tion would have been awakened, and they would have gone to the consideration of the great question with fewer prejudices than confessedly obscure their perceptions of it now. But Sir Robert Peel has never had the frankness to act thus.

Had Sir Robert Peel acted thus, even in 1841, and his party forced him, nevertheless, into the place which he now fills, his great measure -for a great measure it is-would have been received, even by such as now oppose it, in a very different temper. Having failed to act thus, another course was still open to him. Instead of consulting only in the cabinet, he ought to have called the heads of the party together, and stated to them both his intentions and the reasons which led to them. If they refused to be convinced, his next step should have been to sever the connexion that was between them; and having effected this, he ought to have retired from the House of Commons, openly declaring why he had done so. His retirement from

parliament would have gone hand in hand, of course, with his resignation of office; and in all probability the very same results would have followed on which we lately looked. Lord John Russell, had he tried to form a government, must have failed; and then Peel, no longer the head of a party, might have been called by his sovereign out of the retirement into which he had withdrawn. With what perfect dignity, with what unblemished honour, might he have placed himself under such circumstances at the helm of state, and proposed, if he liked it, the very

same measure which he is now strugling to carry against his friends! But it is not quite certain that all this would have come to pass. With Peel out of the way, our belief is, that the uncompromising section of the cabinet would have constructed a government of their own; and had they done so, we see no reason to doubt that they would have been able to carry it on, at all events, during the natural life of the present parliament.

We have elsewhere stated, that it was not our intention to discuss the comparative merits and demerits of Sir Robert Peel's plan. Had it been proposed to us by almost any other individual in public life, we should have sifted its claims upon public support to the bottom, and found, as indeed we find now, a great deal in it to commend. But offered by Sir Robert Peel, and argued for by his present cabinet, there is every thing about it to repel inquiry. That the measure will pass, we believe; that it may prove eminently useful to the commerce of the country, we more than hope; but the giver of the boon, if a boon it be, can never again be to us what he once was. He has ruined himself, and dragged after him to political destruction every member of the cabinet which he has succeeded in making his tool. Now, the country cannot stand duplicity of this sort in public men; and hence though they continue in office, if the present change be tolerated, during the parliament that now is, they will find when the general election comes, that the voices of all parties are against them.

THERE are no countries in the world so little traversed by the migratory swarms that issue annually from the modern officina gentium, Great Britain, with the which countries and their inhabitants the English reader at home is so well and familiarly acquainted, as with the Spains. I use the last word advisedly, meaning thereby the Spains merely of the Peninsula: and I do so because it is idle now, even as it was always, to talk of Spain as a kingdom, or the various classes of Spaniards therein maintained as a nation. This has been remarked by many writers, French and English, and dwelt upon by Mr. Ford, the accomplished author of the Hand-Book of Spain. He says,

"The aggregate monarchy of Spain is composed of many distinct provinces, each of which, in earlier times, formed a separate and independent kingdom; although all are now united by marriage, inheritance, conquest, and other circumstances, under one crown, the original distinctions, geographical as well as social, remain almost unaltered. The language, costume, habits, and local character of the natives, vary no less than the climate and productions of the soil. Man following, as it were, the example of the nature by which he is surrounded, has VOL. XXXIII. NO. CXCVI.

Old Proverb.

little in common with the inhabitant of the adjoining district; and these differences are increased and perpetuated by the ancient jealousies and inveterate dislikes which petty and contiguous states keep up with such tenacious memory. The general comprehensive term 'Spain,' which is convenient for geographers and politicians, is calculated to mislead the traveller. Nothing can be more vague or inaccurate than to predicate any single thing of Spain or Spaniards, which will be equally applicable to all its heterogeneous component parts. The northwestern provinces are more rainy than Devonshire, while the centre plains are more calcined than those of Barbary : while the rude agricultural Gallician, the industrious manufacturing artisan of Barcelona, the gay and voluptuous Andalusian, are as essentially different from each other as so many distinct characters at the same masquerade."

Again, he observes,—

"There is no King of Spain; among the infinity of kingdoms, the list of which swells out the royal style, that of 'Spain' is not found; he is King of the Spains, Rey de las Españas, not Rey de España."

Besides, there is no capital in Spain that forms a point of general concentration, like Rome, Constantinople, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Lis bon, Paris, or London; no one place

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which is the prime seat of arts, and literature, and commerce, as well as the official residence of the court. The position of Madrid, moreover, forbids that it ever should become such. The possession of it would be of no essential and enduring advantage to an enemy-it would be of no fatal or permanent consequence to the Peninsula. Sweep it away from the map, and one of the Spains only Iwould have moulted a bad feather. The tail of the strutting peacock with its separate and royal stars, would, in the bird's haughty imagination, and under the resplendent glories vouchsafed by the sun's rays, shine as brightly as ever: in truth, it would only have discharged a diseased and draggled feather, while the real weakness would remain in the unsightly and unstable feet, on which the glittering mass of plumage has been destined to rest in an uneasy and precarious manner. Madrid, in fact, is a place of no commercial, military, political, or national importance. It is not even a city (ciudad), like Toledo, Seville, Grenada, Leon, Burgos, or Valladolid. It is only a town or (villa). It has no cathedral. It boasts only the presence of a corrupt, and debauched, and brutalised court and government-both a century or two behind all others in Europe, in the forms and shapes of their heresies against the decencies of social life and the rights of mankind. It attracts place-hunters and adventurers in every walk and grade of life, from all parts of the provinces ; for if the centre of nothing else it is that of patronage and fashion-as it must be called for the want of a better word-unless newfangledness (and that of a coarse and ungenial kind) may serve our turn. Still Madrid is boasted of.

