REVELATIONS OP SPAIN IN 1845.

These volume] are offered as the results of some years' residence in Spain; • as in a still later publication, The Ocean Flower, the writer (Mr. T. M. Hughes) turned to account an enforced sojourn in Madeira. The actual pursuits of the author do not appear in his vohtmes ; but in the variety of topics that engage his attention the fluency of his diction, a power over the pen, and a knack rather than an art of presenting his matter, we trace the litterateur. The inflated slapdash of his style, and the prompt readiness with which he decides on anything and everything that he brings before himself, lead us to infer that he was connected with the newspaper press during his residence and travels in Spain.

Such a position ought to yield matter and views : for a foreign cor- respondent of necessity sees a great deal of the country and the people ; he enters into high life, if he has not the entrée; and though we suspect he is never trusted by official men, yet he sees at least foreign ministers, and in that sort of position when men show themselves more than they do to their equals. But means are useless without the power to use them ; and the rapid writing of a superficial but plausible opinion, or the clever though literal account of external forms, is not only very different from searching thought and characteristic delineation, but seems incompatible with them : and this is pretty much the essential character of Revelations of Spain.

The plan seems to have been, to take a general view of the politics

and politicians of Spain during the last few years, so as to give at once a dashing historical and personal sketch of the late revolutions, as well as an explanation of their causes. This was to be followed by financial, commercial, or agricultural subjects ; views of particular institutions or classes of the people—as the Army and Navy, the Contrabandista; whilst a variety of sketches on such miscellaneous matters as Native Dances, the Fan, and the Road-side Yenta, completed the subject and its "revelations." However' either the matter has suggested to us this notion of a plan which never had existence, or Mr. Hughes has not carried out his own idea. The book consists of a series of chapters seventy-eight in number, in whose presentation little order is observed after the first nineteen, which are confined to public events or public men connected with the fall of Espartero and the rise of Narvaez. In the others, the "Aspect of Madrid" stands beside the "Swing of Despotism" : the Clergy and the Banditti jostle each other ; the Road-side Yenta follows Spanish Education, and Bull-fights precede the Navy of Spain : though under all this may be couched a moral, and the writer may design by this arrange- ment to indicate the national incongruities.

The merits of Revelations of Spain are those of the ready writer.

There is a sounding fluency of style, which, if it does not fill the mind, does not task it; there is a good deal of knack displayed in using matter that the writer has picked up by seeing or hearing, and in dressing up information that he has obtained from books. There is some shrewdness in the remarks on Espartero's fall, and the character of Narvaez, wher- ever they may come from there is information to be derived from the political observations, and some interest in the personal sketches. The book, moreover, is readable throughout, if the reader should get over the turgid inflation of the earlier parts, where Mr. Hughes does it in Ring Cambyseg vein. The more obvious faults are this inflated heaping up of words ; a swaggering, off-hand kind of judgment ; and a want of essen- tial novelty in very many of the topios,--as the external appearance of Spanish towns and Spanish scenery, the sketches of society and manners, and the account of the national amusements, such as bull-fights. The true defect of the book, however, is in the author's mind. In men of this rhetorical calibre there is no tenth, because they cannot put it there. Nature life, government, and institutions, are not looked at to disoover what they are; but considered as so much raw stuff out of which pars. graphs are to be manufactured, and made more valuable than the original material. Hence, in things which are not already known to us, we have no reliance upon what is presented. Revelations of Spain resembles the beauties of the old La Belle Assemblee or the modern Annuals. There is the human " os sublime," but so disguised by the milliner and the face-painter that we place no faith in particular features or general expression. This is the general character. Many parts are of a better kind, es- pecially where the original matter is of such a stamp as to defy even the power of phrases to destroy. The following account of the manner in which Olozaga, the Premier of a week, was treated by Narvaez and his creatures of the Camarilla, is of this character : the coolness of the well- trained diplomatist shines through the words in which it is dressed out.

