St. Vincent, over the Spanish fleet, though more than double their number. King Charles III. died in 1789, and was succeeded by his son, Charles IV.

It was easy to foresee that the renewal of the war with France, after the peace of Amiens, would quickly involve Spain. It did so; but it was not possible to foresee the unheard of treachery of Buonaparte, to the royal family and people of Spain. Charles IV. and his queen were sent to reside at Rome, and Ferdinand VII. was long secluded by him from all public notice; until in the month of April, 1812, an artful proposal of peace was made by Buonaparte with England, guaranteeing the independence of Spain, in the present dynasty. It was mildly but firmly answered by the British government, by demanding what was meant by the insidious expression present dynasty; to which no answer was returned. This proposal was in the usual style of his deceptions, previous to the attack upon Russia, which hastened his own downfal.

The history of the peninsular war has been admirably related by a contemporary writer, Dr. Southey we regret that we cannot find room for an abstract of his luminous view of the state of the peninsula previous to its commencement; nor for several splendid passages which we had marked in his work. The reader, however, will remember that from Spain, in 1808 and 1809, arose the first national resistance to the power of Buonaparte on the continent; and that in the peninsula was fought the opening battles of the civilised world against that despot. It is, indeed, amongst the most wonderful passages of modern history that countries so degraded, as Spain and Portugal at this time were, should thus have aroused the whole of Europe to a successful struggle for liberty-and then again themselves retire into their ancient darkness and chains.

'The circumstances of the resistance,' says Dr. Southey, are not less extraordinary than those of the aggression, whether we consider the total disorganisation to which the kingdom of Spain was reduced; the inveterate abuses which had been entailed upon it by the imbecility, misrule, and dotage, of its old despotism; the inexperience, the weakness, and the errors, of the successive governments, which grew out of the necessities of the times; or the unexampled patriotism and endurance of the people, which bore them through these complicated disadvantages. There are few portions of history from which lessons of such political importance are to be deduced; none which can more powerfully and permanently, excite the sympathy of mankind, because of the mighty interests at stake. For this was no common war, of which a breach of treaty, an extension of frontier, a distant colony, or a disputed succession, serves as the cause or pretext: it was as direct a contest between the principles of good and evil as the elder Persians, or the Manicheans, imagined in their fables: it was for the life or death of national independence, national spirit, and of all those holy feelings which are comprehended in the love of our native land. Nor was it for the Peninsula alone that the war was waged it was for England and for Europe; for

literature and for liberty; for domestic morals and domestic happiness; for the vital welfare of the human race. Therefore I have thought that ] could not better fulfil my duties to mankind, and especially to my own country, nor more fitly employ the leisure wherewith God has blessed me, nor endeavour in any worthier manner to transmit my name to future ages, than by composing, with all diligence, the faithful history of this momentous struggle. To this resolution I have been incited, as an Englishman, by the noble part which England has borne in these events; and, as an individual, by the previous course of my studies, which, during the greater part of my life, have been so directed that the annals and the literature of Spain and Portugal have become to me almost as familiar as our own.'

We can only further offer from this elegant author a passage respecting the opening scenes, and another describing the first actual efforts of the patriots, at this period.

The history of Spain and Portugal, from the foundation of their respective monarchies to the middle of the sixteenth century, when both countries attained their highest point of greatness, is eminently heroic, for the persevering spirit with which they warred against the Moors, never ceasing, and scarcely breathing, from the contest till they had finally exterminated them; and for the splendor, the extent, and the importance, of their foreign conquests. Both kingdoms had risen by the same virtues; the same vices brought on the decline of both; and the history of their decline is not less instructive than that of their rise. Their external relations have been widely different; but, notwithstanding this difference, and notwithstanding a national enmity, kept alive rather by old remembrances and mutual pride than by the frequency of their wars with each other, the Spaniards and Portuguese have continued to be morally and intellectually one people. They spring from the same stock; the same intermixture of races has taken place among them; and their national character has been formed by similar circumstances of climate, language manners, and institutions.

