How unfortunate that there is almost no knowledge of him procurable at present! Next to none. The Paraguenos can in many cases spell and read, but they are not a literary people; and, indeed, this Doctor was, perhaps, too awful a practical phenomenon to be calmly treated of in the literary way. Your Breughel paints his sea-storm, not while the ship is labouring and cracking, but after he has got to shore, and is safe under cover ! Our Buenos-Ayres friends, again, who are not without habits of printing, lay at a great distance from Francia, under great obscurations of quarrel and controversy with him; their constitutional feeling shocked to an extreme degree by the things he did. To them, there could little intelligence float down, on those long muddy waters, through those vast distracted countries, that was not more or less of a distracted nature; and then from Buenos-Ayres over into Europe, there is another long tract of distance, liable to new distractions. Francia, Dictator of Paraguay, is, at present, to the European mind, little other than a chimera; at best, the statement of a puzzle, to which the solution is still to seek. As the Paraguenos, though not a literary people, can many of them spell and write, and are not without a discriminating sense of true and untrue, why should not some real Life of Francia, from those parts, be still possible! If a writer of genius arise there, he is hereby invited to the enterprise. Surely in all places your writing genius ought to rejoice over an acting genius, when he falls-in with such; and say to himself: "Here or nowhere is the thing for me to write of! Why do I keep pen-and-ink at all, if not to apprise men of this singular acting genius, and the like of him? My fine-arts and æsthetics, my epics, literatures, poetics, if I will think of it, do all at bottom mean either that or else nothing whatever!"

Hitherto our chief source of information as to Francia is a little Book, the Second on our List, set forth in French some sixteen years ago, by the Messrs. Rengger and Longchamp. Translations into various languages were executed :—of that into English, it is our painful duty to say that no man, except in case of extreme necessity, shall use it as reading. The translator, having little fear of human detection, and seemingly none at all of divine or diabolic, has done his work even unusually ill; with ignorance, with carelessness, with dishonesty

prepense; coolly omitting whatsoever he saw that he did not understand :-poor man, if he yet survive, let him reform in time! He has made a French book, which was itself but lean and dry, into the most wooden of English false books; doing evil as he could in that matter;-and claimed wages for it, as if the feat deserved wages first of all! Reformation, even on the small scale, is highly necessary.

The Messrs. Rengger and Longchamp were, and we hope still are, two Swiss Surgeons; who in the year 1819 resolved on carrying their talents into South America, into Paraguay, with views towards natural history,' among other things. After long towing and struggling in those Parana floods, and distracted provinces, after much detention by stress of weather and of war, they arrived accordingly in Francia's country; but found that, without Francia's leave, they could not quit it again. Francia was now a Dionysius of Paraguay. Paraguay had grown to be, like some mousetraps and other contrivances of art and nature, easy to enter, impossible to get out of. Our brave Surgeons, our brave Rengger (for it is he alone of the two that speaks and writes) reconciled themselves; were set to doctoring of Francia's soldiery, of Francia's self; collected plants and beetles; and, for six years, endured their lot rather handsomely at length, in 1825, the embargo was for a time lifted, and they got home. This Book was the consequence. It is not a good book, but at that date there was, on the subject, no other book at all; nor is there yet any other better, or as good. We consider it to be authentic, veracious, moderately accurate; though lean and dry, it is intelligible, rational; in the French original, not unreadable. We may say it embraces, up to the present date, all of importance that is yet known in Europe about the Doctor Despot; add to this its indisputable brevity; the fact that it can be read sooner by several hours than any other Dr. Francia: these are its excellences,-considerable, though wholly of a comparative sort.

After all, brevity is the soul of wit! There is an endless merit in a man's knowing when to have done. The stupidest man, if he will be brief in proportion, may fairly claim some hearing from us: he too, the stupidest man, has seen something, heard something, which is his own, distinctly peculiar,

never seen or heard by any man in this world before; let him tell us that, and if it were possible, nothing more than that,— he, brief in proportion, shall be welcome!

The Messrs. Robertson, with their Francia's Reign of Terror, and other Books on South America, have been much before the world of late; and failed not of a perusal from this Reviewer; whose next sad duty it now is to say a word about them. The Messrs. Robertson, some thirty or five-and-thirty years ago, were two young Scotchmen, from the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, as would seem; who, under fair auspices, set out for Buenos-Ayres, and thence for Paraguay, and other quarters of that remote continent, in the way of commercial adventure. Being young men of vivacity and open eyesight, they surveyed with attentive view those convulsed regions of the world; wherein it was evident that revolution raged not a little; but also that precious metals, cow-hides, Jesuits' bark, and multiplex commodities, were nevertheless extant; and iron or brazen implements, ornaments, cotton and woollen clothing, and British manufactures not a few, were objects of desire to mankind. The Brothers Robertson, acting on these facts, appear to have prospered, to have extensively flourished in their commerce; which they gradually extended up the River Plate, to the city of the Seven Streams or Currents (Corrientes socalled), and higher even to Assumpcion, metropolis of Paraguay; in which latter place, so extensive did the commercial interests grow, it seemed at last expedient that one or both of the prosperous Brothers should take up his personal residence. Personal residence accordingly they did take up, one or both of them, and maintain, in a fluctuating way, now in this city, now in that, of the De la Plata, Parana or Paraguay country, for a considerable space of years. How many years, in precise arithmetic, it is impossible, from these inextricably complicated documents now before us, to ascertain. In Paraguay itself, in Assumpcion city itself, it is very clear, the Brothers Robertson did, successively or simultaneously, in a fluctuating inextricable manner, live for certain years; and occasionally saw Dr. Francia with their own eyes,-though, to them or others, he had not yet become notable.