"On the following day, while 016zaga was engaged in the Secretaria de Estado upon the difficult task of forming an Administration, he was surprised by the receipt of a hurried message from the Palace; and having repaired thither with- out delay, his surprise was increased on being told by the Queen, that he must form his Ministry without delay, for if not, there was another who would do it for him.' 016zsga did not resign in disgust, for he took pity on his Sovereign, and his indignation at the back-stairs influence sustained him through the miserable conflict. Ile instantly formed his Cabinet; and the second day of its existence, received for himself and his colleagues, from the Queen's mouth, an invitation to the Royal table. "On the appointed day the new Ministers repaired to the Palace, and were told at the door that there was no dinner for them! 016zaga, in nowise disconcerted, declared that they did not come to eat, but to have the honour of paying their respects to her Majesty; and pushed into the interior of the Palace.

This glorious impertinence of 016zaga's drove the Camarilla to despair. The Marquess de Santa Cruz—for she it was who came with that smoothly- told but rudest of fibs, and whom 016zaga merely indicated to the Congress, subsequently, as one who is may de cerea to the Queen, who has the honour to serve very close to her Majesty's person,' bit her lip, and had nothing to answer. The resources even of that cleverest of intriguing women were exhausted: no further obstacle could be improvised. The horrid man would take no rebuff nor refusal. To be sure, it was deucedly unexpected. Think of a person thus grossly insulted, invited to a grand dinner at the Palace, and told on his arrival, with a contemptuous sneer, that there was no dinner for him, having face and firmness alba& to reply, with the most exquisitely cutting politeness, 'My col- leagues and I have not come, Marquess, to eat at the Queens or any other table. We assure your Excellency, that eating is not our object. We come desirous to enjoy the honour of her Majesty's invitation, by seating ourselves at her Royal table. Her Majesty will dine and we will look on: The Marquess had thought tojouer 016zaga, but she herself was joaie- she strove to humiliate him, but was herself humbled, and detected in a very base untruth: for, contrary to her distinct declaration, 016zaga and his colleagues found a sumptuous banquet prepared ! Any other man, taken aback by the Marquess's cool statement, would have said: No matter; some other day we will enjoy the honour.' But 016zaga walked in, and partook of a most abundant dinner:.

Diplomacy, however, is vain against power and self-will. Old- zaga was turned out a few days after, charged, it may be remembered, with coercing his girlish Sovereign ; whom Mr. Hughes thus describes. "The appearance of Queen Isabel Maria to the eye of a stranger is that of a precocious but somewhat care-worn and sickly girl—exceedingly pale, and with nothing either expressive or interesting in her countenance." * *

"If you look more closely, you will see a shade pass now and then over her brow and features, indicative of waywardness of disposition and of a character somewhat spoiled bar destiny.; and y.ou will not be far mistaken if you draw this conclusion.'

"Queen Isabel is said to be of a rather wilful nature, subject to pettish fits; at times not a little obstinate, and deficient in intelligence as well as in temper These qualifies are inherited in part from both father and mother. If she lisa thrown her whole soul into her Camarilla, it was likewise a maternal failing, for Mendizabal in his official interviews with Queen Cristina had frequently to lock

out the listening Cement's: the very charge laid at 016zaga's door." * *

"Queen Isabel has been very imperfectly and irregularly educated. That she should be little enlightened, is not surprising; that she should be deficient in ordinary knowledge, is a mere corollary of her inadequate tutoring. She was not altogether three months in the hands of 016zaga, whose instruction was confined to her political education; and under the guidance of Arguelles, to whom she was previously intrusted, she was rather indocile and refractory. About the Court, they say that she is capricious, wilful, disimulada; and fibbing, an ordinary cha- racteristic of her age in young girls, is alleged to be very much the contrary of being disdained by her."

FATE OF SPANISH RULERS.

Retribution strangely follows in this life the trifler with the lives of his fellow- men; and when the tiger of the Peninsula is let loose he tears his victim to pieces. Though the fumes of blood cast a film over the eyes of despots, which hides from them the end that awaits them—an end as cruel as their lives had been— the finger of an avenging Providence not less certainly writes their doom in in- visible ink upon the palace-wall.