The old governments are called free, like all those which the Teutonic tribes established ; but this freedom was little better than a scheme of graduated tyranny, and the laws upon which it was founded were only so many privileges which the conquerors reserved or arrogated to themselves. When the commixture of languages and nations was complete, and commerce had raised up a class of men who had no existence under the feudal system, a struggle for political liberty ensued throughout all the European kingdoms. It was soon terminated in Spain: a good cause was ruined by the rashness and misconduct of its adherents; and the scale, after it had been borne down by the sword of the sove reign, never recovered its equipoise: for the Romish church leagued itself with the monarchical authority, against whose abuse it had formerly been the only bulwark; but, changing its policy now according to the times, it consecrated the despotism whereby it was upheld in its own

usurpations. The effects of this double tyranny were not immediately perceived; but, in its inevitable consequences, it corrupted and degraded every thing to which it could extend-laws, morals, industry, literature, science, arts, and

arms.

'In other countries where absolute monarchy has been established, and the Romish superstition has triumphed, both have been in some de. gree modified by the remains of old institutions, the vicinity of free states, and the influence of literature and manners. But in Spain and Portugal almost all traces of the ancient constitution had been effaced; and, as there existed nothing to qualify the spirit of popery, a memorable example was given of its unmitigated effects. The experiment of intolerance was tried with as little compunction as in Japan, and upon a larger scale. Like the Japanese government, the inquisition went through with what it began; and, though it could not in like manner secure its victory, by closing the ports and barring the passes of the peninsula, it cut off, as much as possible, all intellectual communication with the rest of the world.

'The courts of Madrid and Lisbon were as despotic as those of Constantinople and Ispahan. They did not, indeed, manifest their power by acts of blood, because the reigning families were not cruel, and cruelty had ceased to be a characteristic of the times: but with that cold, callous insensibility, o which men are liable in proportion as they are removed from the common sympathies of human kind, they permitted their ministers to dispense at pleasure exile and hopeless imprisonment, to the rigor and inhumanity of which death itself would have been mercy. The laws afforded no protection; for the will of the minister was above the laws; and every man who possessed influence at court violated them with impunity, and procured impunity for all whom he chose to protect. Scarcely did there exist even an appearance of criminal justice. Quarrels among the populace were commonly decided by the knife: he who stabbed an antagonist or an enemy in the street wiped the instrument in his cloak, and passed on unmolested by the spectators, who never interfered farther than to call a priest to the dying man. When it happened that a criminal was thrown into prison, there he remained till it became necessary to make room for a new set of tenants: the former were then turned adrift; or, if their crimes had been notorious and frequent, they were shipped off to some foreign settlement.

'After the triumph of the monarchical power, the cortes had fallen first into insignificance, then into disuse. There was no legislative body; the principle of the government being, that all laws and public measures of every kind were to proceed from the will and pleasure of the sovereign. Men of rank, therefore, if they were not in office, had no share in public business; and their deplorable education rendered them little fit either to improve or enjoy a life of perfect leisure. It is said also to have been the system of both governments, while they yet retained some remains of perverted policy, to keep the nobles in attendance about the court, where they

might be led into habits of emulous extravagance, which would render them hungry for emoluments, and thereby dependent upon the crown. The long-continued moral deterioration of the privileged classes had produced in many instances a visible physical degeneracy; and this tendency was increased by those incestuous marriages, common in both countries, which pride and avarice had introduced, and for which the sanction of an immoral church was to be purchased.