analogous to the children of Israel,' the 'Beni' of the Spanish Moors; and to this day the Arabs of Cairo call themselves children of that town, Ibn el Musr, &c. This being of the same province or town creates a powerful feeling of clanship,— a freemasonry. The parties cling together like old school-fellows, or the Scotch. It is a home and really binding feeling. To the spot of their birth all their recollections, comparisons, and eulogies, are turned; nothing to them comes up to their particular province, that is their real country; 'La Patria,' meaning Spain at large, is a subject of declamation, fine words, palabras-palaver, in which all, like Orientals, delight to indulge, and to which their grandiloquent idiom lends itself readily. From the earliest period down to the present, all observers have been struck with this localism as a salient feature in Iberian character. They never would amalgamatenever would, as Strabo said, put their shields together; never would sacrifice their own local private interest for the general good; on the contrary, in the hour of need, they had, as at present, a tendency to separate into distinct juntas, each of which only thought of its own views, utterly indifferent to the injury thereby occasioned, to what ought to have been the common cause of all. Thus the virility and the vitality of the noble people has been neutralised; they have indeed strong limbs and honest hearts, but, as in the Oriental parable, 'a head' is wanting to direct and govern. Hence Spain is to-day, as it always has been, a bundle of small bodies tied together by a rope of sand, and being without union is also without strength, and has been beaten in detail. The much. used phrase Españolismo expresses ra ther a dislike of foreign dictation,' and the self-estimation' of Spaniards, Espa ñoles sobre todos, than any real patriotic love of country."

Let the English reader bear these facts in his mind, and also certain others of even a still more general nature, which I shall lay before him also in the words of Mr. Ford, and he will then be fully in a condition to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest, the mass of information which is brought home to him here in our own England, in so many varied forms, about the Spains and Spaniards. The passages I am about to quote are to be found in the preface to the Hand-Book, and run thus,

"To see the cities and know the minds of men" [by the way, Mr. Ford, if you said "thoroughly know," which is the

meaning of the Greek word, you might have spared the Italics]," has been, since the days of the Odyssey, the object of travel; but how difficult it is, in the words of THE DUKE (Desp. Dec. 13, 1810), ' to understand the Spaniards exactly! Made up of contradictions, they dwell in the land of the unexpected, le pays de l'imprévu; where exception is the rule, where accident and the impulse of the moment are the moving powers, and where men, especially in their collective capacity, act like women and children. A spark, a trifle sets the impressionable masses in action, and none can foresee the commonest event. Nor does any Spaniard ever attempt to guess beyond la situacion actual, or to foretell what the morrow will bring. Paciencia y barajar is his motto; and he waits patiently to see what will next turn up after another shuffle, for his creed and practice are resignation,' the Islam of the Oriental.

"The key to decipher this singular people is scarcely European, since this Berberia Christiana is at least a neutral ground between the hat and the turban, and many contend that Africa begins even at the Pyrenees. Be that as it may, Spain-first civilised by the Phoenicians, and long possessed by the Moors-bas indelibly retained the original impressions. Test her, therefore, and her natives by an Oriental standard, how analogous does much appear that is strange and repugnant if compared with European usages! This land and people of routine and habit are also potted for antiquarians, for bere Pagan, Roman, and Eastern customs, long obsolete elsewhere, turn up at every step, in church and house, in cabinet and campaign, as we shall care. fully point out."

Let the reader, I say, take these facts and considerations with him, and he will be in a condition to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the multitude, native and foreign, of various works, all excellent relating to the Spains, Spanish life, and manners, and history, from Don Quixote down to Borrow's Bible in Spain, from "Livy's pictured page "down to the Despatches of the Duke of Wellington. And strange in these works, as in all the intermediate grave or gay, is the story of the Peninsula and the people. The south of Spain is the real land of romance and chivalry -that is to say, the chivalry romanesque,

When the Gothic plume met the Mubammedan glance,

And rivers ran red with the Saracen lance."

But the true chivalry, the chivalry of the conqueror's despatch, is and ever was with us, the descendants of the Norman, the Saxon, and the Dane, as with their forefathers, the sea-kings and the lords of battle. Where rolls the wave that does not roll over some memorial of our conquests? Where stands the spot of solid earth that has not trembled under our victorious tread? And that it is now as it was in the beginning and ever shall be, bear witness, as a proof and a promise, Moodkee and Ferozeshah! But I again say the south of Spain was the land of romanesque adventure and chivalry; and there was the scene laid of the first gentle passages of arms.

