuse.

"Peasants, sir; market-people."

The officer, who had been on guard since the preceding evening, had been sitting in his room, waiting the arrival of his dinner, which was to be sent to him from his quarters, and was rather behind time. The delay had put him out of temper.

"How can you tell that? You are cunning to know people without looking at then. Let them wait."

And the next moment he issued from the guard-house, and approached the peasants.

"Your name?" said he, sharply, to the first of the party.

"José Samaniego," was the answer. "A poor aldeano from Artica, para servir á vuestra señoria. These are my wife and daughter."

The speaker was an old, greyhaired man, with wrinkled features, and a stoop in his shoulders; and, notwithstanding a cunning twinkle in his eye, there was no mistaking him for any thing else than he asserted himself to be.

The officer turned away from him, glanced at the rest of the party, and seemed about to let them pass, when his eye fell upon the sturdy, crop-headed peasant already referred to. He immediately approached him.

"Where do you come from?" said he, eyeing him with a look of suspicion.

The sole reply was a stare of stupid surprise. The officer repeated the question.

"From Berriozar," answered the man, naming a village at a greater distance from Pampeluna than the one to which old Samaniego claimed to belong. And then, as if he supposed the officer inclined to become a customer, he reached over to his pannier and took out a basket of figs.

"Fine figs, your worship," said he, mixing execrably bad Spanish with Basque words. "Muy barato. You shall have them very cheap."

When the man mentioned his place of abode, two or three of the women exchanged a quick glance of surprise; but this escaped the notice of the officer, who now looked hard in the peasant's face, which preserved its former expression of immovable and sleepy stupidity.

"Dismount," said the ensign.

The man pointed to his bandaged ankle; but on a repetition of the order he obeyed, with a grimace of pain, and then stood on one leg, supporting himself against the mule.

"I shall detain this fellow," said the officer, after a moment's pause. "Take him into the guard-room."

Just then a respectable-looking, elderly citizen, on his return apparently from a stroll outside the fortifications, walked past on his way into the town. On perceiving the young officer, he stopped and shook hands with him.

"Welcome to Pampeluna, Don Rafael!" he exclaimed. "Your regiment I knew was here, but could not believe that you had come with it, since I had never before known you to neglect your old friends."

"No fault of mine, Señor Lopez," replied the officer. "Three days here, and not a moment's rest from guards and fatigue duty."

"Well, don't forget us; Ignacia and Dolores look for you. Ah, Blas! you here? How's your leg, poor Blas? Did you bring the birds I ordered?"

These questions were addressed to the lame peasant, who replied by a grin of recognition; and an assurance that the birds in question had been duly delivered to his worship's servant.

"Very good," said Lopez. "Good morning, Don Rafael."

The young officer stopped him.

"You know this man, then, Señor Lopez?" inquired the ensign.

"Know him? as I know you. Our poultry-man; and if you will sup with us to-night, when you come off guard, you shall eat a fowl of his fattening."

"With pleasure," replied the ensign. "You may go," he added, turning to the peasant. "Let these people pass, sergeant. May I be shot, Don Basilio, if I didn't mean to detain your worthy poulterer on suspicion of his being a better man than he looked. There has been an escape, and a sharp watch is held to keep the runaway in the town. It would have been cruel, indeed, to stop the man who brings me my supper. Ha, ha! a capital joke! Stopping my own supplies!"

"A capital joke, indeed," said Lopez, laughing heartily. "Well, good bye, Don Rafael. We shall expect you to-night."

And the cloth-merchant walked away, his usual pleasant smile upon his placid face, whilst the peasants passed through the gate; and the officer, completely restored to good-humour by the prospect of a dainty supper and pleasant flirtation with Don Basilio's pretty daughters, proceeded to the discussion of his dinner, which just then made its appearance.

Crossing the river, the party of peasants who had met with this brief delay, rode along for a mile or more without a word being spoken amongst them. Presently they came to a place where three roads branched off, and here the lame peasant, who had continued to ride in rear of the others, separated from them, with an abrupt "adios!" Old Samaniego looked round, and his shrivelled features puckered themselves into a comical smile.

"Is that your road to Berriozar, neighbour?" said he. "It is a new one, if it be."

The person addressed cast a glance over his shoulder, and muttered an inaudible reply, at the same time that he thrust his hand under the vegetables that half filled his panniers.

"If you live in Berriozar, I live in heaven," said Samaniego. "But fear nothing from us. Viva el Rey Carlos!"

He burst into a shrill laugh, echoed by his companions, and, quickening their pace, the party was presently out of sight. The lame peasant, who, as the reader will already have conjectured, was no other than Baltasar de Villabuena, rode on for some distance further, till he came to an extensive copse fringing the base of a mountain. Riding in amongst the trees, he threw away his pannier, previously taking from it a large horse pistol which had been concealed at the bottom. He then stripped the bandage from his leg, bestrode his mule, and vigorously belabouring the beast with a stick torn from a tree, galloped away in the direction of the Carlist territory.

---

HOW THEY MANAGE MATTERS IN "THE MODEL REPUBLIC."

In the present doubtful state of our relations with the American Republic, many anxious eyes are of course being directed across the Atlantic, and much speculation excited as to the present policy and ultimate designs of that anomalous and ambitious people. Since increased facilities of communication have brought the two continents into closer union, and afforded their respective inhabitants more frequent opportunities of observing each other's political and social arrangements, it cannot, we think be said with truth, that those of the United States have risen in favour with the enlightened minds of Europe, least of all with those of England. For the obvious failings of that Republic are of a kind eminently adapted to shock minds cast in the European mould; while her virtues, however appropriate to the transatlantic soil in which they flourish, do not either so readily suggest themselves to the notice of the Old World, or, when fully realized, command a very extraordinary degree of respect. We do not very highly appreciate the liberty which appears to us license, nor the equality which brings with it neither good manners nor good morals, nor the vast material progress which occupies the energies of her people, to the exclusion of more elevating pursuits. There are moreover griefs connected with the United States which come peculiarly home to British interests and prejudices; the existence of slavery, for instance, in its most revolting form, in direct opposition to the spirit of their institutions, and to the very letter of that celebrated declaration which is the basis of all their governments; the repudiation or non-payment of debts contracted for the purposes of public works, of which they are every day reaping the advantages; and the unprincipled invasion of our Canadian frontier by their citizens during the late disturbances in that colony. Within the last few months, more particularly, they have committed many and grievous offences against their own dignity, the peace of the world, and the interests of Britain. We have heard their chief magistrate defy Christendom, and inform the world that the American continent is, for the future, to be held as in fee-simple by the United States; we have seen Texas forcibly torn from feeble Mexico, and the negotiations on the subject of Oregon brought to a close by a formal declaration, that the American title to the whole of it is "clear and unquestionable." They have displayed, in the conduct of their foreign relations during the past year, a vulgar indifference to the opinion of mankind, and an overweening estimate of their own power, which it is at once ludicrous and painful to behold. Nor is there reason to believe that these blots on the escutcheon of a nation, so young and so unembarrassed, are either deeply regretted or will be speedily effaced. We see no reaction of national virtue against national wrongdoing. For the cause of this great Republic is not, as in other countries, dependent upon the will of the one man, or the few men, who are charged with the functions of government, but on the will of the great mass of the people, deliberately and frequently expressed. The rule of the majority is in America no fiction, but a practical reality; and the folly or wisdom, the justice or injustice of her public acts, may, in ordinary times, be assumed as fair exponents of the average good sense and morals of the bulk of her citizens.

We are not of those who charge the democratic institutions of the United States as a crime upon their people, or who think that, in separating themselves from the British crown, they were guilty of a deliberate wickedness which has yet to be expiated. Whether that separation was fully justified by the circumstances of the time, is a question upon which we do not propose to enter: but having so separated, it does not appear that any course was left open to them but that which they have pursued. Through the negligence of the mother country, no pains had been taken to plant even the germs of British institutions in her American colonies, and the War of Independence found them already in possession of all, and more than all, of the democratic elements of our constitution; while the feeling of personal attachment to the sovereign had died out through distance and neglect, and the influence of the aristocracy and the church was altogether unknown. Even in Virginia, where, in consequence of the existence of domestic slavery on a large scale, and the laws of primogeniture and entail, a certain aristocratical feeling had sprung up, a jealousy of the British crown and parliament showed itself from first to last, at least as strongly as elsewhere; and the ink of the Declaration of Independence was scarcely dry, before those laws of property were repealed, and every vestige of an Established Church swept away. Nothing then remained, in the absence of Conservative principles and traditions, but to construct their government upon the broadest basis of Democracy; accordingly, the triumph of that principle was complete from the first. The genius of progressive democracy may have removed some of the slender barriers with which it has found itself accidentally embarrassed; but it has not been able to add any thing to the force of those pithy abstractions which were endorsed by the most respectable chiefs of the Revolution, and which remain to sanctify its wildest aspirations.

All men, therefore, in America—that is, all white men—are "free and equal;" and every thing that has been done in her political world for the last half century has gone to illustrate and carry out this somewhat intractable hypothesis. Upon this principle, the vote of John Jacob Astor, with his twenty-five millions of dollars, is neutralized by that of the Irish pauper just cast upon its shores. The millionaire counts one, and so does the dingy unit of Erin, though the former counts for himself, and the latter for his demagogue and his priest. The exclusion of women and negroes from this privilege remains, it is true, a hiatus valde deflendus by the choicer spirits of the democracy. It is thought, however, that the system will shortly be completed by the addition of these new constellations. At this moment, in prospect of a convention to re-tinker the constitution, two agitations are going on in the state of New York—one to secure the "Political Rights of Women;" the other to extend those which negroes, under certain grievous restrictions, already enjoy. The theory of virtual representation has been held up to these two classes of citizens with as little success as to our own Radicals. Both negroes and women throw themselves upon the broad fact of their common humanity, and indignantly demand wherefore a black skin or a gentle sex should disqualify their possessors from the exercise of the dearest privilege of freemen.

Now, however absurd this system may appear to us in the abstract, and however strongly we should resist its application to our own political case, we believe, as we said before, that the Americans have no choice in the matter but to make it work as well as possible, and that it is for the interest of the world, as well as for their own, that it should so work. The preservation of peace, and our commercial relations with the United States, are far more important to us than the triumph of an idea. We are quite content, if they will permit us, to remain on the best of terms with our transatlantic descendants, and to see them happy and prosperous in their own way. We even think it fortunate for mankind that the principle of self-government is being worked out in that remote region, and under the most favourable circumstances, in order that the civilized world may take note thereof, and guide itself accordingly. It is, we know, a favourite theme with their demagogues, that the glory and virtue and happiness of Yankee-doodle-doo have inspired the powers of the rotten Old World with the deepest jealousy and hatred, and that every crown in Europe pales before the lustre of that unparalleled confederacy. Nothing can be wider of the truth, pleasing as the illusion may be to the self-love of the most vainglorious people under the sun. The prestige which America and her institutions once undoubtedly enjoyed in many parts of Europe is rapidly fading away, as each successive post brings fresh evidence of her vices and her follies. We can, indeed, recollect a time when the example of the model Republic was held up for admiration in the most respectable quarters, and was the trump-card at every gathering of Radical reformers. But now the scene is changed—now, "none so poor to do her reverence." Even Chartist and Suffrage-men, Mr Miall and the Northern Star, have at last

—— "forgot to speak
That once familiar word."

