so terribly hampered by class-legislation' and the like, what could he make of it? Almost nothing! O'Higgins is clearly of Irish breed ; and, though a Chileno born, and 'natural son ' of Don Ambrosio O'Higgins, formerly the Spanish Viceroy of 'Chile,' carries his Hibernianism in his very face. A most cheery, jovial, buxom countenance, radiant with pepticity, good humour and manifold effectuality in peace and war! Of his battles and adventures let some luckier epic-writer sing or speak. One thing we Foreign Reviewers will always remember his father's immense merits towards Chile in the matter of Highways. Till Don Ambrosio arrived to govern Chile, some half-century ago, there probably was not a made road of en miles long from Panama to Cape Horn. Indeed, except his roads, we fear there is hardly any yet. One omits the old Inca causeways, as too narrow (being only three feet broad), and altogether unfrequented in the actual ages. Don Ambrosio made, with incredible industry and perseverance and skill, in every direction, roads, roads. From San Iago to Valparaiso, where only sure-footed mules with their packsaddles carried goods, there can now wooden-axled cars loud-sounding, or any kind of vehicle, commodiously roll. It was he that shaped these passes through the Andes, for most part; hewed them out from mule-tracks into roads, certain of them. think of his casuchas. Always on the higher inhospitable solitudes, at every few miles' distance, stands a trim brick cottage, or casucha, into which the forlorn traveller introducing himself, finds covert and grateful safety; nay food and refection, for there are 'iron boxes' of pounded beef or other provender, iron boxes of charcoal; to all which the traveller, having bargained with the Post-office authorities, carries a key.4 Steel and tinder are not wanting to him, nor due iron skillet, with water from the stream: there he, striking a light, cooks hoarded victual at eventide, amid the lonely pinnacles of the world, and blesses Governor O'Higgins. With both hands,' it may be hoped,—if there is vivacity of mind in him :

Had you seen this road before it was made,

You would lift both your hands and bless General Wade!

And

It affects one with real pain to hear from Mr. Miers, that

4 Miers.

the War of Liberty has half ruined these O'Higgins casuchas. Patriot soldiers, in want of more warmth than the charcoalbox could yield, have not scrupled to tear-down the door, doorcase, or whatever wooden thing could be come at, and burn it, on the spur of the moment. The storm-stayed traveller, who sometimes, in threatening weather, has to linger here for days, for fifteen days together,' does not lift both his hands and bless the Patriot soldier !

Nay, it appears, the O'Higgins roads, even in the plain country, have not, of late years, been repaired, or in the least attended to, so distressed was the finance department; and are now fast verging towards impassability and the condition of mule-tracks again. What a set of animals are men and Chilenos ! If an O'Higgins did not now and then appear among them, what would become of the unfortunates? Can you wonder that an O'Higgins sometimes loses temper with them; shuts the persuasive outspread hand, clutching some sharpest hide-whip, some terrible sword of justice or gallowslasso therewith, instead,—and becomes a Dr. Francia now and then! Both the O'Higgins and the Francia, it seems probable, are phases of the same character; both, one begins to fear, are indispensable from time to time, in a world inhabited by men and Chilenos !

As to O'Higgins the Second, Patriot, Natural-son O'Higgins, he, as we said, had almost no success whatever as a governor; being hampered by class-legislation. Alas, a governor in Chile cannot succeed. A governor there has to

resign himself to the want of success; and should say, in cheerful interrogative tone, like that Pope elect, who showing himself on the balcony, was greeted with mere howls, "Non piacemmo al popolo ?”—and thereupon proceed cheerfully to the next fact. Governing is a rude business everywhere; but in South America it is of quite primitive rudeness: they have no parliamentary way of changing ministries as yet; nothing but the rude primitive way of hanging the old ministry on gibbets, that the new may be installed! Their government has altered its name, says the sturdy Mr. Miers, rendered sulky by what he saw there: altered its name, but its nature continues as before. Shameless peculation, malversation, that is their government oppression formerly by Spanish officials, now by

:

native haciendados, land-proprietors,—the thing called justice still at a great distance from them, says the sulky Mr. Miers ! -Yes, but coming always, answer we; every new gibbeting of an old ineffectual ministry bringing justice somewhat nearer! Nay, as Miers himself has to admit, certain improvements are already indisputable. Trade everywhere, in spite of multiplex confusions, has increased, is increasing the days of somnolent monopoly and the old Acapulco Ship are gone, quite over the horizon. Two good, or partially good measures, the very necessity of things has everywhere brought about in those poor countries: clipping of the enormous bat-wings of the Clergy, and emancipating of the Slaves. Bat-wings, we say; for truly the South-American clergy had grown to be as a kind of bat-vampires :-readers have heard of that huge SouthAmerican bloodsucker, which fixes its bill in your circulating vital-fluid as you lie asleep, and there sucks; waving you with the motion of its detestable leather wings into ever deeper sleep; and so drinking, till it is satisfied, and you—do not awaken any more! The South-American governments, all in natural feud with the old church-dignitaries, and likewise all in great straits for cash, have everywhere confiscated the monasteries, cashiered the disobedient dignitaries, melted the superfluous church-plate into piastres; and, on the whole, shorn the wings of their vampire; so that if it still suck, you will at least have a chance of awakening before death!-Then again, the very want of soldiers of liberty led to the emancipating of blacks, yellows and other coloured persons: your mulatto nay your negro, if well drilled, will stand fire as well as another.