But

in the south only-the earthly paradise of the Moors-and certain of the adjoining districts, and in the latter more in prevailing fiction than in fact; for, crede mihi, the Peninsula generally is little propitious to the practice of knight-errantry. A very slight consideration of its geography and climate will suffice to shew this. Mr. Ford observes :

"From Spain being the most southern country in Europe, it is very natural that those who have never been there should imagine the climate to be as delicious as that of Italy or Greece. This is far from being the fact. Some of the sea-coasts and sheltered plains in the southern and eastern provinces are warm in winter, and exposed to an almost African sun in summer, but the northern and western districts are damp and rainy; while the interior is either cold and cheerless, or sunburnt and wind-blown. Winters have occurred at Madrid of such severity that sentinels have been frozen to death; and frequently all communication is suspended by the depth of snow in the elevated roads of the Castiles."

It is clear enough, then, that the Peninsula generally was no fit scene for knight-errantry; and certainly none of that, and very, very little of true chivalry, remains in the country. The nobility are the worst and most despicable in the world-worse even than the old noblesse of France, for heartless, and base, and vilely debauched and dishonest as those were, they were not what the multitude of the Spanish nobility also are, personal cowards and paltry traitors. Ford praises the lower classes as being formed of a better material, and no doubt they are entitled to that rela

Mr.

tive praise; but when a positive admiration of them is expressed, I venture to dissent from it. A brave people never was a people of assassins, and how else except as assassins, or, in other words, as guerilleros, have Spaniards since the olden time distinguished themselves? There is no courage in taking individual stragglers, or small bodies of the enemy, at advantage, and murdering them. The secret blow, too, is always the coward's blow, and rarely, in war or in private quarrel, has the Spaniard dealt any other. His knife is always ready to stab an adversary unawares by thrust or throw, but he has no notion of fair play-no imagination of a free and manly stand-up fight; and in the field of battle, during the French invasion, a single charge of a few squadrons of cavalry was, with scarcely an exception, sufficient to drive a host of Spanish braves, or, as in other countries they would be styled, braggadocios, into helpless disorder and disgraceful flight. The praises lavished upon them by Southey and other English writers of the same kidney (at the gross and palpable falsehoods of Spanish writers, who could not if they would tell truth, upon almost any subject, nobody is astonished), are preposterous, and shameful in the last degree to those who uttered them. The Spaniards never stood against the French soldiery in fair fight, any more than that other vaunted rabble, the Cossacks, did. If a man will only take the facts related by Mr. Ford, he must perforce arrive at this conclusion, notwithstanding the fervent expression of that gentleman's general opinions to the contrary. It appears from his own account, that even their robbers, who make so remarkable a figure in novels and romances, are the least adventurous and the most cowardly of their class in any country. They never stake life against life. They invariably assail the traveller unawares, at some deadly disadvantage, or with overwhelming numbers. Our Dick Turpins and Claude Duvals were, in comparison with the most famous of them, princes and paladins, and worthy to lead, like the Black Prince, an army of Free Companions. But let me give Mr. Ford's account of these Spanish freebooters, for it is interesting. He says:

"It is not to be denied that Spain is, of all countries in Europe, the one in which the ancient, classical, and once universal system of robbing on the high. way exists the most unchanged. With us these things have been much altered: Spain is what England was sixty years ago, with Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common,--what Italy was very lately, and may be again next year. A bad character sticks to a country as well as to an individual: Spain had the same reputation in the days of antiquity, but it was always the accusation of foreigners. The Romans, who had no business to invade Spain, [indeed, Mr. Ford!] were harassed by the native guerilleros,-—those undisciplined bands of armed men who wage the little war' which Iberia always did. The Romans, worried by those unmilitary voltigeurs, called all the Spaniards who resisted them latrones ;' just as the French, during the late war, from the same reasons, called them brigands and assassins. The national resistance against the intrusive foreigner has always armed the peasantry of Spain. Again, that sort of patriotism, à moyen de parvenir, which is the last and usual resource of scoundrels, is often made the pretext of the ill-conditioned to throw a specious mantle over the congenial vocation of living a freebooting idle existence by plunder rather than by work and industry. This accounts for the facility with which the universal Spanish nation flies to arms. Smuggling, again, sows the soil with dragon's teeth, and produces, at a moment's notice, a plentiful crop of armed men or guerilleros, which is almost a convertible term with robber.

Robbery in other countries has yielded to increased population, to more rapid and more frequent intercommunication. The distances in Spain are very great; the highroads are few, and are carried through long leagues of uncultivated plains (dehesas'), through deserted towns, dispeopled districts,

despoblados,' a term more common in Spain, as in the East, than that of village is in England. Andalucia is the most dangerous province, and it was always 80. This arises from the nature of the country, from being the last scene of the Moorish struggle, and now from being in the vicinity of Gibraltar the great focus of smuggling, which prepares the raw material for a banditti. These evils, which are abated by internal quiet and the continued exertions of the authorities, increase with troubled times, which, as the tempest calls forth the stormy petrel, rouses into dangerous action the worst portions of society, and creates a sort of civil cachexia, which can only be put down by peace and a strong settled government; blessings which, alas! have been long denied to unhappy Spain;