They turn from her, and pass away as gingerly as the chorus in the Greek play from the purlieus of those ominous goddesses—

ἁς τρἑμομεν λἑγειν
και παραμειβὁμεθ
αδἑρχὡτως αφὡτας—

Mr O'Connell himself can find no room in his capacious affections for men who repudiate their debts, burn convents, "mob the finest pisantry," and keep a sixth of their population in chains in the name of liberty!

If "the great unwashed" on the other side of the Atlantic, will only consent to send men to their councils of moderately pure hearts and clean hands, they may rest assured that any conspiracy which the united powers of kings, nobles, and priests may devise against them, will take little by its motion. But they do just the reverse, as we shall presently show. The profligacy of their public men is proverbial throughout the states; and the coarse avidity with which they bid against each other for the petty spoils of office, is quite incomprehensible to an European spectator. To "make political capital," as their slang phrase goes, for themselves or party, the most obvious policy of the country is disregarded, the plainest requirements of morality and common sense set aside, and the worst impulses of the people watched, waited on, and stimulated into madness. To listen to the debates in Congress, one would think the sole object of its members in coming together, was to make themselves and their country contemptible. Owing to the rantings of this august body, and the generally unimportant character of the business brought before it, little is known of its proceedings in Europe except through the notices of some passing traveller. But its shame does not consist merely or chiefly in the occasional bowie-knife or revolver produced to clinch the argument of some ardent Western member, nor even in the unnoted interchange of compliments not usually current amongst gentlemen. Much more deplorable is the low tone of morality and taste which marks their proceedings from first to last, the ruffian-like denunciations, the puerile rants, the sanguinary sentiments poured forth day by day without check or censure. This is harsh language, but they shall be judged out of their own mouths. We have before us a file of the Congressional Globe, the official record of the debates in both Houses, extending from December 12 to January 15. During this period the Oregon question was called up nearly every day, and we propose to give some specimens, verbatim et literatim, of the spirit in which it has been discussed. We shall give notices of the speakers and their constituents as we go along, to show that the madness is not confined to one particular place or party, but is common to Whig and Democrat, to the representatives of the Atlantic as well as of the Western states. Most of our European readers will, we think, agree with us, that, considering the entire absence of provocation, and the infinitely trivial nature of the matter in dispute, these rhetorical flourishes are without parallel in the history of civilized senates.

What is commonly called Oregon, is a strip of indifferent territory betwixt the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It is separated from both the American and British possessions by an arid wilderness of great extent, or by many thousands of miles of tempestuous navigation, via Cape Horn. Since 1818, the claims of both parties to this region have been allowed to lie in abeyance under a convention of joint occupancy, if the advantages enjoyed in common by a handful of traders and trappers of both nations can be so called. The settlers from both countries are still numbered by hundreds, and the soil is very ill adapted to agricultural purposes; in short, it is the last thing in the world that a decent nation would get into a passion about. Still, as the previous administration had gained much glory by completing the robbery of Texas from Mexico, Mr Polk has thought fit to illustrate his by an attempt to squeeze and bully the sterner majesty of England. Accordingly, in his message, he boasts of having offered less favourable terms than his predecessors; and these being of course rejected, retires with dignity upon the completeness of the American title, and intimates that the time is at hand when the rights of his country must be asserted, if necessary, by the sword. All this is new light to all the parties concerned; this tempest in a tea-pot is of Mr Polk's own particular brewing; the real Oregon being a little political capital, as aforesaid, for himself. So far he has been eminently successful, for the fierce democracy howls forth its applause upon the floor of Congress, in manner and form as followeth:—

Mr Cass, Democratic senator from Michigan, an insolvent western state, opened the ball on the 12th of December. He is said to aspire to the presidential chair, and is already a full general of militia. We give him his civil title, however, because we find him so set down in the Globe, which knows best what the military one is worth. There is nothing remarkable in his speech, except the fuss which he makes about national honour. He may find it lying in the ditch, much nearer home than Oregon—

"As to receding, it is neither to be discussed nor thought of. I refer to it but to denounce it—a denunciation which will find a response in every American bosom. Nothing is ever gained by national pusillanimity. The country which seeks to purchase temporary security by yielding to unjust pretensions, buys present ease at the expense of permanent honour and safety. It sows the wind to reap the whirlwind. I have said elsewhere what I repeat here, that it is better to fight for the first inch of national territory than for the last. It is better to defend the doorsill than the hearth-stone—the porch than the altar. National character is a richer treasure than gold or silver, and exercises a moral influence in the hour of danger, which, if not power itself, is it surest ally. Thus far ours is untarnished!" &c.

This statement of the relative value of "national character" as compared with the precious metals, will be very edifying to the creditors of Michigan.

Mr Serier, Democratic senator from Arkansas, another insolvent western state, is a still richer representative of the majesty of the American senate. This state is the headquarters of the bowie-knife, revolver, and Judge Lynch regime, and Mr S.'s education in these particulars does not appear to have been neglected.

"It has been her (Great Britain's) bullying that has secured for her the respect of all Europe. She is a court-house bully; and in her bullying, in my opinion, lies all her strength. Now, she must be forced to recede; and like any of our western bullies, who, when once conquered, can be kicked by every body, from one end of the country to the other, England will, in case she do not recede from her position on this question, receive once more that salutary lesson which we have on more than one occasion already taught her." * * "I should like very much indeed to hear any one get on the stump, in my part of the country, sir, and undertake to tell us that the President had established our claims to Oregon, and made it as plain as the avenue leading to the White House; but inasmuch as there is great danger that Great Britain may capture our ships, and burn our cities and towns, it is very improper for us to give notice that we will insist upon our claim. I need hardly say that such a one, if he could be found, would be summarily treated as a traitor to his country." * * * *

No doubt of it. Furthermore, Mr Serier cannot think of arbitration, because—

"When I see such billing and cooing betwixt France and England, and when I think the Emperor of Russia may not desire to have so near his territory a set of men who read Paine's Rights of Man, and whistle 'Yankee doodle,' I feel disposed to settle the matter at once by force of gunpowder. I consider the President acted wisely—very wisely—in keeping the case in its present position, and in giving intimation of taking possession after twelve months' notice, and then to hold it. Yes, sir, to hold it by the force of that rascally influence called gunpowder. That's my opinion. These are plain common-sense observations which I have offered."

What a love of a senator! We put it to the House of Lords—have they any thing to show like unto this nobleman of the woods?—We will now, with the permission of our readers, introduce them for a few moments to the House of Representatives. Mr Douglas, a Democratic representative from Illinois, another insolvent western state, wants to know why Great Britain should not be bullied as well as Mexico.

"He did hope that there would be no dodging on this Oregon question. Yes; that there would be no dodging on the Oregon question; that there would be no delay. There was great apprehension of war here last year—but of war with Mexico instead of Great Britain; and they had found men brave, and furious in their bravery, in defying Mexico and her allies, England and France, who now had an awful horror in prospect of a war with Great Britain. He (Mr D.) had felt pretty brave last year with reference to Mexico and her allies, and he felt equally so now. He believed if we wished to avoid a war upon this Oregon question, the only way we could avoid it was preparing to give them the best fight we had on hand. The contest would be a bloodless one; we should avoid war, for the reason that Great Britain knows too well: if she had war about Oregon, farewell to her Canada."

Our next extract will be from the speech of Mr Adams, a Whig representative from, we regret to say, Massachusetts, which is in every respect the pattern state of the Union. We are willing to believe that in this single case the orator does not represent the feelings of the majority of his constituents. Mr Adams has filled the Presidential chair, and other high offices; and, while secretary of state, permitted himself to say on a public occasion, that the madness of George the Third was a divine infliction for the course that monarch had pursued towards the United States. The ruling passions of his life are said to be, hatred to England and to his southern brethren; and he thinks that war would gratify both these malignant crotchets at once, as the former would, in that contingency, lose Canada, and the latter their slaves. He urges that notice to terminate the convention of joint occupation should be given, and then observes—

"We would only say to Great Britain, after negotiating twenty odd years under that convention, we do not choose to negotiate any longer in this way. We choose to take possession of our own, and then, if we have to settle what is our own, or whether any portion belongs to you, we may negotiate. We might negotiate after taking possession. That was the military way of doing business. It was the way in which Frederick II. of Prussia had negotiated with the Emperor of Austria for Silesia. [Here Mr A. gave an account of the interview of Frederick the Great with the Austrian minister, and of the fact of Frederick having sent his troops to take possession of that province the very day that he had sent his minister to Vienna to negotiate for it.] Then we should have our elbows clear, and could do as we pleased. It did not follow as a necessary consequence that we should take possession; but he hoped it would follow as a consequence, and a very immediate one. But whether we give the notice or not, it did not necessarily draw after it hostility or war. If Great Britain chose to take it as an indication of hostility, and then to commence hostilities, why, we had been told that there would be but one heart in this country; and God Almighty grant that it might be so! If this war come—which God forbid! and of which, by the way, he had no apprehension whatever—he hoped the whole country would go into it with one heart and one mighty hand; and, if that were done, he presumed the question between us and Great Britain would not last long, neither Oregon, nor any country north of this latitude would long remain to Great Britain. Strong as was his moral aversion to war, modern war and military establishments, then, if he should have the breath of life at the time when the war commences, he hoped he should be able and willing to go as far in any sacrifices necessary to make the war successful, as any member of that house. He could say no more."