The Conde de Espana was a wholesale murderer, anewas slain by his own people; Moreno, the political butcher of Malaga, was himself assassinated in the end; Queaa, the trampler of the Madrid populace beneath his horses' hoofs, was torn by that populace asunder, and his mutilated fingers stirred a convivial bowl for the Nacionales who slew dm; the Governor of Cadiz, in 1830, was asmssinated for his severities, in the street; Elio, Captain-General of Valencia, was the execu- tioner of his political adversaries, and perished on the scaffold. The contempo- rary annals of Portugal furnish similar instances; for within ten years, Gomez Freire, an unpopular Minister, was shot down in the streets of Lisbon, and Telles Jordao, the inhuman persecutor of the Constitutionalist prisoners in the Tower of St. Julian, was torn in pieces and as frightfully mutilated as Quesada was in Madrid. This is the true mirror for Ministers in the Peninsula—the awful lea son which "must give them pause" in the midst of their riot of power and barba- rous instincts. "No hay boda sin tornabodar says a significant Spanish pro- verb—" There is no wedding but there is a day after it !"

A SIGNIFICANT MONETARY FACT.

Owing to the imperfect and perilous inland communications, there is a con- stant exchange between the different towns and cities as between the various European capitals, and a premium is allowed upon payments in the ordinary sil- ver currency. Between Seville and Madrid at short dates upon silver payments the premium is one per cent; upon gold it is considerably higher. On Santan- der the premium is one-and-a.half, on Granada one-half, Barcelona par, Alicante par. Thus it will be seen that the sea-communication, which in other countries is held to be most dangerous (the very charter-parties speak of "perils of the sea,") is here accounted less dangerous than that of land; and the further you have to go by land the higher becomes the premium. For a few leagues across the robber-infested Ronda from Seville to Granada you are charged one-half per cent, and for going round Spain to Barcelona you are charged nothing. Between Cadiz and Seville no premium is required, the dis- tance being accomplished upon the Guadalquivir steamers. It is scarcely neces-

sary to say, that the solution of the enigma is the fact of the land-routes being infested by robbers.

WHITER IN THE SOUTH OF SPAIN.

In this delicious climate vegetation is never suspended, except by the excessive heats of slimmer. The genuine spring is usually about Christmas, and the choicest fruit is in bloom when the ground of England is locked up with frost; when vegetation is hoar-nipped, and the snow is heaped on every bough and twig. It is in winter here that the climate is truly lovely, and in summer and autumn only that one might sigh to be elsewhere. From November to May it is Heaven or an Elysium. In winter the only drawbacks are the excessive rains; but the alternative of shower and sunbeam is even then extremely frequent, and when- ever it occurs, delightful. The sunbeams sparkle out like molten brilliants, with a lustre that happily does not smite, and madden, and pierce the brain, (as too often in the depth of summer,) and the light, "through purest crystal gleam- ing," is mild, ethereal, and benignant. Inconvenient as are at times these terrible showers, pouring on, on like a deluge for days and without intermission, no milder treatment would soften and prepare the ground, break up the indurated soil of summer, and fit it for the reception of seed. But there are always brilliant in- tervals of sunshine; and it was in Andalucia that the ancients placed the Elysian Fields.

There seems to be some charm in the Spanish manner and mode of life, with perhaps some personal good qualities in the people, which causes a remarkable discrepancy in writers on Spain between their own judgments and the particular facts they adduce. Mr. Hughes is no exception to this rule. His narrative of events and sketches of men leave an impression of Spanish character of the most degraded kind. Not one public man, even of his own heroes, can he produce who is not stained with the vices of intrigue, inconsistency for personal objects, base submission to the ruling authority as long as place can be held, and factions opposition when lost, whilst the bulk of the leading politicians seem alike cowardly and blood- thirsty in revolutionary outbreaks. We have formerly observed on the absence of respectable middle-class pursuits, which renders all the edu- cated or half-educated Spaniards mere place-hunters ready to do anything or serve anybody for a post under Government, whilst the people at large are bloodthirsty, cruel, lazy, bigoted, and it may be said corrupt, since Mr. Hughes intimates that an outbreak may be got up anywhere for a small sum of money. Yet, having impressed all this and more by his statements, he frequently dwells upon their excellent merits, and calls them and the Portuguese "the noble and glorious Peninsular peoples."