"The armies partook of the general degradation. The forms of military power existed like the forms of justice: but they resembled the trunk of a tree, of which the termites have eaten out the timber, and only the bark remains. There appeared in the yearly almanacs a respectable list of regiments, and a redundant establishment of officers: but, brave and capable of endurance as the Portuguese and Spaniards are, never were there such officers or such armies in any country which has ranked among civilised nations. Subalterns might be seen waiting behind a chair in their uniforms, or asking alms in the streets; and the men were what soldiers necessarily become, when, without acquiring any one virtue of their profession, its sense of character and of honor, its regularity, or its habits of restraint, they possess all its license, and have free scope for the vices which spring up in idleness. Drawn by lot into a compulsory service, ill-disciplined, and ill-paid, they were burdensome to the people, without affording any security to the nation.

'The state of religion was something more hopeful, though it is scarcely possible to imagine any thing more gross than the idolatry, more impudent than the fables, more monstrous than the mythology of the Romish church, as it flourished in Spain and Portugal. Wherever this corrupt church is dominant, there is no medium between blind credulity and blank, hopeless, utter unbelief: and this miserable effect tends to the stability of the system which has produced it, because men who have no religion, accommodate themselves to whatever it may be their interest to profess. The peasantry, and the great mass of the people, believed with implicit and intense faith whatever they were taught. The parochial clergy, differing little from the people in their manner of life, and having received an education so nearly worthless that it can scarcely be said to have raised them above the common level, were for the most part as superstitious and as illinformed as their flock. The higher clergy, however, had undergone a gradual and important change, which had not been brought about by laws or literature, but by the silent and unperceived influence of the spirit of the times. While their principle of intolerance remained the same (being inherent in popery, and inseparable from it), the practice had been greatly abated; and the autos-da-fe, the high festival days of this merciless idolatry, were at an end; for it was felt, and secretly acknowledged, that these inhuman exhibitions were disgraceful in the eyes of Europe, and had brought a stain upon the character of the peninsular nations in other catholic countries, and even in Rome itself. The persecution of the Jews therefore (which the founder of the

Braganzan line would never have permitted if he had been able to prevent it) ceased; and the distinction between Old and New Christians had nearly disappeared. At the same time an increased intercourse with heretical states, the power and prosperity of Great Britain, and the estimation in which the British character is held wherever it is known, had insensibly diminished, if not the abhorrence in which heresy was held, certainly the hatred against heretics. Thus the habitual feelings of the clergy had been modified, and they were no longer made cruel by scenes of execrable barbarity, which in former times compelled them to harden their hearts. They became also ashamed of those impostures upon which so large a portion of their influence had been founded though they did not purge their kalendar, they made no additions to it; miraculous images were no longer discovered: when a gravedigger, in the exercise of his office, happened to find a corpse in a state of preservation, no at tempt was made to profit by the popular opinion of its sanctity: miracles became less frequent as they were more scrupulously examined; and impostures, which, half a century ago, would have been encouraged and adopted, were detected, exposed, and punished. The higher clergy in both countries were decorous in their lives, and in some instances exemplary in the highest degree.

Literature had revived in both kingdoms, and was flourishing, notwithstanding the restraints which the government and the inquisition continued to impose. Few similar institutions have equalled the Royal Academies of Madrid and Lisbon in the zeal and ability with which they have brought to light their ancient records, and elucidated the history and antiquities of their respective countries. There was one most important subject from which men of letters were compelled to refrain-the old free constitution: but it met them every where in their researches; and its restoration was the object of their wishes, if not of their hopes.

'The lower classes, who in great cities are every where too generally depraved, were perhaps peculiarly so in Spain, from the effect of what may be called their vulgar, rather than their popular, literature. This had assumed a curious and most pernicious character, arising partly from the disregard in which ill-executed laws must always be held, and partly from the faith of the people in the efficacy of absolution. The ruffian and the bravo were the personages of those ballads which were strung for sale along dead walls in frequented streets, and vended by blind hawkers about the country. In these pieces, which, as they were written by men in low life for readers of their own level, represent accurately the state of vulgar feeling, the robberies and murders which the hero commits are described as so many brave exploits performed in his vocation; and, at the conclusion, he is always delivered over safely to the priest, but seldom to the hangman. Fables of a like tendency were not unfrequently chosen by their dramatists for the sake of flattering some fashionable usage of superstition, such as the adoration of the cross, and the use of the rosary; and the

