who trusted him on this occasion. To them he delivered up the ministry: to them he promised never to interfere with the government, but to live as a constitutional ruler, above the strife and struggles of parties. In this the Duke of Victory was wrong: he should have opened his palace, lived in the throng, listened to the plaints, the desires, the feelings of all parties, and made himself adherents amongst all. The Spaniards tender eminence only on the condition of its being affable, and look upon kings, as we said before, with a kind of Arabic sentiment, as summary righters of wrongs, and controllers of all that is iniquitously done by their servants administering power. Espartero thought he acted the sovereign most fully by shutting himself in a small palace, by doing business regularly, and by eschewing all the pleasurable and representative part of his functions. He understood little of the minutiae of politics, and cared not to talk of them. He gave no dinners, no balls, no tertullias, no card-tables. In short, his salary was clean lost to the courtiers and placemen, and would-be placeThe women declared him to be a very dull Regent, and

men.

their condemnation was fatal.

The most inveterate enemies of the Regent were, however, the new and bastard portion of the Liberals-those whom the French ministerial papers called Young Spain: men jealous of the old Liberals of 1809 and 1821, who looked upon Arguelles and Calatrava as out of date, and who considered themselves representatives of a new and practical school of liberalism, superior to any yet discovered. Caballero and Olozaga were the chiefs of the party: but these gentlemen, however able as orators and writers, had never succeeded in attaching to them more than an insignificant number of followers. Timid, tortuous, and time-serving, they were of that class of politicians which can harass a ministry, but are incapable themselves of forming an administration. The Regent was sorely puzzled how to deal with them. Their speeches in the Cortes were backed at times by a large number of votes; but when he summoned them to his presence, and bade them form a ministry, they always declined. They had a majority for opposition, they said, but not for power. This might have puzzled a more experienced constitutional sovereign than Espartero. Soldierlike, he bade them go about their business. He was wrong. He ought on the contrary, like Louis Philippe in similar circumstances, to have facilitated their formation of a ministry; he ought to have smiled upon them; he ought to have lent them a helping hand; and then, after they had been fully discredited by a six months' hold of power, he might easily have turned them adrift, as the king of the French did M. Thiers.

Secure in the affection and support of the old stanch liberal

party, the Regent never dreamed that these could be overcome by men affecting to be more liberal than they. But Spain was not left to itself. The French court became exceedingly jealous at this time of the Regent's intentions respecting the marriage of the young queen. They sent an envoy, who was called a family ambassador, and who as such pretended to immediate and uncontrolled access to the young queen. The Regent resisted, the envoy left, France was more irritated, and then determined on the Regent's downfal. Thirty journals were almost simultaneously established in Madrid and different parts of the peninsula, all of which set up the same cry of the Regent's being sold to England, and of Spain being about to be sacrificed in a treaty of commerce. Barcelona, most likely to be affected by this bugbear treaty, was of course the centre of opposition; and there, under the instigation and with the pay of French agents, open resistance was organized, and insurrection broke forth. The subsequent events are known: the bombardment, the reduction, the lenity of the Regent, the impunity of the Barcelonese, and their perseverance even after defeat in braving authority.

The army was then tampered with: at least some regiments. The Spanish officer though brave is unfortunately a gambler and an idler, with little prospect of making way in his profession by talent or by promotion in war; all chances of the latter are at present cut off; promotion is now to be had only by revolutions, since, if these are successful, the military abettors rise a step. Then there are court ways of rising in the army: a handsome fellow attract ing the attention of the queen or of a lady in whom king or minister is interested: and all these chances were precluded by the dull, moral regency of Espartero, to whose self and family and ministers, such ways and intrigues intrigues were utterly unknown. The young officers longed for the reign of the queens, young or old, and 'down with Espartero' was first their wish, and then their cry. Indeed from the first the Spanish officers were disinclined to Espartero as general, and much preferred Cordova, a diplomatist and a courtier; but the soldiers on the other hand preferred the Regent. With this class, then, especially with the non-commissioned officers, the efforts of the conspirators were chiefly made. Calumnies were circulated, promises lavished, the soldiers attached to the service were promised grades, the rest were promised dismissal to their homes: in fine, the army was debauched, and when the Regent wanted to make use of it as a weapon of defence, it broke in his hands and pierced him.

The condemnation on which Espartero's enemies, the French, lay most stress, is his want of skill in maintaining himself in power. Success with them covers every virtue. The want of it

exaggerates every defect. There was a discussion at Prince Talleyrand's one evening, as to who was the greatest French statesman in modern times. Each named his political hero. Talleyrand decided that Villèle was the greatest man, on the ground that in a constitutional country he kept the longest hold of power: adding, that the best rope-dancer was he who kept longest on the cord. The great proof of political genius, according to Talleyrand, was to stick longest in place. The rule is a wretched one, and yet Espartero would not lose by being even in that way judged: for no Spaniard has kept such prolonged command and influence, none have attained more brilliant ends. The Treaty of Bergara, and the Regency, are two successes that might well content a life. And after all Espartero was long enough regent to allow Spain to enjoy tranquillity under his rule, and to afford every one a taste and a prospect of what Spain might yet become, under a free, a peaceable, and a regular government.