This profligate drivel is uttered by the Nestor of the commonwealth, an infirm old man, with one foot in the grave. In order, however, to make the course pursued by this gentleman and the next speaker intelligible to the English reader, we may explain that, by the annexation of Texas, the Southern States have a majority of votes in Congress; the Northern States are therefore indifferent about war for Oregon, and the abolitionists among them frantic for it, in order that their domestic balance of power may be restored. Mr Giddings, a Whig representative from Ohio, and a red-hot abolitionist, indulges in the following most wicked and treasonable remarks:—

"This policy of adding territory to our original government is the offspring of the south. They have forced it upon the northern democracy. Their objects and ends are now answered. Texas is admitted. They have now attained their object, and now require the party to face about—to stop short, and leave the power of the nation in their hands. They now see before them the black regiments of the West India islands landed on their shores. They now call to mind the declarations of British statesmen, that a war with the United States will be a war of emancipation. They now see before them servile insurrections which torment their imaginations; murder, rapine, and bloodshed, now dance before their affrighted visions. Well, sir, I say to them, this is your policy, not mine. You have prepared the cup, and I will press it to your lips till the very dregs shall be drained. Let no one misunderstand me. Let no one say I desire a slave insurrection; but, sir, I doubt not that hundreds of thousands of honest and patriotic hearts will laugh at your calamity, and mock when your fear cometh. No, sir; should a servile insurrection take place, should massacre and blood mark the footsteps of those who have for ages been oppressed—my prayer to God shall be that justice—stern, unalterable justice—may be awarded to the master and the slave!" ... "A war with England in the present state of the two nations must inevitably place in our possession the Canadas, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. Six states will be added to the northern portion of the union, to restore the balance of power to the Free States.... I demand of you not to leave the nation in its present state of subjugation to the south. I will vote to give you the means of doing so," &c.

We hold up the ferocious cant of this mock philanthropist to the scorn of all good men, whether in Europe or America. So, because "the domestic institution" of his happy land is not to the taste of this Giddings, thousands of white men are to imbrue their hands in each other's blood, and England, the great champion of the negro race, at her own expense, is to be driven by force of arms out of Oregon. It is consoling, however, to find at last by their own confession, that there is a weak place—and a very weak one too—in "the area of freedom."

Besides the acquisition of Canada, which is put down on all hands as a "gone 'coon," other brilliant results are to ensue from the possession of Oregon. Mr Ingersoll, (Whig,) "a drab-coloured man" from Pennsylvania—"flattered himself that two years would not elapse before the Chinese and Japanese—sober, industrious, and excellent people—would be attracted there to settle. It was only a short voyage across the Pacific Ocean. Millions of those starving workmen who, in point of sobriety, industry, and capacity, were among the best in the world—workmen from every isle in the Pacific—men able to outwork the English, would flock there."

In the same fine strain of prophecy, Mr Darragh, another "drab" of the Democratic school, observes—

"He was one of those who believed that there were men now here, who might yet live to see a continuous railroad extending from the mouth of the Columbia to the Atlantic. The country would soon be filled with a dense population, and would eventually control the China trade, and affect the whole commerce of the Pacific. He trusted in God there would be a beginning of this end. He trusted that this government would say to the despotisms of Europe—Stay on your own side of the water, and do not attempt to intermeddle with the balance of power on this continent. He believed it to be the design of God that our free institutions, or institutions like ours, should eventually cover this whole continent—a consummation which could not but affect every part of the world, and the prospect of which ought to fill with joy the heart of every philanthropic man!"

But it won't till you've paid your debts, O Darragh!

Mr Baker, (Whig,) another insolvent from Illinois, is very rich and rapacious—

"He (Mr B.) went for the whole of Oregon; for every grain of sand that sparkled in her moonlight, and every pebble on its wave-worn strand. It was ours—all ours; ours by treaty, ours by discovery.... There was such a thing as destiny for this American race—a destiny that would yet appear upon the great chart of human history. It was already fulfilling, and that was a reason why we could now refuse to Great Britain that which we had offered her in 1818 and 1824. Reasons existed now in our condition, which did not exist then. Who at that time could have divined that our boundary was to be extended to the Rio del Norte, if not to Zacatecas, to Potosi, to California? No, we had a destiny, and Mr B. felt it." ... "Cuba was the tongue which God had placed in the Gulf of Mexico to dictate commercial law to all who sought the Carribbean Sea. And England was not to be allowed to take Cuba or hold Oregon, because we, the people of the United States, had spread, were spreading, and intend to spread, and should spread, and go on to spread!" ... "Mr Speaker, if from this claim an echo shall come back, it may not come from Oregon, but it will come from the Canadas. Sir, it will be 'the last echo of a host o'erthrown.' The British power will be swept from this continent for ever, and though she may, 'like the sultan sun, struggle upon the fiery verge of heaven,' she must yield at last to the impulses of freedom, and to the touch of that destiny which shall crush her power in the western hemisphere!"

This may be considered bad to beat; yet, in our opinion, a choice spirit from Missouri, Sims by name, does it—

"It is so common on this floor, for inexperienced members to make apologies for their embarrassment, that I will not offer any for mine. I find some difficulty in getting along with all the questions that may be raised by the north or by the south, and by lawyers, and by metaphysicians, and learned doctors who abound here, that I shall be slow in getting along. I hope, therefore, that gentlemen will keep cool, and suffer me to get through." ...

Certainly, Sims—there is no false modesty, you will observe, in this good Sims. He thus defines his position.

"I wish it to be distinctly understood what banner I fight under. It is for Oregon, all or none, now or never! Not only I myself, but all my own people whom I represent, will stand up to this motto. Around that will we rally, and for it will we fight, till the British lion shall trail in the dust. The lion has cowered before us before. Talk of whipping this nation? Though not, sir, brought up in the tented field, nor accustomed to make war an exercise, and do not so much thirst for martial renown as to desire to witness such a war, yet I cannot fear it, nor doubt its success."

A touching episode in the life of Sims!—

"When I was a boy, sir—a small boy—in 1815, I was with my father in church where he was offering his prayers to the Almighty, and it was then that the news of the victory of New Orleans was brought to the spot. I never felt so happy, sir, as at that moment. At that moment my love of country commenced, and from that hour it has increased more and more every year; and I shall be ever ready to peril every thing in my power for the good of my country. Still, I am for the whole of Oregon, and for nothing else but the whole, and in defence of it I will willingly see every river, from its mountain source to the ocean, reddened with the blood of the contest. Talk about this country being whipped! The thing is impossible! Why did not Great Britain whip us long ago, if she could?" * * * * * * "I shall lose as much as any one in a war—I do not mean in property—but I have a wife and children, and I love them with all the heart and soul that I possess. No one can love his family more than I do mine unless a stronger intellect may give him more strength of affection; and my family will be exposed to the merciless savages, who will as ever become the allies of Great Britain in any war. But still, sir, my people on the frontier will press on to the mouth of the Columbia, and fight for Oregon. I am not sure but I will go myself."

The feelings of the female Sims, and all the little Simses, on reading that last sentence! We shudder to think of it. Sims, however, has made up his mind that the exploit is no great matter after all.

"It was said that the route to Oregon was impracticable, and that it was beset with dangerous enemies, and that we could not send troops over to Oregon, nor provisions to feed them. Now, sir, we of Missouri can fit out ten thousand waggon-loads of provisions for Oregon, and ten thousand waggon-boys to drive them, who, with their waggon-whips, will beat and drive off all the British and Indians that they find in their way."

The peroration of this harangue is, perhaps, the funniest part of it all, but want of space compels us to omit it. We let Sims drop with great reluctance, and pass over several minor luminaries who are quite unworthy to follow in his wake. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are about to introduce to you Mr Kennedy, a Democratic representative from Indiana—a very insolvent Western state, and a celebrated "British or any other lion" tamer.

"Sir, (says Mr K.,) when the British lion, or any other lion, lies down in our path, we will not travel round the world in blood and fire, but will make him leave that lair." * * * *

After this mysterious announcement, he enquires—

"Shall we pause in our career, or retrace our steps, because the British lion has chosen to place himself in our path? Has our blood already become so pale, that we should tremble at the roar of the king of beasts? We will not go out of our way to seek a conflict with him; but if he cross our path, and refuses to move at a peaceful command, he will run his nose on the talons of the American eagle, and his blood will spout as from a harpooned whale. The spectators who look on the struggle may prepare to hear a crash, as if the very ribs of nature had broke!" ...

Once more into the lion—or lioness—for it does not appear exactly which this time!

"We are one people and one country, and have one interest and one destiny, which, if we live up to, though it may not free us to follow the British lion round the world in blood and slaver, will end in her expulsion from this continent, which he rests not upon but to pollute!"

Mr Kennedy's solicitude for the rising generation is very touching—

"Where shall we find room for all our people, unless we have Oregon? What shall we do with all those little white-headed boys and girls—God bless them!—that cover the Mississippi valley, as the flowers cover the western prairies?"

In order to show the truly awful and more than Chinese populousness of this ancient State of Indiana, which was admitted into the Union so long ago as 1816, we may observe that its superficial extent is thirty-six thousand square miles, or twenty-three millions and forty thousand acres. The population in 1840, black and white all told, amounted to the astounding number of six hundred and eighty-five thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, or about one-third of that of London! The adjoining states of Illinois and Missouri are still less densely peopled.

Mr Kennedy's opinions touching the British government—

"Cannibal-like, it fed one part of its subjects upon the other. She drinks the blood and sweat, and tears the sinews of its labouring millions to feed a miserable aristocracy. England is now seen standing in the twilight of her glory; but a sharp vision may see written upon her walls, the warning that Daniel interpreted for the Babylonish king—'Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin!'"

We cannot help the confusion of genders. It's so writ down in the Globe, as are all our quotations—verbatim. Here comes a fine "death or glory" blast—

"Why is it that, after all, we should so dread the shock of war? We all have to die, whether in our beds or in the battle-field. Who of you all, when roused by the clangour of Gabriel's trump, would not rather appear in all the bloom of youth, bearing upon your front the scar of the death-wound received in defence of your country's right, than with the wrinkled front of dishonoured age?"

Hoorra!—Only one more quotation from Kennedy, and that because it permits us to take a last fond look at Sims, who re-appears, for a moment, like a meteor on the scene of his past glories!

"Was it not a burning, blistering, withering shame that the cross of St George should be found floating on American soil?" [Here Mr L. H. Sims exclaimed, "Yes, and it will blister on our foreheads like the mark of Cain!">[

Mr Hamlin, a Democratic representative from Maine, one of the pattern New England states, is not far behind his Western brethren—

"Their progress was as certain as destiny. He could not be mistaken in the idea, that our flag was destined to shed its lustre over every hill and plain on the Pacific slope, and on every stream that mingles with the Pacific. What would monarchical institutions do—what would tyrants do—in this age of improvement—this age of steam and lightning? The still small voice in our legislative halls and seminaries of learning, would soon be re-echoed in distant lands. Should we fold our arms and refuse, under all these circumstances, to discharge our duty? No; let us march steadily up to this duty, and discharge it like men;

'And the gun of our nation's natal day
At the rise and set of sun,
Shall boom from the far north-east away
To the vales of Oregon.
And ships on the seashore luff and tack,
And send the peal of triumph back.'"

Mr Stanton, a Democratic representative from the slave state of Tennessee—Polk's own—observes, that war about Oregon

"Would be another crime of fearful magnitude added to that already mountainous mass of fraud and havoc by which England has heretofore extended her power, and by which she now maintains it. Did some gentlemen say that her crimes were represented by a vast pyramid of human skulls? I say, sir, rather by a huge pyramid of human hearts, living, yet bleeding in agony, as they are torn from the reeking bosoms of the toiling, fighting millions."

