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occasionally in the heart of remote deserts, and striking work there.6 M. de la Condamine saw bull-fights at Cuença, five days running; and on the fifth day, saw his unfortunate too audacious surgeon massacred by popular tumult there. He sailed the entire length of the Amazons River, in Indian canoes; over narrow Pongo rapids, over infinite mud-waters, the infinite tangled wilderness with its reeking desolation on the right hand of him and on the left ;—and had mischances, adventures, and took celestial observations all the way, and made remarks ! Apart altogether from his meridian degrees, which belong in a very strict sense to World-history and the advancement of all Adam's sinful posterity, this man and his party saw and suffered many hundred times as much of mere romance adventure as the Messrs. Robertson did :-Madame Godin's passage down the Amazons, and frightful life-in-death amid the howling forest-labyrinths, and wrecks of her dead friends, amounts to more adventure of itself than was ever dreamt of in the Robertsonian world. And of all this M. de la Condamine gives pertinent, lucid and conclusively intelligible and credible account in one very small octavo volume; not quite the eighth part of what the Messrs. Robertson have already written, in a not pertinent, not lucid or conclusively intelligible and credible manner. And the Messrs. Robertson talk repeatedly, in their last Volumes, of writing still other Volumes on Chile, 'if the public will encourage.' The Public will be a monstrous fool ií it do. The Public ought to stipulate first, that the real new knowledge forthcoming there about Chile be separated from the knowledge or ignorance already known; that the preliminary question be rigorously put, Are several volumes the space to hold it, or a small fraction of one volume?

On the whole, it is a sin, good reader, though there is no Act of Parliament against it; an indubitable malefaction or crime. No mortal has a right to wag his tongue, much less to wag his pen, without saying something: he knows not what mischief he does, past computation; scattering words without meaning,—to afflict the whole world yet, before they cease! For thistle-down flies abroad on all winds and airs of wind: idle thistles, idle dandelions, and other idle products of Nature 6 Condamine: Relation d'un Voyage dans l'Intérieur de l'Amérique n'fridionale.

VOL. VII.

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or the human mind, propagate themselves in that way; like to cover the face of the earth,-did not man's indignant providence, with reap-hook, with rake, with autumnal steel-andtinder, intervene. It is frightful to think how every idle volume flies abroad like an idle globular downbeard, embryo of new millions; every word of it a potential seed of infinite new downbeards and volumes: for the mind of man is voracious, is feracious; germinative, above all things, of the downbeard species! Why, the Author-corps in Great Britain, every soul of them inclined to grow mere dandelions if permitted, is now supposed to be about ten thousand strong; and the reading-corps, who read merely to escape from themselves, with one eye shut and the other not open, and will put-up with almost any dandelion, or thing which they can read without opening both their eyes, amounts to twenty-seven millions all but a few! O could the Messrs. Robertson, spirited, articulate-speaking men, once know well in what a comparatively blessed mood you close your brief, intelligent, conclusive M. de la Condamine, and feel that you have passed your evening well and nobly, as in a temple of wisdom,—not ill and disgracefully, as in brawling tavern supper-rooms, with fools and noisy persons,-ah, in that case, perhaps the Messrs. Robertson would write their new Work on Chile in part of a volume !

But enough of this Robertsonian department; which we must leave to the Fates and Supreme Providences. These spirited, articulate-speaking Robertsons are far from the worst of their kind; nay, among the best, if you will ;-only unlucky in this case, in coming across the autumnal steel and tinder ! Let it cease to rain angry sparks on them: enough now, and more than enough. To cure that unfortunate department by philosophical criticism—the attempt is most vain. Who will dismount, on a hasty journey, with the day declining, to attack mosquito-swarms with the horsewhip? Spur swiftly through them; breathing perhaps some pious prayer to Heaven. By the horsewhip they cannot be killed. Drain-out the swamps where they are bred,—Ah, couldst thou do something towards that! And in the mean while: How to get on with this of Dr. Francia?

The materials, as our reader sees, are of the miserablest: mere intricate inanity (ii we except poor wooden Rengger), and

little more; not facts, but broken shadows of facts; clouds of confused bluster and jargon ;—the whole still more bewildered in the Robertsons, by what we may call a running shriek of constitutional denunciation, 'sanguinary tyrant,' and so forth. How is any picture of Francia to be fabricated out of that? Certainly, first of all, by omission of the running shriek! This latter we shall totally omit. Francia, the sanguinary tyrant, was not bound to look at the world through Rengger's eyes, through Parish Robertson's eyes, but faithfully through his own eyes. We are to consider that, in all human likelihood, this Dionysius of Paraguay did mean something; and then to ask in quietness, What? The running shriek once hushed, perhaps many things will compose themselves, and straggling fractions of information, almost infinitesimally small, may become unexpectedly luminous !