A greater and more rare example offered to Spain by the Regent's government, was the honesty of its political and financial measures. There was no court nor court treasurer to absorb onethird or one-half of every loan and every anticipation, nor could the leasers or farmers of the public revenue obtain easy bargains by means of a bribe. Such things were disposed of by public competition; and Calatrava in this respect left behind him an example, which will render a recurrence to the old habit of proceeding too scandalous and intolerable.

So, morality and simplicity of life, though a cause of dislike with courtiers, with place and money-hunters, was on the contrary, a rare and highly-appreciated merit in the eyes of the citizens. No one cause occasioned more disgusts and revolts in Madrid than the scandals of the court of Madrid. Its removal was a great bond of peace, whatever people may say of the salutary influence of royalty!

The party attached to the regency of the Duke of Victory as the best symbol and guard of the constitution, lay chiefly in the well-informed and industrious class of citizens, such as exist in great majority in Madrid, Saragossa, Cadiz. In Catalonia the manufacturers and their workmen were against him, from a belief that he wished to admit English cotton. Seville is an old archiepiscopal seat, where the clergy have great influence; and the clergy there, as well as rivalry of Cadiz, occasioned its resistance. There is, one may say, no rustic population in the south. All the poor congregate in towns, or belong to them, and form a mass of ignorant, excitable, changeable opinion, that is not to be depended upon for twenty-four hours. There is throughout a strong vein of republicanism, and a contempt for all things and persons

north of the Sierra Morena: so that nothing is more easy than to get up an alborato against the government of the time being. The north of Spain, on the contrary, depends upon its rural population; and is slower to move, but much more formidable and steady when once made to embrace or declare an opinion. Throughout the north, neither citizens nor servants declared against the regent. It was merely the garrisons and troops of the line. Such being the force and support of the different parties, one is surprised to find that Espartero so easily succumbed, and we cannot but expect that his recall, either as regent or general, is sooner or later inevitable.

The career of the Duke of Victory being thus far from closed, it would be premature to carve out his full-length statue: to be too minute in personal anecdote, too severe or too laudatory in judging him. Our materials too are but meager; though the Galerie des Cotemporains' which heads our article is a popular and meritorious little work. Our present task is, however, sufficiently discharged. Señor Flores promises at Madrid a life of Espartero in three volumes; and the Duke of Victoria and Spain are subjects that we shall have ample occasion and necessity to

recur to.

SHORT REVIEWS

OF RECENT PUBLICATION S.

Let us

Des Jésuites, par MM. MICHELET ET QUINET. Paris. 1843. MICHELET the historian, and Quinet the eloquent lecturer upon the literature of the South, have suspended their ordinary labours to ring an alarum upon the revival of the Jesuits in France. glance at the cause of their provocation. For some time past the clergy have complained of the exclusive control exercised by the University over the education of the rising generation, the heads of which they accuse of corrupting the minds of youth by the dissemination of infidel principles. This charge pushed through all its consequences (and they are readily conceivable), is, as our readers will acknowledge, very grave, and such as the government itself, the direct patron and supporter of the university, could not allow to remain unanswered. M. Villemain, the minister of public instruction, himself a professor formerly, was the earliest to take the field: in the first instance verbally in his place in the Chamber of Peers, and then as the author of an elaborate report, officially prepared upon the state of education in France, in which he not only demonstrated the immense spread of education through the care of the university, but asserted its strict attention to the provision of religious instruction. M. Villemain's defence of the university rendered him perhaps the most popular of the present ministers: his vindication, complete as it was considered to be, limiting itself to the strict line of defence. Had it been more, it might have detracted from its own completeness as well as from the temperate dignity of a high government officer. But the university professors were not trammelled by considerations of etiquette and position; and they, attacked directly as corrupt teachers, have not felt bound to forego the exquisite pleasure of retaliation. Infidels as they were accused of being, they knew that there was a name more hateful still, the name of Jesuit, and this they have loudly shouted through the length and breadth of the land.

It was in the early part of the summer that M. Michelet turned, in a seemingly abrupt manner, from an historical course he was pursuing, to deal with the mechanical, material, lifeless, soulless form which he considered the literature of the present day to be taking: the same system which he conceived to have been once adopted by the enemies of all true knowledge. The Jesuits in the 16th century affected to be lovers of learning, and consented to feed the intellect with the husks and shells, the mere mechanical forms, that they might the more easily deprive the soul of its true food.' But in Michelet's dealing with the subject of Jesuitism, there is more of the poet than of the keen controversialist. 6 The machinery employed by