Peace, this person observes, is rather nearer his heart than any thing else, but

"If she must depart, if she is destined to take her sad flight from earth to heaven again, then welcome the black tempest of war. Welcome its terrors, its privations, its wounds, its deaths! We will sternly bare our bosoms to its deadliest shock, and trust in God for the result."

After all this, our readers will be little surprised to find that a Mr Gordon, from the rich and partially civilized state of New York, whose commercial relations with us are of such magnitude and importance, makes an ass of himself with the best of them.

"The next war with Great Britain will expel her from this continent. Though a peace-loving people, we are, when aroused in defensive warfare, the most warlike race ever clad in armour. Let war come, if it will come, boldly and firmly will we meet its shock, and roll back its wave on the fast anchored isle of Britain, and dash its furious flood over those who raised the storm, but could not direct its course. In a just war, as this would be on our part, the sound of the clarion would be the sweetest music that could greet our ears!... I abhor and detest the British Government. Would to God that the British people, the Irish, the Scotch, the Welsh, and the English, would rise up in rebellion, sponge out the national debt, confiscate the land, and sell it in small parcels among the people. Never in the world will they reach the promised land of equal rights, except through a red sea of blood. Let Great Britain declare war, and I fervently hope that the British people, at least the Irish, will seize the occasion to rise and assert their independence.... I again repeat, that I abhor that government; I abhor that purse-proud and pampered aristocracy, with its bloated pension-list, which for centuries past has wrung its being from the toil, the sweat, and the blood of that people."

Mr Bunkerhoff, from Ohio, and his people—

"Would a great deal rather fight Great Britain than some other powers, for we do not love her. We hear much said about the ties of our common language, our common origin, and our common recollections, binding us together. But I say, we do not love Great Britain at all; at least my people do not, and I do not. A common language! It has been made the vehicle of an incessant torrent of abuse and misrepresentation of our men, our manners, and our institutions, and even our women—it might be vulgar to designate our plebeian girls as ladies—have not escaped it; and all this is popular, and encouraged in high places."

Mr Chipman, from Michigan, thus whistles Yankee-doodle, with the usual thorough-base accompaniment of self-conceit:—

"Reflecting that from three millions we had increased to twenty millions, we could not resist the conclusion, that Yankee enterprise and vigour—he used the term Yankee in reference to the whole country—were destined to spread our possessions and institutions over the whole country. Could any act of the government prevent this? He must be allowed to say, that wherever the Yankee slept for a night, there he would rule. What part of the globe had not been a witness of their moral power, and to the light reflected from their free institutions?" * * * *

Your Yankee proper can no more "get along" without his spice of cant, than without his chew of tobacco and his nasal twang. What follows, however, took even us by surprise:—

"Should we crouch to the British lion, because we had been thus prosperous? He remembered the time when education, the pride of the northern Whigs, was made the means of opposition to the democracy. He recollected the long agony that it cost him to relieve his mind from federal thraldom. Education was an instrument to ridicule and put down democracy."

What Mr Chipman would do—if—

"I appeal to high Heaven, that if a British fleet were anchored off here, in the Potomac, and demanded of us one inch of territory, or one pebble that was smoothed by the Pacific wave into a child's toy, upon penalty of an instant bombardment, I would say fire." * * * * "Now he (Mr C.) lived on the frontier. He remembered when Detroit was sacked. Then we had a Hull in Michigan; but now, thank God, we had a Lewis Cass, who would protect the border if war should come, which, in his opinion, would not come. There were millions on the lake frontier who would, in case of war, rush over into Canada—the vulnerable point that was exposed to us. He would pledge himself, that, upon a contract with the government, Michigan alone would take Canada in ninety days; and, if that would not do, they would give it up, and take it in ninety days again. The Government of the United States had only to give the frontier people leave to take Canada."

Though Michigan has the benefit of this hero's councils, he is at the pains to inform us that Vermont, a New England state, claims his birth, parentage, and education—a fact which we gladly record on the enduring page of Maga for the benefit of the future compiler of the Chipman annals. He closes an oration, scarcely, if at all, inferior to that of Sims, with a melodious tribute to the land of his nativity.

"If Great Britain went to war for Oregon, how long would it be before her starving millions would rise in infuriated masses, and overwhelm their bloated aristocracy! He would say, then, if war should come—

'Hurrah for Vermont! for the land which we till
Will have some to defend her from valley and hill;
Leave the harvest to rot on the field where it grows,
And the reaping of wheat for the reaping of foes.
'Come Mexico, England! come tyrant, come knave,
If you rule o'er our land, ye shall rule o'er our grave!
Our vow is recorded—our banner unfurl'd,
In the name of Vermont, we defy all the world!'"

Magnifique—superbe—pretty well! Would not the world like to know something of the resources of this unknown anthropophagous state which throws down the gauntlet so boldly? Well, in this very year of grace, the population of Vermont amounts to no less than 300,000 souls of all ages, sexes, and colours! She pays her governor the incredible sum of £150 a-year. Her exports in 1840 amounted to £60,000. Every thing about her is on the same homoeopathic scale, except her heroes!

We have by no means exhausted our file, but our patience is expended, and so we fear is that of our readers. We write this in the city of New York, in the first week of February, and the debate is still proceeding in a tone, if possible, still more outrageous and absurd. The most astounding feature of the whole is, that the "collective wisdom" of any country professing to be civilized, can come together day after day and listen to such trash, without censure—without even the poor penalty of a sneer.

The Americans complain that they have been grievously misrepresented by the British press. Mrs Trollope, Mr Dickens, and other authors, are no doubt very graphic and clever in their way; but in order to do this people full justice, they must be allowed to represent themselves. A man must go amongst them fully to realize how hopeless and deplorable a state of things is that phase of society which halts betwixt barbarism and civilization, and is curiously deficient in the virtues of both. If he wishes to form a low idea of his species, let him spend a week or two at Washington; let him go amongst the little leaders of party in that preposterous capital, watch their little tricks, the rapacity with which they clutch the meanest spoils and wonder how political profligacy grows fat upon diet so meagre and uninviting. He will come away with a conviction, already indorsed by the more respectable portion of the American community, that their government is the most corrupt under the sun; but he will not, with them, lay the flattering notion to his soul, that the people of whom such men are the chosen representatives and guides, are likely to contribute much to the aggregate of human happiness, freedom, and civilization.

As to the denunciations of Great Britain, so thickly strewn through these carmina non prius audita of the Congressional muse, we are sure they will excite no feeling in our readers but that of pity and contempt, and that comment upon them is unnecessary. The jealousy of foreign nations towards the arts and arms of his country, is no new experience to the travelled Englishman. Still, as the Americans have no reason to be particularly sore on the subject of our arms, and as they appropriate our arts, at a very small expense, to themselves, they might afford, we should think, to let the British lion alone, and glorify themselves without for ever shaking their fists in the face of that magnanimous beast. In a political point of view, however, the deep-seated hostility of this people towards the British government, is a fact neither to be concealed nor made light of. From a somewhat extended personal observation, the writer of this is convinced that war at any time, and in any cause, would be popular with a large majority of the inhabitants of the United States. It is in vain to oppose to their opinion the interests of their commerce, and the genius of their institutions, so unsuited to schemes of warlike aggrandizement. The government of the United States is in the hands of the mob, which has as little to lose there as elsewhere, by convulsion of any kind.

We are willing to believe that the person who at present fills the Presidential chair at Washington, is fully alive to the responsibilities of his situation, and would gladly allay the storm which himself and his party have heretofore formed for their own most unworthy purposes. He knows full well that the dispute is in itself of the most trumpery nature; that the course of Great Britain has been throughout moderate and conciliatory to the last degree; that the military and financial position of the United States is such as to forbid a warlike crisis; and that, if hostilities were to ensue betwixt Great Britain and his country, no time could be more favourable to the former than the present. Yet, with all these inducements to peace, we fear he will find it impossible to bring matters to a satisfactory termination. But should an opportunity occur of taking us at disadvantage—should we find ourselves, for instance, involved in war with any powerful European nation—we may lay our account to have this envious and vindictive people on our backs. We are not, therefore, called upon to anticipate the trial, and to take the course of events into our own hands; but still less ought we to make any concessions, however trifling, which may retard, but will eventually exasperate, our difficulties. Much is in our power on the continent of North America, if we are but true to our own interests and to those of mankind. We should cherish to the utmost that affectionate and loyal spirit, which at present so eminently distinguishes our flourishing colony of Canada; we should look to it, that such a form of government be established in Mexico as shall at once heal her own dissensions, and guarantee her against the further encroachments of her neighbours; and we should invite other European nations to join with us in informing the populace of the United States, that they cannot be indulged in the gratification of those predatory interests, which the public opinion of the age happily denies to the most compact despotisms and the most powerful empires.

---

ANTONIO PEREZ.

As often as we revisit the fair city of Brussels, an irresistible attraction leads us from the heights crowned with its modern palaces, down among the localities of the valley beneath, the seat and scene of so many of the old glories of the capital of the Netherlands. On these occasions our steps unconsciously deviate a little from the direct line of descent, turning off on the left hand towards the Hotel d'Aremberg. But it is not to saunter through the elegant interior of this princely mansion, and linger over exquisite pictures and rare Etruscan vases, that we then approach it. Our musing eye sees not the actual walls shining with intolerable whiteness in the fierce summer-sun, but the towers of an ancient edifice, long ago demolished by the pitiless Alva, which once, as the Hotel de Cuylembourg, covered the same site. Beneath its roof the Protestant Confederates, in 1566, drew up their memorable "Request" to Margaret of Parma; and at one of its windows these "Beggars," being dismissed with such contumelious scorn from the presence of the Regent, nobly converted the stigma into a war-cry; and, with the wallet of the "Gueux" slung across their shoulders, drank out of wooden porringers a benison on the cause of the emancipation of the United Provinces. So prompted to think of these stirring times, we are carried by the steep declivity of a few streets to that magnificent Town Hall, where, only eleven years before the occurrences in the Hotel Cuylembourg, Charles V. had resigned into the hands of his son Philip the sovereignty of an extensive and flourishing empire. All that could be achieved by the energy of a mind confident of its own force and clearness—by a strong will wielding enormous resources of power—by prudence listening to, and able to balance, cautious experience, and fearless impetuosity—and by consummate skill in the art of government, had been laboriously and successfully achieved by Charles. To Philip he transferred the most fertile, delightful, opulent, and industrious countries of Europe—Spain and the Netherlands, Milan and Naples. His African possessions included Tunis and Oran, the Cape Verd and Canary islands. The Moluccas, the Philippine and Sunda islands heaped his storehouses with the spices, and fruits, and prolific vegetable riches of the Indian Ocean; while from the New World, the mines of Mexico, Chili, and Potosi poured into his treasury their tributary floods of gold. His mighty fleet was still an invincible armada; and his army, inured to war, and accustomed to victory under heroic captains, upheld the wide renown of the Spanish infantry. But neither the abilities nor the auspicious fortunes of Charles were inherited with this vast dominion by Philip. It is almost a mystery the crumbling away during his reign of such wealth and such strength. To read the riddle, we must know Philip. The biography which we shall now hurriedly sketch, of one of his most eminent favourites and ministers, who was, also, one of the most remarkable men that ever lived, enables us to see further into the breast of the gloomy, jealous, and cruel king, than we could hope to do by the less penetrating light of general history.