An unscientific Cattle-breeder and tiller of the earth, in some nameless chacra not far from the City of Assumpcion, was the Father of this remarkable human individual; and seems to have evoked him into being some time in the year 1757. The man's name is not known to us; his very nation is a point of controversy: Francia himself gave him out for an immigrant of French extraction; the popular belief was, that he had wandered over from Brazil. Portuguese or French, or both in one, he produced this human individual, and had him christened by the name of José Gaspar Rodriguez Francia, in the year above mentioned. Rodriguez, no doubt, had a Mother too; but her name also, nowhere found mentioned, must be omitted in this delineation. Her name, and all her fond maternities, and workings and sufferings, good brown lady, are sunk in dumb forgetfulness; and buried there along with her, under the twenty-fifth parallel of Southern Latitude; and no British reader is required to interfere with them! José Rodriguez must have been a loose-made tawny creature, much given to taciturn reflection; probably to crying humours, with fits of vehement ill-nature; such a subject, it seemed to the parent Francia cautiously reflecting on it, would, of all attainable trades, be suitablest for preaching the Gospel, and doing the Divine Offices, in a country like Paraguay. There were other young Francias; at least one sister and one brother in addi

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tion; of whom the latter by and by went mad. The Francias, with their adust character, and vehement French-Portuguese blood, had perhaps all a kind of aptitude for madness. Dictator himself was subject to the terriblest fits of hypochondria, as your adust 'men of genius' too frequently are! The lean Rodriguez, we fancy, may have been of a devotional turn withal; born half a century earlier, he had infallibly been so. Devotional or not, he shall be a Priest, and do the Divine Offices in Paraguay, perhaps in a very unexpected way.

Rodriguez having learned his hornbooks and elementary branches at Assumpcion, was accordingly despatched to the University of Cordova in Tucuman, to pursue his curriculum in that seminary. So far we know, but almost no farther. What kind of curriculum it was, what lessons, spiritual spoonmeat, the poor lank sallow boy was crammed with, in Cordova High Seminary; and how he took to it, and pined or throve on it, is entirely uncertain. Lank sallow boys in the Tucuman and other high seminaries are often dreadfully ill-dealt with, in respect of their spiritual spoonmeat, as times go! Spoonpoison you might often call it rather: as if the object were to make them Mithridateses, able to live on poison? Which may be a useful art too, in its kind? Nay, in fact, if we consider it, these high seminaries and establishments exist there, in Tucuman and elsewhere, not for that lank sallow boy's special purposes, but for their own wise purposes; they were made and put together, a long while since, without taking the smallest counsel of the sallow boy! Frequently they seem to say to him, all along: “This precious thing that lies in thee, O sallow boy, of 'genius' so-called, it may to thee and to eternal Nature be precious; but to us and to temporary Tucuman it is not precious, but pernicious, deadly: we require thee to quit this, or expect penalties!" And yet the poor boy, how can he quit it; eternal Nature herself, from the depths of the Universe, ordering him to go on with it? From the depths of the Universe, and of his own Soul, latest revelation of the Universe, he is, in a silent, imperceptible, but irrefragable manner, directed to go on with it,—and has to go, though under penalties. Penalties of very death, or worse! Alas, the poor boy, so willing to obey temporary Tucumans, and yet unable to disobey eternal Nature, is truly to be pitied. Thou shalt be Rodri

guez Francia! cries Nature, and the poor boy to himself. Thou shalt be Ignatius Loyola, Friar Ponderoso, Don Fatpauncho Usandwonto! cries Tucuman. The poor creature's whole boyhood is one long lawsuit: Rodriguez Francia against All Persons in general. It is so in Tucuman, so in most places. You cannot advise effectually into what high seminary he had best be sent; the only safe way is to bargain beforehand, that he have force born with him sufficient to make itself good against all persons in general!

Be this as it may, the lean Francia prosecutes his studies at Cordova, waxes gradually taller towards new destinies. Rodriguez Francia, in some kind of Jesuit skullcap and black college serge gown, a lank rawboned creature, stalking with a downlook through the irregular public streets of Cordova in those years, with an infinitude of painful unspeakabilities in the interior of him, is an interesting object to the historical mind. So much is unspeakable, O Rodriguez; and it is a most strange Universe this thou hast been born into; and the theorem of Ignatius Loyola and Don Fatpauncho Usandwonto seems to me to hobble somewhat! Much is unspeakable; lying within one, like a dark lake of doubt, of Acherontic dread, leading down to Chaos itself. Much is unspeakable, answers Francia; but somewhat also is speakable,—this for example: That I will not be a Priest in Tucuman in these circumstances; that I should like decidedly to be a secular person rather, were it even a Lawyer rather! Francia, arrived at man's years, changes from Divinity to Law. Some say it was in Divinity that he graduated, and got his Doctor's hat; Rengger says, Divinity; the Robertsons, likelier to be incorrect, call him Doctor of Laws. To our present readers it is all one, or nearly so. Rodriguez quitted the Tucuman Alma Mater, with some beard on his chin, and reappeared in Assumpcion to look-out for practice at the bar.

What Rodriguez had contrived to learn, or grow to, under this his Alma Mater in Cordova, when he quitted her? The answer is a mere guess; his curriculum, we again say, is not yet known. Some faint smattering of Arithmetic, or the everlasting laws of Numbers; faint smattering of Geometry, everlasting laws of Shapes; these things, we guess, not altogether in the dark, Rodriguez did learn, and found extremely remark

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