Poor South-American emancipators; they began with Volney, Raynal and Company, at that gospel of Social Contract and the Rights of Man; under the most unpropitious circumstances; and have hitherto got only to the length we see! Nay now, it seems, they do possess 'universities,' which are at least schools with other than monk teachers; they have got libraries, though as yet almost nobody reads them, and our friend Miers, repeatedly knocking at all doors of the Grand Chile National Library, could never to this hour discover where the key lay, and had to content himself with looking-in through the windows.5 Miers, as already hinted, desiderates unspeak5 Travels in Chile.

able improvements in Chile;-desiderates, indeed, as the basis of all, an immense increase of soap-and-water. Yes, thou sturdy Miers, dirt is decidedly to be removed, whatever improvements, temporal or spiritual, may be intended next! According to Miers, the open, still more the secret personal nastiness of those remote populations rises almost towards the sublime. Finest silks, gold brocades, pearl necklaces and diamond ear-drops, are no security against it: alas, all is not gold that glitters; somewhat that glitters is mere putrid fish-skin! Decided, enormously increased appliance of soap-and-water, in all its branches, with all its adjuncts; this, according to Miers, would be an improvement. He says also ('in his haste,' as is probable, like the Hebrew Psalmist), that all Chileno men are liars; all, or to appearance, all! A people that uses almost no soap, and speaks almost no truth, but goes about in that fashion, in a state of personal nastiness, and also of spiritual nastiness, approaching the sublime; such people is not easy to govern well !—

But undoubtedly by far the notablest of all these SouthAmerican phenomena is Dr. Francia and his Dictatorship in Paraguay; concerning whom, and which, we have now more particularly to speak. Francia and his reign of terror' have excited some interest, much vague wonder in this country; and especially given a great shock to constitutional feeling. One would rather wish to know Dr. Francia;--but unhappily one cannot ! Out of such a murk of distracted shadows and rumours, in the other hemisphere of the world, who would pretend at present to decipher the real portraiture of Dr. Francia and his Life? None of us can. A few credible features, wonderful enough, original enough in our constitutional time, will perhaps to the impartial eye disclose themselves; these, with some endeavour to interpret these, may lead certain readers into various reflections, constitutional and other, not entirely without benefit.

Certainly, as we say, nothing could well shock the constitutional feeling of mankind, as Dr. Francia has done. Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse, and indeed the whole breed of tyrants, one hoped, had gone many hundred years ago, with their reward; and here, under our own nose, rises a new 'tyrant,'

claiming also his reward from us! Precisely when constitutional liberty was beginning to be understood a little, and we flattered ourselves that by due ballot-boxes, by due registration-courts, and bursts of parliamentary eloquence, something like a real National Palaver would be got-up in those countries, arises this tawny-visaged, lean, inexorable Dr. Francia; claps you an embargo on all that; says to constitutional liberty, in the most tyrannous manner, Hitherto, and no farther! It is an undeniable, though an almost incredible fact, that Francia, a lean private individual, Practitioner of Law, and Doctor of Divinity, did, for twenty or near thirty years, stretch out his rod over the foreign commerce of Paraguay, saying to it, Cease! The ships lay high and dry, their pitchless seams all yawning on the clay-banks of the Parana; and no man could trade but by Francia's license. If any person entered Paraguay, and the Doctor did not like his papers, histalk, conduct, or even the cut of his face,—it might be the worse for such person! Nobody could leave Paraguay on any pretext whatever. It mattered not that you were man of science, astronomer, geologer, astrologer, wizard of the north; Francia heeded none of these things. The whole world knows of M. Aimé Bonpland; how Francia seized him, descending on his tea-establishment in Entre Rios, like an obscene vulture, and carried him into the interior, contrary even to the law of nations; how the great Humboldt and other high persons expressly applied to Dr. Francia, calling on him, in the name of human science, and as it were under penalty of reprobation, to liberate M. Bonpland; and how Dr. Francia made no answer, and M. Bonpland did not return to Europe, and indeed has never yet returned. It is also admitted that Dr. Francia had a gallows, had jailors, law-fiscals, efficials; and executed, in his time, 'upwards of forty persons,' some of them in a very summary manner. Liberty of private judgment, unless it kept its mouth shut, was at an end in Paraguay. Paraguay lay under interdict, cut-off for above twenty years from the rest of the world, by a new Dionysius of Paraguay. All foreign commerce had ceased; how much more all domestic constitution-building! These are strange facts. Dr. Francia, we may conclude at least, was not a common man but an uncommon.