villain who, in the course of the drama, has perpetrated every imaginable crime, is exhibited at the catastrophe as a saint by virtue of one of these redeeming practices. Such works were more widely injurious in their tendency than any of those which the inquisition suppressed. They infected the minds of the people; and the surest course by which a coxcomb in low life could excite admiration and envy among his compeers was by appearing habitually to set justice at defiance. It became a fashion among some of the higher classes in Spain to imitate these wretches; and, by a stranger and more deplorable perversion of nature, women were found, among those of distinguished rank, who affected the dress and the manners of the vilest of their sex.'

The first general insurrection is thus described:

The seizure of the fortresses, and the advance of the French troops, had roused the spirit of the Spaniards; their hopes had been excited to the highest pitch by the downfal of Godoy and the elevation of Ferdinand; and, in that state of public feeling, the slaughter at Madrid, and the transactions at Bayonne, were no sooner known, than the people, as if by an instantaneous impulse over the whole kingdom, manifested a determination to resist the insolent usurpation. Abandoned as they were by one part of the royal family, deprived of the rest; forsaken too by those nobles and statesmen whose names carried authority, and on whose talents and patriotism they had hitherto relied;-betrayed by their government, and now exhorted to submission by all the constituted authorities, civil and religious, which they had been accustomed to revere and to obey;-their strong places and frontier passes in possession of the enemy; the flower of their own troops, some in Italy, others in the north of Europe; and a numerous army of the French, accustomed to victory, and now flushed with Spanish slaughter, in their capital and in the heart of the country; under these complicated disadvantages and dangers, they rose in general and simultaneous insurrection against the mightiest military power which had ever till that time existed; a foree not more tremendous for its magnitude than for its perfect organisation, wielded always with consummate skill, and directed with consummate wickedness. A spirit of patriotism burst forth which astonished Europe, and equalled the warmest hopes of those who were best acquainted with the Spanish nation: for those persons who knew the character of that noble people,-who were familiar with their past history, and their present state; who had heard the peasantry talk of their old heroes, of Hernan Cortes and of the Cid;-who had witnessed the passionate transfiguration which a Spaniard underwent when recurring from the remembrance of those times to his own ;-his brave impatience, his generous sense of humiliation, and the feeling with which his soul seemed to shake off the yoke of these inglorious days, and take sanctuary among the tombs of his ancestors,-they knew that the spirit of Spain was still alive, and had looked on to this resurrection of the dry bones. As no foresight could have apprehended the kind of injury with which

the French consul would have been murdered, if some humaner persons had not conveyed him in time to Fort St. Antonio, upon an island in the sea. A portrait of Ferdinand was carried in procession through the streets; and the vivas which accompanied that popular name were followed by a fearful cry of Down with the French and the traitors!' But order was soon restored, and in a great measure by the exertions of the clergy, who possessed at this time a double influence over the people, because no class of men displayed more fervor of patriotic loyalty. The heads of the monasteries, and the parochial priests, assembled with the constituted authorities of the town, the regent of the Royal Audience, and the governor, to whom obedience was now restored; they formed a permanent junta of government; they sent officers to treat with the English squadron which was then blockading Ferrol, and they despatched advices to Santiago, Tuy, Orense, Lugo, Moudonedo, and Betanzos, requiring each of those cities to send a deputy to the junta, and make the news known throughout their respective jurisdictions. In the course of three days the whole of Galicia was in a state of insurrection, and a communication was immediately opened with England.