It was in the course of the year 1594, that the mother of the great Lord Bacon wrote bitterly to his brother Anthony—"Tho' I pity your brother, yet so long as he pities not himself, but keepeth that bloody Perez, yea, as a coach-companion and bed-companion, a proud, profane, costly fellow, whose being about him I verily fear the Lord God doth mislike, and doth less bless your brother in credit, and otherwise in his health, surely I am utterly discouraged, and make conscience further to undo myself to maintain such wretches as he is, that never loved your brother but for his own credit, living upon him."

This dark portrait, even from the pencil of maternal anxiety, is not overcharged with shade. A few words, which could not have been uttered by the Lady Bacon except as a prophetess, we may add in reference to the meeting of the famous Englishman and the notorious Spaniard. At that moment the public life of Francis Bacon was faintly dawning. The future Minister of State and Chancellor of England had just entered the House of Commons, and was whining for promotion at the gate of the royal favourite. The mean subservience of his nature was to be afterwards developed in its repulsive fulness. His scheming ambition saw itself far away from the ermine of justice, doomed to be spotted by his corruption. He had not then betrayed, and brought to the scaffold, and slandered his benefactor. The power and honours of which he was to be stripped, were yet to be won. His glory and his shame alike were latent. He was beginning hazardously a career of brilliant and dismal vicissitudes, to finish it with a halo of immortal glory blazing round his name.

But such a career along a strange parallelism of circumstances, although with a gloomier conclusion, Antonio Perez had already run. The unscrupulous confidant and reckless tool of a crafty and vindictive tyrant, he had wielded vast personal authority, and guided the movements of an immense empire.

"Antonio Perez, secretary of state," said one of his contemporaries, "is a pupil of Ruy Gomez. He is very discreet and amiable, and possesses much authority and learning. By his agreeable manners, he goes on tampering and disguising much of the disgust which people would feel at the king's slowness and sordid parsimony. Through his hands have passed all the affairs of Italy, and also those of Flanders, ever since this country has been governed by Don Juan, who promotes his interests greatly, as do, still more, the Archbishop of Toledo and the Marquis de Los Valez. He is so clever and capable that he must become the king's principal minister. He is thin, of delicate health, rather extravagant, and fond of his advantages and pleasures. He is tenacious of being thought much of, and of people offering him presents."

To gratify, by one dreadful blow, a cruel king and a guilty passion, he murdered his friend. The depth of his misery soon rivalled and exceeded the eminence of his prosperity. Hurled from his offices and dignities, deprived of the very title of nobility, condemned by the civil, and excommunicated by the ecclesiastical tribunals, cast into prison, loaded with irons, put to the torture, hunted like a wild beast out of his own country and many a nook of refuge in other lands, Perez, who had been "the most powerful personage in the Spanish monarchy," was, when we first meet him in the company of Bacon, an exile in penury. And so he died, an impoverished outcast, leaving to posterity a name which befits, if it cannot adorn, a tale, and may well point a moral.

The "bloody" Perez was the natural son of Gonzalo Perez, who was for a long time Secretary of State to Charles V. and Philip II. Of his mother nothing is known. The conjectures of scandal are heightened and perplexed by the fact that he was ennobled when a child, and that, amidst all the denunciations of his overbearing behaviour and insufferable arrogance, he is never reproached with the baseness of his maternal lineage. Legitimated in infancy by an imperial diploma, Antonio was literally a courtier and politician from his cradle.

"Being of a quick understanding, an insinuating character, and a devotedness which knew neither bounds nor scruples, full of expedients, a nervous and elegant writer, and expeditious in business, he had gained the favour of Philip II., who had gradually given him almost his entire confidence. He was, with Cayas, one of the two secretaries of the council of state, and was charged principally with the despacho universal; that is, with the counter-sign and the conduct of the diplomatic correspondence and the royal commands. Philip imparted to him his most secret designs, initiated him into his private thoughts; and it was Perez who, in deciphering the despatches, separated the points to be communicated to the council of state for their opinion, from those which the king reserved for his exclusive deliberation. Such high favour had intoxicated him. He affected even towards the Duke of Alva, when they met in the king's apartments at dinner, a silence and a haughtiness which revealed at once the arrogance of enmity and the infatuation of fortune. So little moderation in prosperity, coupled with the most luxurious habits, a passion for gaming, a craving appetite for pleasures, and excessive expenses, which reduced him to receive from every hand, excited against him both envy and animosity in the austere and factious court of Philip II.; and, on the first opportunity, inevitably prepared his downfal. This event, too, he himself hastened by serving too well the distrustful passions of Philip, and, perhaps, even by exciting them beyond measure against two men of his own party, Don Juan of Austria and his secretary Escovedo."

It is impossible to imagine that the character of Philip was not fathomed by Perez. The peril of his position, as the depositary of the innermost secrets of the king, could not have escaped his acute mind. The treachery of his daily services, to which, in the words we have quoted, allusion is made, must have perpetually reminded him how probably he was preparing for himself the ruin which before his own eyes had struck and destroyed more than one of his predecessors. At the same time, the bent of his disposition carried him readily enough into intrigue, deceit, and cool remorseless villany. He was not retarded by any scruple, or abashed by any principle. But he did not lack sagacity. The power which he loved and abused was acquired and retained easily, because the exercise of his talents had always been quite in harmony with the natural flexion of his mind. In the conduct of public affairs, Philip never had a minister who more dexterously conformed reasons and actions of policy to the will, or prejudices, or passions of the sovereign. All the extravagance, and even towards so terrible an enemy as Alva, all the insolence of Perez, could hardly have shaken his security. From what he knew, and what he had done, Philip, it is true, might at any moment be tempted to work his downfal, if not his death; but, in consequence of that very knowledge and his very deeds, the value of such an adviser and such a tool was almost sure to protract and avert his doom. The disgrace and misfortune, therefore, of Perez, however enveloped afterwards in the mantle of political delinquency, are to be traced to more strictly personal causes. It is a curious, interesting, and horrible story.

The memorable struggle of the Netherlands against the domination of Spain was at its height. The flames kindled by the ferocity of Alva had not been extinguished by his milder but far less able successor, the Grand Commander Requesens, who sank under the harassing pressure of the difficulties which encompassed him. Upon his death, the Spanish court, alive to the momentous issues of the contest, invoked the services of one of the most celebrated men of the age. Don John of Austria, who saved Europe and Christianity at the Gulf of Lepanto, and had repeatedly humbled the Crescent in its proudest fortresses, was chosen to crush the rebellious Flemings. The appointment was hardly made, when clouds of distrust began to roll over the spirit of Philip. The ambition of his brother was known and troublesome to him, as he had baffled but two years before a project which Don John took little pains to conceal, and even induced the Pope to recommend, of converting his conquest of Tunis into an independent sovereignty for himself. Believing these alarming aspirations to be prompted by the Secretary Juan de Soto, whom Ruy Gomez had placed near his brother, Philip removed Soto and substituted Escovedo, on whose fidelity he relied, and who received secret instructions to divert, as far as possible, the dreams of Don John from sceptres and thrones. But a faithless master taught faithlessness to his servants. Escovedo, neglecting the counsels of Philip, entered cordially into the views and schemes of Don John, until the sagacious vigilance of Antonio Perez startled the jealousy of the Spanish monarch by the disclosure, that Don John intended, and was actually preparing to win and wear the crown of England. Such a prospect, there can be no doubt, tore his sullen soul with bitter recollections, and made him resolve, more sternly than ever, that the haughty island should groan beneath no yoke but his own. The mere subjugation of England by Spanish arms, and the occupation of its throne by a Spaniard, not himself, were insufficient to glut the hatred, and avenge the insulted majesty of Philip. For his own hands and his own purposes he reserved the task; and at a later period, the wreck of the Armada strewed the shores of Britain with memorials of his gigantic and innocuous malignity. Dissembling, however, his displeasure, he permitted Don John to expect, when the Netherlands had been pacified, his approval of the invasion of England.

"At the same time, to become acquainted with all his brother's designs, and watch the intrigues of Escovedo, he authorized Perez, who was the confidant of the one and the friend of the other, to correspond with them, to enter into their views, to appear to gain his favour for them, to speak even very freely of him, in order to throw them the more off their guard, and afterwards to betray their secrets to him. Perez sought, or, at the very least, accepted this odious part. He acted it, as he himself relates, with a shameless devotion to the king, and a studied perfidy towards Don Juan and Escovedo. He wrote letters to them, which were even submitted to the inspection of Philip, and in which he did not always speak respectfully of that prince; he afterwards communicated to Philip the bold despatches of Escovedo, and the effusions of Don Juan's restless and desponding ambition. In forwarding to the king a letter from Escovedo, he at once boasts, and clears himself of this disloyal artifice. 'Sire,' says he, 'it is thus one must listen and answer for the good of your service; people are held much better thus at sword's length; and one can better do with them whatever is conducive to the interest of your affairs. But let your majesty use good precaution in reading these papers; for, if my artifice is discovered, I shall no longer be good for any thing; and shall have to discontinue the game. Moreover, I know very well that, for my duty and conscience, I am doing, in all this, nothing but what I ought; and I need no other theology than my own to comprehend it.' The king answers—'Trust, in every thing, to my circumspection. My theology understands the thing just as yours does, and considers not only that you are doing your duty, but that you would have been remiss towards God and man, had you not done so, in order to enlighten my understanding, as completely as is necessary, against human deceits and upon the things of this world, at which I am truly alarmed."

The laurels of the conqueror of the Turks drooped and withered in Flanders.

"This young and glorious captain found, in the provinces confederated at Ghent, an incurable distrust both of the Spaniards and himself. The profound and skilful policy of the Prince of Orange raised obstacles against him which he could not surmount. In spite of the moderate conditions which he offered to the assembled States-General, he was received by them much less as a pacificator than as an enemy. They refused to authorize the departure of the Spanish troops by sea, fearing they might be employed against the provinces of Holland and Zealand, and they required that they should repair to Italy by land. Don Juan saw his designs upon England, on this side, vanishing. Without authority, money, or any means of establishing the domination of the king, his brother, and of supporting his own renown, he took a disgust to a position which offered him no issue. Accustomed, hitherto, to rapid and brilliant enterprises, he desponded at his impotency; and already a prey to gnawing cares, which were leading him slowly to the tomb, he demanded his recall."