Mountains of cow and other hides, it would appear, quitted those countries by movement of the Brothers Robertson, to be

15

worn-out in Europe as tanned boots and horse-harness, with more or less satisfaction, ‚—not without due profit to the merchants, we shall hope. About the time of Dr. Francia's Leginning his ‘reign of terror,' or earlier it may be (for there are no dates in these inextricable documents), the Messrs. Robertson were lucky enough to take final farewell of Paraguay, and carry their commercial enterprises into other quarters of that vast continent, where the reign was not of terror. Their voyagings, counter-voyagings, comings and goings, seem to have been extensive, frequent, inextricably complex; to Europe, to Tucuman, to Glasgow, to Chile, to Laswade and elsewhither; too complex for a succinct intelligence, as that of our readers has to be at present. Sufficient for us to know that the Messrs. Robertson did bodily, and for good, return to their own country some few years since; with what net result of cash is but dimly adumbrated in these documents; certainly with some increase of knowledge,-had the unfolding of it but been brief in proportion! Indisputably the Messrs. Robertson had somewhat to tell their eyes had seen some new things, of which their hearts and understandings had taken hold more or less. In which circumstances the Messrs. Robertson decided on publishing a Book. Arrangements being made, Two Volumes of Letters on Paraguay came out, with due welcome from the world, in 1839.

We have read these Letters for the first time lately: a Book of somewhat aqueous structure: immeasurably thinner than one could have wished; otherwise not without merit. It is written in an off-hand, free-flowing, very artless, very incorrect style of language, of thought, and of conception; breathes a cheerful, eupeptic, social spirit, as of adventurous South-American Britons, worthy to succeed in business; gives one, here and there, some visible concrete feature, some lively glimpse of those remote sunburnt countries; and has throughout a kind of bantering humour or quasi-humour, a joviality and healthiness of heart, which is comfortable to the reader, in some measure. A Book not to be despised in these dull times: one of that extensive class of books which a reader can peruse, so to speak, 'with one eye shut and the other not open;' a considerable luxury for some readers. These Letters on Paraguay meeting, as would seem, a unanimous approval, it was now determined

The

by the Messrs. Robertson that they would add a Third Volume, and entitle it Dr. Francia's Reign of Terror. They did so, and this likewise the present Reviewer has read. Unluckily the Authors had, as it were, nothing more whatever to say about Dr. Francia, or next to nothing; and under this condition, it must be owned they have done their Book with what success was well possible. Given a cubic inch of respectable Castile soap, To lather it up in water so as to fill one puncheon winemeasure: this is the problem; let a man have credit, of its kind, for doing his problem! The Messrs. Robertson have picked almost every fact of significance from Rengger and Longchamp, adding some not very significant reminiscences of their own; this is the square inch of soap: you lather it up in Robertsonian loquacity, joviality, Commercial-Inn banter, Leading-Article philosophy, or other aqueous vehicles, till it fills the puncheon, the Volume of four-hundred pages, and say "There!" public, it would seem, did not fling even this in the face of the venders, but bought it as a puncheon filled; and the consequences are already here: Three Volumes more on South America, from the same assiduous Messrs. Robertson! These also, in his eagerness, this present Reviewer has read; and has, alas, to say that they are simply the old volumes in new vocables, under a new figure. Intrinsically all that we did not already know of these Three Volumes,—there are craftsmen of no great eminence who will undertake to write it in one sheet ! Yet there they stand, Three solid-looking Volumes, a thousand printed pages and upwards; three puncheons more lathered out of the old square inch of Castile soap! It is too bad. A necessitous ready-witted Irishman sells you an indifferent grayhorse; steals it overnight, paints it black, and sells it you again on the morrow; he is haled before judges, sharply cross-questioned, tried and almost executed, for such adroitness in horseflesh but there is no law yet as to books!

M. de la Condamine, about a century ago, was one of a world-famous company that went into those equinoctial countries, and for the space of nine or ten years did exploits there. From Quito to Cuença, he measured you degrees of the meridian, climbed mountains, took observations, had adventures; wild Creoles opposing Spanish nescience to human science; wild Indians throwing down your whole cargo of instruments