'At Badajoz and at Seville the first popular movements were repressed by the local authorities; but they soon broke out again with renewed violence. The Count de la Torre del Fresno was governor at Badajoz; the people collected before his palace, calling upon him to enrol them, and give them arms for the defence of the country. A second time he endeavoured to control a spirit which was no longer to be restrained; and the furious multitude, who perceived that to remain quiet was in fact to acknowledge the foreign king who was to be forced upon them, considered all attempts to abate their ardor as proceeding from a traitorous intention, forced their way into the house, dragged him forth, and murdered him. For, in the sudden dissolution of government, by which free scope was for the first time given to the hopes and expectations of enthusiastic patriotism, the evil passions also were let loose, and the unreasonable people were sometimes hurried into excesses by their own blind zeal, sometimes seduced into them by wretches who were actuated by the desire of plunder, or of private revenge. Men were sacrificed to the suspicions and fury of the multitude, as accomplices and agents of the French, whose innocence in many cases was established when too late. Such crimes were committed at Valladolid, Cartagena, Granada, Jaen, San Lucar, Carolina, Ciudad Rodrigo, and many other places. But this dreadful anarchy was of short duration. The people had no desire to break loose from the laws and the habits of subordination; the only desire which possessed them was to take vengeance for their murdered countrymen, and to deliver their country from the insolent usurpation which was attempted. If any obstruction was offered to this generous feeling, they became impatient and ungovernable: otherwise, having always been wont to look to their rulers, never to act for themselves, their very zeal displayed itself in the

form of obedience; they were eager to obey any who would undertake to guide them, and no person thought of stepping beyond his rank to assume the direction. Because Ferdinand, when he set out upon his journey to Bayonne, had left a junta of government at Madrid, the people were familiar with that name, and juntas, in consequence, were formed every where; those persons being every where appointed whom the inhabitants were accustomed to respect.'

The issue is well known. A final evacuation

of the Spanish territory by the French took place in the western Pyrenees, after the battle of Vittoria, 21st of June 1813; and the eastern Pyrenees in the following spring. Ferdinand VII. was now restored. In the short struggle between Buonaparte and the allied powers, in 1815, Spain entered feebly into the views of the allies; since that period she has been engaged in various unsuccessful expeditions against her insurgent colonies; in a partial civil war in which many political leaders have fallen, or been expelled the country and finally, with the aid of France, in re-establishing the despotism of Ferdinand on the ruins of all the liberal manners and improvements of the Cortes.

PART II.

STATISTICS OF SPAIN.

There is not a country in the world, perhaps, which unites more natural advantages in respect to climate, soil, and variety of productions, extent of the sea-coast, noble harbours, &c., than Spain. As these must ever be of leading interest in this country we begin with her maritime advantages, and shall conduct the reader first round her Atlantic, and then along her Mediterranean shores.

it

The north coast of Spain runs nearly east and west, with no other indentations than a few insignificant bays and rivers. In general the mountains approach the sea, and the coast is of safe approach. The provinces which compose are Biscay, divided into Biscay Proper, or Senorio, and Guipuscoa, Asturias, and a part of Galicia. The chief head-lands are Cape Machichaco, between St. Sebastian and Bilboa, a high steep point; east of the cape three miles, and two miles from Cape Ogono, a remarkable hanging promontory, is Isaro Island. Cape de las Penas (Scythicum) is named from rocks and shoals lying off it a mile and a half, with, it is said, a safe passage within them; the cape is broad, high, steep, and whitish, and the coast to the east is composed of perpendicular cliffs.

Cape Ortegal (Trileucum), supposed to derive its name from Ort, in the northern dialects a point of land, and Galicia, is nearly the north point of Spain. Point de la Estaca, east of Cape Ortegal, is the absolute north point, being one mile higher in latitude than the cape. Cape Ortegal is one of the extremities of the mountains of Galicia; it is a lofty and steep promontory, off which is a cluster of rocks, called the Farelons of Ortegal, or Aguillones (needles), with a narrow channel in ten fathoms within them. Cape Prior, seven or eight leagues southwest of Cape Ortegal, is a high promontory,