To enforce his complaints, Don John sent Escovedo to Spain. Redress was not granted, and his messenger never returned to him. The deadly correspondence between Perez and himself—the outpourings of an ardent and daring temper, swelling with lofty designs, and pining beneath an apparently irremediable inaction, into the ears of a frigid and false winnower of unguarded words and earnest feelings—was continued unremittingly. M. Mignet, it seems to us, shows very satisfactorily, that Perez, in his abominable office of an unjust interpreter of the wishes and intentions of Don John, drugged Philip copiously with calumnious reports and unwarrantable insinuations. Be that as it may, we are inclined to believe, among other matters of a very different complexion, that, without repugnance on the part of Philip, there was a tossing about for a time, in the lottery of events, a marriage between Don John and our beautiful and unfortunate Mary. There is a pleasure and a grace sometimes in idle speculation; but to the leisure of a happier fancy than ours we commit the picture of the consequences of an union between the heroic Don John and the lovely Queen of Scotland. "Money, more money, and Escovedo," became at length, in his perplexity and anguish, the importunate clamour of the governor of the Netherlands. Then it was, as Perez tells us, that Philip and his obsequious counsellors meditated on the course best fitted for what was evidently a serious conjecture. Then it was, we learn from the same authority, that the king determined on the death of Escovedo.

"They took a review of the various schemes that had been planned in favour of Prince Don Juan, ever since his residence in Italy, without the king having any communication or perfect knowledge of them; they called to mind the grievous disappointment experienced by the authors of these projects, at the expedition to England not taking place according to their first idea; the attempt they made a second time, for the same object, with his Holiness, when they were in Flanders, and always without giving the king any account; the design of deserting the government of Flanders, when once the expedition to England was abandoned; the secret understandings formed in France without the king's knowledge; the resolution they had formed, to prefer going as adventurers into France, with six thousand foot and one thousand horse, to filling the highest offices; lastly, the very strong language with which the prince, in his letters, expressed his grief and despair. The result of all this seemed, that there was reason to fear some great resolution, and the execution of some great blow or other which might trouble the public peace, and the tranquility of his majesty's states, and, moreover, that Prince Don Juan might himself be ruined, if they let the secretary, Escovedo, remain any longer with him."

What a gap there is in the whole truth in this story, on which Perez subsequently built his defence, we shall now briefly explain. With one considerable exception, historians concur in their belief of the amours of Perez with the Princess of Eboli. Ranke, who is satisfied with the political explanation given by Perez of the murder of Escovedo, discredits the notion of Perez being a lover of the princess, because she was old, and blind of one eye, and because his own wife, Dona Juana Coëllo, evinced towards him, throughout his trial, the most devoted and constant affection.

"The last reason," says our author, with perfect truth, "goes for nothing." The love of woman buries her wrongs without a tear. "As to the objection," M. Mignet proceeds to remark, "derived from the age and appearance of the Princess of Eboli, it has not much foundation either. All contemporary writers agree in praising her beauty (hermosura.) Born in 1540, she married Ruy Gomez at the age of thirteen, and was only thirty-eight years old at the present period. She was not one-eyed, but she squinted. There was nothing in her person to prevent the intimacy which Ranke discredits, but which numerous testimonies place beyond any doubt. I quote only the most important, waiving the presents which Perez had received from the princess, and which he was condemned to give back by a decree of justice."

It is too late now, we join M. Mignet in believing, to doubt or even to decry the personal charms of the Princess of Eboli, which the misty delirium of the poet may have magnified, or the expedient boldness of the romancer too voluptuously emblazoned, but which more than one grave annalist has calmly commemorated.[4] We shall not, however, venture to decide the nice question which oscillates between an obliquity and a loss of vision. The Spanish word "tuerto" means, ordinarily, "blind of one eye." And there is an answer which M. Mignet probably considers apocryphal, as he does not allude to it, said to have been made by Perez to Henry IV. of France, who expressed surprise that he should be so much the slave of a woman that had but one eye. "Sire," replied the ingeniously gallant Perez, "she set the world on fire with that; if she had preserved both, she would have consumed it." It is of little consequence. Any slight physical blemish or imperfection was more than counterbalanced by the wit and accomplishments of this seductive woman, whose enchantments, like those of Ninon de l'Enclos, defied the impairing inroads of old age.

It is unnecessary here to repeat or analyse the powerful concatenation of proofs by which her criminal intimacy with Perez is established. We may frankly admit, nevertheless, that the first perusal of the evidence did not convince us. The probability was strong that much would be exaggerated, perverted, and invented, before a partial tribunal, in order to annihilate a disgraced courtier, a fallen and helpless enemy. But the reasons which appear conclusively to fix culpability, will be better understood when the facts of the case are stated. Every witness must be branded with perjury to entitle us to doubt that the familiarity of Perez with the princess had attracted observation. Escovedo was aware of it, saw it, and denounced it. He remonstrated with both parties on their guilt and on their danger. The appeals to conscience and to fear were of unequal force. The guilt of their conduct was not likely to excite, in a couple abandoned to the indulgence of a mutual and violent passion, any emotion except anger against the honesty and audacity which rebuked them. By a grave discourse on breaches of decorum and morality, Escovedo ran the risk of being considered—what the princess actually declared him to be—a rude fellow and a bore. But the danger of their profligacy was a more delicate and ominous text for censure. In the peril of any public exposure was involved an additional complication of guilt. Perez was not the only favoured votary of the versatile siren. His rival, or rather his partner, was—Philip of Spain! The revelation of promiscuous worship, threatened by Escovedo, sounded like a knell to Perez and the princess. Was it a mad defiance, or a profound prescience, of the consequences, which, when Escovedo, stung on one occasion beyond forbearance by the demonstration of iniquity which Othello in his agony demands of Iago, declared loudly his purpose of divulging every thing to the king?—was it, we say, the fury or the shrewdness of despair which then drew from the lady a reply of outrageous and coarse effrontery? The irrecoverable words being spoken, we think, with M. Mignet, that "the ruin of Escovedo, whose indiscretions were becoming formidable, was doubtless sworn, from this moment, by Perez and the princess."

We shall now, with some consciousness of superiority over the German, Feuerbach, whose common-place murders are flavourless for us, (who were fellow-citizens of Burke, and rode in an omnibus with Greenacre, just as Bacon had Perez for a coach-companion,) transcribe the minute continuous narrative of the assassination of Escovedo, taken down from the lips of Antonio Enriquez, the page and familiar of Antonio Perez:—

"'Being one day at leisure in the apartment of Diego Martinez the major-domo of Antonio Perez, Diego asked me whether I knew any of my countrymen who would be willing to stab a person with a knife. He added, that it would be profitable and well paid, and that, even if death resulted from the blow, it was of no consequence. I answered, that I would speak of it to a mule-driver of my acquaintance, as in fact I did, and the muleteer undertook the affair. Afterwards, Diego Martinez gave me to understand, with rather puzzling reasons, that it would be necessary to kill the individual, who was a person of importance, and that Antonio Perez would approve of it; on this I remarked that it was not an affair to be trusted to a muleteer, but to persons of a better stamp. Then Diego Martinez added, that the person to be killed often came to the house, and that, if we could put any thing in his food or drink, we must do so; because that was the best, surest, and most secret means. It was resolved to have recourse to this method, and with all dispatch.

"'During these transactions, I had occasion to go to Murcia. Before my departure, I spoke of it to Martinez, who told me I should find, in Murcia, certain herbs well adapted to our purpose; and he gave me a list of those which I was to procure. In fact, I sought them out and sent them to Martinez, who had provided himself with an apothecary, whom he had sent for from Molina in Aragon. It was in my house that the apothecary, assisted by Martinez, distilled the juice of those herbs. In order to make an experiment of it afterwards, they made a cock swallow some, but no effect followed; and what they had thus prepared, was found to be good for nothing. The apothecary was then paid for his trouble, and sent away.

"'A few days after, Martinez told me he had in his possession a certain liquid fit to be given to drink, adding that Antonio Perez, the secretary, would trust nobody but me, and that, during a repast which our master was to give in the country, I should only have to pour out some of this water for Escovedo, who would be among the guests, and for whom the preceding experiments had already been tried. I answered, that unless my master himself gave me the order, I would not have a hand in poisoning any body. Then the secretary, Anthony Perez, called me one evening in the country, and told me how important it was for him that the secretary Escovedo should die; that I must not fail to give him the beverage in question on the day of the dinner: and that I was to contrive the execution of it with Martinez; adding, moreover, good promises and offers of protection in whatever might concern me.

"'I went away very contented, and consulted with Martinez as to the measures to be taken. The arrangement for the dinner was as follows: entering the house by the passage of the stables, which are in the middle, and advancing into the first room, we found two side-boards, one for the service of plates, and the other for that of the glasses, from which we were to supply the guests with drink. From the said room, on the left, we passed to that where the tables were laid, and the windows of which looked out on the country. Between the room where they were to dine, and that where the side-boards stood, was a square room, serving as an antechamber and passage. Whilst they were eating, I was to take care that every time the secretary Escovedo asked for drink, I should be the person to serve him. I had thus the opportunity of giving him some twice; pouring the poisoned water into his wine at the moment I passed through the antechamber, about a nutshell-full, as I had been ordered. The dinner over, secretary Escovedo went away, but the others remained to play, and Antonio Perez having gone out for a moment, rejoined his major-domo and me in one of the apartments over the court-yard, where we gave him an account of the quantity of water that had been poured into secretary Escovedo's glass; after which, he returned to play. We heard, afterwards, that the beverage had produced no effect.

"'A few days subsequent to this ill success, secretary Antonio Perez gave another dinner in what is called Cordon House, which belonged to the count of Punoñ Rostro, where secretary Escovedo, Dona Juana Coëllo, the wife of Perez, and other guests, were present. Each of them was served with a dish of milk or cream, and in Escovedo's was mixed a powder like flour. I gave him, moreover, some wine mixed with the water of the preceding dinner. This time it operated better, for secretary Escovedo was very ill, without guessing the reason. During his illness, I found means for one of my friends, the son of captain Juan Rubio, governor of the principality of Melfi, and formerly Perez's major-domo (which son, after having been page to Dona Juana Coëllo, was a scullion in the king's kitchens), to form an acquaintance with secretary Escovedo's cook, whom he saw every morning. Now, as they prepared for the sick man a separate broth, this scullion, taking advantage of a moment when nobody saw him, cast into it a thimble-full of a powder that Diego Martinez had given him. When secretary Escovedo had taken some of this food, they found that it contained poison. They subsequently arrested one of Escovedo's female slaves who must have been employed to prepare the pottage; and, upon this proof, they hung her in the public square at Madrid, though she was innocent.

"'Secretary Escovedo having escaped all these plottings, Antonio Perez adopted another plan, viz., that we should kill him some evening with pistols, stilettoes, or rapiers, and that without delay. I started, therefore, for my country, to find one of my intimate friends, and a stiletto with a very thin blade, a much better weapon than a pistol for murdering a man. I travelled post, and they gave me some bills of exchange of Lorenzo Spinola at Genoa, to get money at Barcelona, and which, in fact, I received on arriving there.'

"Here Enriquez relates, that he enticed into the plot one of his brothers, named Miguel Bosque, to whom he promised a sum of gold and the protection of Perez; that they arrived at Madrid the very day Escovedo's slave was hanged; that, during his absence, Diego Martinez had fetched from Aragon, for the same object, two resolute men, named Juan de Mesa and Insausti; that the very day after his arrival, Diego Martinez had assembled them all four, as well as the scullion Juan Rubio, outside Madrid, to decide as to the means and the moment of the murder; that they had agreed upon this, that Diego Martinez had procured them a sword, broad and fluted up to the point, to kill Escovedo with, and had armed them all with daggers; and that Antonio Perez had gone, during that time, to pass the holy week at Alcala, doubtless with the intention of turning suspicion from him when the death of Escovedo was ascertained. Then Antonio Enriquez adds:—

"'It was agreed, that we should all meet every evening upon the little square of Saint James (Jacobo), whence we should go and watch on the side by which secretary Escovedo was to pass; which was done. Insausti, Juan Rubio, and Miguel Bosque, were to waylay him; while Diego Martinez, Juan de Mesa, and I, were to walk about in the neighbourhood, in case our services should be required in the murder. On Easter Monday, March 31, the day the murder was committed, Juan de Mesa and I were later than usual in repairing to the appointed spot, so that, when we arrived at St James's Square, the four others had already started to lie in ambush for the passing of secretary Escovedo. Whilst we were loitering about, Juan de Mesa and I heard the report that Escovedo had been assassinated. We then retired to our lodgings. Entering my room, I found Miguel Bosque there, in his doublet, having lost his cloak and pistol; and Juan de Mesa found, likewise, Insausti at his door, who had also lost his cloak, and whom he let secretly into his house.'"

The quiet pertinacity which characterizes this deliberate murder adds a creditable chapter to the voluminous "Newgate Calendar" of the sixteenth century. The murderers—first, second, third, and fourth—having executed their commission, were rewarded with a dramatic appreciation of their merits. Miguel Bosque received a hundred gold crowns from the hand of the clerk in the household of Perez. Juan de Mesa was presented with a gold chain, four hundred gold crowns, and a silver cup, to which the Princess of Eboli added, in writing, a title of employment in the administration of her estates. Diego Martinez brought to the three others brevets, signed nineteen days after this deed of blood, by Philip II. and Perez, of alfarez, or ensign in the royal service, with an income of twenty gold crowns. They then smilingly dispersed, as the play directs, "you that way, I this way."

Such blood will not sink in the ground. Instantly, at a private audience granted to him by Philip, the son of Escovedo, impelled by a torrent of universal suspicion, charged his father's death home to Perez. On the same day, Philip communicated to Perez the accusation. No pictorial art, we are sure, could exhibit truly the faces of these two men, speaking and listening, at that conference. This, however, was the last gleam of his sovereign's confidence that ever shone on Perez. His secret and mortal enemy, Mathew Vasquez, one of the royal secretaries, having espoused the cause of the kinsmen of Escovedo, wrote to Philip, "People pretend that it was a great friend of the deceased who assassinated the latter, because he had found him interfering with his honour, and on account of a woman." The barbed missile flew to its mark, and rankled for ever.

Our limits preclude the most concise epitome of the next twelve years of the life of Perez, of which the protracted tribulations, indeed, cannot be related more succinctly and attractively than they are by M. Mignet. During this weary space of time, Perez, single-handed, maintained an energetic defensive warfare against the disfavour of a vindictive monarch, the oppression of predominant rivals, the insidious machinations and wild fury of relentless private revenge, the most terrific mockeries of justice, the blackest mental despondency, and exquisite physical suffering. Philip II. displayed all his atrocious feline propensities—alternately hiding and baring his claws—tickling his victim to-day with delusions of mercy and protection, in order to smite him on the morrow with heavier and unmitigated cruelty. The truth is, he did not dare to kill, while he had no desire to save. Over and over again, in the course of the monstrous burlesques which were enacted in judicial robes as legal inquiries, did Philip privately, both orally and in writing, exonerate and absolve the murderer. Prosecutors and judges were bridled and overawed—kinsmen were abashed—popular indignation was quelled by reiterated assurances and reports, that the confidential secretary of state had been the passive and faithful executioner of royal commands. Even Uncle Martin, the privileged court-fool, when the flight ultimately of Perez gave general satisfaction, though not to the implacable Philip, exclaimed openly—"Sire, who is this Antonio Perez, whose escape and deliverance have filled every one with delight? He cannot, then, have been guilty; rejoice, therefore, like other people." But the lucky rival—the happy lover, could not expiate his rank offence by any amount of sacrifice in person or estate. According to our view of these lingering scenes of rancorous persecution, Philip gradually habituated himself to gloat over the sufferings of Perez with the morbid rapture of monomania. So long as the wretched man was within his reach, he contemplated placidly the anguish inflicted on him by the unjust or excessive malevolence of his enemies. He repeatedly checked the prosecutions of the Escovedo family, and sanctioned their revival with as little difficulty as if he had never interposed on any former occasion. He relaxed at intervals the rigorous imprisonment under which Perez was gasping for the breath of life, granting him for nearly a twelvemonth so much liberty as to inflate a naturally buoyant temperament with inordinate hope; but, in that very period, instigated and approved of investigations and actions at law, which resulted in reducing Perez, in so far as wealth and honours were concerned, to beggary and rags. He threw into a dungeon Pedro de Escovedo, who talked unreservedly of his desire to assassinate Perez; and refused the fervent entreaties of Perez himself to remove, for a temporary relief, the fetters with which, when his ailing body could scarcely support its own weight, his limbs had been loaded. He sent Perez compassionate and encouraging messages, writing to him, "I will not forsake you, and be assured that their animosity (of the Escovedos) will be impotent against you;" while he regularly transmitted to Vasquez and the Escovedos the information which nourished and hardened their hatred. And finally, having constantly enjoined Perez to take heed that no one should discover the murder to have been perpetrated by the king, Philip, on the ground that he obstinately refused to make a full confession, imperturbably consigned him "to that dreadful proof, the revolting account of which," says M. Mignet, "I will quote from the process itself:"—

"At the same instant, the said judges replied to him that the proofs still remaining in all their force and vigour ..., they ordered him to be put to the torture to make him declare what the king required; that if he lost his life, or the use of some limbs, it would be his own fault; and that he alone would be responsible. He repeated, once more, his former assertions, and protested, moreover, against the use of torture towards him, for these two reasons: first, because he was of a noble family; and secondly, because his life would be endangered, since he was already disabled by the effects of his eleven years' imprisonment. The two judges then ordered his irons and chain to be taken off; requiring him to take an oath and declare whatever he was asked. Upon his refusal, Diego Ruis, the executioner, stripped him of his garments, and left him only his linen drawers. The executioner having afterwards retired, they told him once more to obey the king's orders, on pain of suffering torture by the rope. He repeated once more that he said what he had already said. Immediately the ladder and apparatus of torture having been brought, Diego Ruis, the executioner, crossed the arms of Antonio Perez, one over the other; and they proceeded to give him one twist of the rope. He uttered piercing cries, saying: Jesus! that he had nothing to declare; that he had only to die in torture; that he would say nothing; and that he would die. This he repeated many times. By this time they had already given him four turns of the rope; and the judges having returned to summon him to declare what they wanted of him, he said, with many shrieks and exclamations, that he had nothing to say; that they were breaking his arm. Good God! I have lost the use of one arm; the doctors know it well. He added with groans: Ah! Lord, for the love of God!... They have crushed my hand, by the living God! He said, moreover: Señor Juan Gomez, you are a Christian; my brother, for the love of God, you are killing me, and I have nothing to declare. The judges replied again, that he must make the declarations they wanted; but he only repeated: Brother, you are killing me! Señor Juan Gomez, by our Saviour's wounds, let them finish me with one blow!... Let them leave me, I will say whatever they will; for God's sake, brother, have compassion on me! At the same time, he entreated them to relieve him from the position in which he was placed, and to give him his clothes, saying, he would speak. This did not happen until he had suffered eight turns of the rope; and the executioner being then ordered to leave the room where they had used the torture, Perez remained alone with the licentiate Juan Gomez and the scrivener Antonio Marquez."

The impunity of tyranny was over-strained. The tide of sympathy fluctuated, and ebbed with murmuring agitation from the channel in which it had flowed so long with a steady current. Jesters and preachers uttered homely truths—the nobles trembled—and the people shuddered. With a few intelligible exceptions, there was a burst of general satisfaction when, on the 20th April 1591, two months after his torture, Perez, by the aid of his intrepid and devoted wife—(and shall we be too credulous in adding, with the connivance of his guards?)—broke his bonds, fled from Castile, and set his foot on the soil of independent Aragon.

Let us now, for a moment, reconsider the motives which solve, as they guided, at once the indefensible guilt of Perez, and the malignant perfidy of Philip. The King of Spain unquestionably ordered the murder of Escovedo, and confided its perpetration to the docile secretary. But the death-warrant slumbered for a while in the keeping of the executioner. It was not until Escovedo acquired his perilous knowledge of the debaucheries of Perez and the Princess of Eboli, and had avowed his still more perilous resolution of publishing their frailty in a quarter where detection was ruin, that Perez plied with inflexible diligence artifice and violence, poison and dagger—to satisfy, coincidently, himself and his sovereign. By a similar infusion of emotions, roused by later occurrences, the feelings of Philip towards Perez underwent, after the murder, a radical change. He at first unhesitatingly joined, as we have seen, in rewarding the actual murderers. The tale of the preference lavished by beauty on his minion had not seared his heart-strings. With that revelation came the mood of inexpiable hate. A word from him, uttered with unequivocal emphasis, would have cleared and rescued Perez. Such words, indeed, he pronounced more than once; but never as he would have done, if their effect had been to screen merely the faithful minister of state. The object in their occasional recurrence was one of profound dissimulation. Philip's design was to lull the alarm of Perez, and to recover out of his hands every scrap of written evidence which existed, implicating himself in the death of Escovedo. And it was under an erroneous impression of his efforts having been at length completely triumphant, that he sent Perez to the torture, with a foregone determination of killing him with the sword of justice, as a slanderous traitor, who could not adduce a tittle of proof to support his falsehood.

But the wit of Perez was as penetrating as Philip's, and had avoided the snare. Retaining adroitly, in authentic documents, ample materials for his own defence, and the inculpation of the king, Perez fought undauntedly and successfully his battle, on the charge of Escovedo's murder, before the tribunals of Aragon, which were either ignorant of, or indifferent to, the scandals and personal criminalities inseparably mixed up with the case at Madrid. The retributive justice which had overwhelmed Perez in his person and circumstances in Castile, now descended on the reputation of Philip in Aragon, who was likewise not only obliged to hear of the acquittal of his detested foe by the supreme court there, but necessitated, by the tremendous statements promulgated by Perez as his justification, founded on unimpeachable writings in his possession, to drop and relinquish all legal proceedings.

The bitterness of the cup of woe, however, it had still been in the power of the fierce despot otherwise to deepen. Infuriated by the flight of Perez, the king caused the wife, then pregnant, and the children of the fugitive, to be arrested and cast into the public prison, dragging them "on the day when it is usual to pardon the very worst of criminals, at the very hour of the procession of the penitents on Holy Thursday, with a reckless disregard of custom and decency, among the crosses and all the cortèges of this solemnity, in order that there might be no lack of witnesses for this glorious action." These words we have cited from a famous narrative subsequently published by Perez in England, from which we are also tempted to extract, in relation to the same occurrence, the following passage, full of that energetic eloquence which contributed, among other causes, to win over general commiseration to the writer:—

"'The crime committed by a wife who aids her husband to escape from prison, martyred as he had been for so many years, and reduced to such a miserable condition, is justified by all law—natural, divine and human—and by the laws of Spain in particular. Saul, pursuing David, respected Michal, though she was his daughter, and had even saved her husband from the effects of his wrath. Law—common, civil, and canonical—absolves woman from whatever she does to defend her husband. The special law of Count Fernan Gonzalès leaves her free; the voice and the unanimous decree of all nations exalt and glorify her. If, when her children are in her house, in their chamber, or their cradle, it be proved that they are strangers to every thing, by that alone, and by their age, which excludes them from such confidences, how much more must that child be a stranger to all, which the mother bore in her bosom, and which they thus made a prisoner before its birth? Even before it could be guilty, it was already punished; and its life and soul were endangered, like one of its brothers who lost both when they seized his mother a second time, near the port of Lisbon.' He finishes with these noble and avenging threats:—'But let them not be deceived; wherever they put them, such captives have, on their side, the two most powerful advocates in the whole world—their innocence and their misfortune. No Cicero, no Demosthenes can so charm the ear, or so powerfully rouse the mind, as these two defenders; because, among other privileges, God has given them that of being always present, to cry out for justice, to serve both as witnesses and advocates, and to terminate one of those processes which God alone judges in this world: this is what will happen in the present case, if the justice of men be too long in default. And let not the debtors of God be too confident about the delay of His judgment; though the fatal term be apparently postponed, it is gradually approaching; and the debt to be paid is augmented by the interest which is added to it down to the last day of Heaven's great reckoning."'

It was not till eight years later, in 1599, when Philip III. sat on the throne of Spain, that the wife and children of Perez regained their liberty, and not till nearly twenty-five later, in 1615, that his children, who had passed their youth in prison, and been legally attainted with their father's degradation without having participated in his offences, were restored to their rank and rights as Spanish nobles.

Baffled in his pursuit of vengeance by the sturdy independence of the civil courts of Aragon, Philip turned his eyes for assistance to a tribunal, of which the jurisdiction had apparently no boundary except its exorbitant pretensions. At the king's bidding, the Inquisition endeavoured to seize Perez within its inexorable grasp. It seized, but could not hold him. The free and jealous Aragonese, shouting "Liberty for ever!" flew to arms, and emancipated from the mysterious oppression of the Holy Office the man already absolved of crime by the regular decrees of justice.

The Inquisition having renewed its attempt, the people, headed and supported by leaders of the highest lineage, condition, and authority in Aragon, increased in the fervour and boldness of their resistance. Their zealous championship of Perez—a most unworthy object of so much generous and brave solicitude—drove them into open insurrection against Philip. The biographer narrates, that when the storm raised by him, and on his account, drew near, Perez escaped across the Pyrenees into France; and the historian records, that when the sun of peace again re-emerged from the tempest, Philip had overthrown the ancient constitution of Aragon, crushed its nobility, destroyed its independence, and incorporated its territory with the Spanish monarchy.

Perez, although compelled to fly, bade farewell for ever to his native land with reluctance. There is something touching in the familiar image which he uses to describe his own condition: "He was like a dog of a faithful nature, who, though beaten and ill-treated by his master and household, is loth to quit the walls of his dwelling." He found at Béarn, in the court of the sister of Henry IV. of France, a resting-place from hardship, but not a safe asylum from persecution. During his brief residence there, three separate attempts to assassinate him were detected or defeated; nor were these the only plots directed against his person. M. Mignet quotes a pleasant variety of the species from the lively pen of Perez himself.

"'When Perez was at Pau, they went so far as to try to make use of a lady of that country, who lacked neither beauty, gallantry, nor distinction; a notable woman, an Amazon, and a huntress; riding, as they say, up hill and down dale. One would have thought they wanted to put to death some new Samson. In short, they offered her ten thousand crowns and six Spanish horses to come to Pau, and form an intimacy with Perez; and, after having charmed him by her beauty, to invite and entice him to her house, in order, some fine evening, to deliver him up, or allow him to be carried off in a hunting party. The lady, either being importuned, or desirous, from a curiosity natural to her sex, to know a man whom authority and his persecutors considered of so much consequence, or, lastly, for the purpose of warning the victim herself, feigned, as the sequel makes us believe, to accept the commission. She travelled to Pau, and made acquaintance with Perez. She visited him at his house. Messengers and love-letters flew about like hail. There were several parties of pleasure; but, in the end, the good disposition of the lady, and her attachment for Perez, gained the victory over interest, that metal of base alloy, which defiles more than any act of love; so that she herself came and revealed to him the machinations from beginning to end, together with the offers made, and all that had followed. She did much more. She offered him her house and the revenue attached to it, with such a warmth of affection, (if we may judge of love by its demonstrations,) that any sound mathematician would say there was, between that lady and Perez, an astrological sympathy.'"

His restless spirit of intrigue, and perhaps a nascent desire, provoked by altered circumstances, of reciprocal vengeance against Philip, hurried Perez from the tranquil seclusion of Béarn to the busy camp of Henry IV. After a long conference, he was sent to England by that monarch, who calculated on his services being usefully available with Queen Elizabeth in the common enterprise against Spain. Then it was that he formed his intimate acquaintance with the celebrated Francis Bacon, in whose company we first introduced him to our readers, and with many other individuals of eminence and note.

"It was during the leisure of this his first residence in London that Perez published, in the summer of 1594, his Relaciones, under the imaginary name of Raphael Peregrino; which, far from concealing the real author, in reality designated him by the allusion to his wandering life. This account of his adventures, composed with infinite art, was calculated to render his ungrateful and relentless persecutor still more odious, and to draw towards himself more benevolence and compassion. He sent copies of it to Burghley, to Lady Rich, sister of the Earl of Essex, to Lords Southampton, Montjoy, and Harris, to Sir Robert Sidney, Sir Henry Unton, and many other personages of the English court, accompanying them with letters gracefully written and melancholy in spirit. The one which he confided to the patronage of the Earl of Essex was at once touching and flattering:—'Raphael Peregrino,' said he, 'the author of this book, has charged me to present it to your Excellency. Your Excellency is obliged to protect him, since he recommends himself to you. He must know that he wants a godfather, since he chooses such as you. Perhaps he trusted to his name, knowing that your Excellency is the support of the pilgrims of fortune.'"

The dagger of the assassin continued to track his wanderings. And it is, probably, not commonly known, that upon one of the city gates of London, near St Paul's, there might be seen, in 1594, the heads of two Irishmen, executed as accomplices in a plot for the murder of Antonio Perez.

In England, where he was supported by the generosity of Essex, he did not remain very long, having been recalled, in 1594, to France by Henry, who had recently declared war against Philip. At Paris, Perez was received with great distinction and the most flattering attentions, being lodged in a spacious mansion, and provided with a military body-guard. The precaution was not superfluous. Wearing seemingly a charmed life, the dusky spectre of premature and unnatural death haunted him wherever he went or sojourned. Baron Pinilla, a Spaniard, was captured in Paris on the eve of his attempt to murder Perez, put to the torture, and executed on the Place de Grève—thus adding another name to the long catalogue of people, to whom any connexion with, or implication in, the affairs of Perez, whether innocently or criminally, for good or evil, attracted, it might be imagined as by Lady Bacon, from an angry Heaven the flash of calamitous ruin.

His present prosperity came as a brilliant glimpse through hopeless darkness, and so departed. Revisiting England in 1596, he found himself denied access to Essex, shunned by the Bacons, and disregarded by every body. The consequent mortification accelerated his return to France, which he reached, as Henry was concluding peace with Philip, to encounter cold distrust and speedy neglect from the French King. All this was the result of his own incurable double-dealing. He had been Henry's spy in the court of Elizabeth, and was, or fancied himself to be Elizabeth's at Paris. But the omnipotent secretary of state and the needy adventurer played the game of duplicity and perfidy with the odds reversed. All parties, as their experience unmasked his hollow insincerity, shrunk from reliance on, or intercourse with an ambidextrous knave, to whom mischief and deceit were infinitely more congenial than wisdom and honesty. "The truth is," wrote Villeroy, one of the French ministers, to a correspondent in 1605, "that his adversities have not made him much wiser or more discreet than he was in his prosperity." We must confess ourselves unable to perceive any traces of even the qualified improvement admitted by Villeroy.

The rest of the biography of this extraordinary man is a miserable diary of indignant lamentations over his abject condition—of impudent laudations of the blameless integrity of his career—of grovelling and ineffectual efforts and supplications to appease and eradicate the hatred of Philip—and of vociferous cries for relief from penury and famine. "I am in extreme want, having exhausted the assistance of all my friends, and no longer knowing where to find my daily bread," is the terrible confession of the once favourite minister of the most powerful monarch in Europe. He never touched the ground, or even gazed on the distant hills of Spain again. In one of the obscure streets of Paris, in solitude and poverty, he dragged the grief and infirmities of his old age slowly towards the grave; and at length, in the seventy-second year of his age, on a natural and quiet deathbed, closed the troubles of his tempestuous existence.

Such is "this strange eventful history." Such was the incalculable progeny of misery, disgrace, disaster, and ruin, involving himself, his family, countless individuals, and an entire nation, which issued from the guilty love of Perez and the Princess of Eboli.

Antonio Perez and Philip II. By M. Mignet. Translated by C. Cocks, B.L. London: 1846.

---

RECOLLECTIONS OF A LOVER OF SOCIETY.