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enjoyed since. His devotion to the Catholic Church made him particularly acceptable to the pope.

Whilst at Rome he wrote and published in Italian a work entitled "Concordanza delle Scienze Naturali e principalmente della Geologia, con la Genesia," always a favorite subject, on which he took the orthodox side. The late Lady William Russell acknowledges the receipt of a copy in a letter dated " Audley Square, Day of the Purification, 1864.”

Many thanks, my dear duke, for the book with the pretty concetto of "Che sarà, sarà." Alas! Che sard in Germany?

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I recommend my Roman son (Lord Odo) to your protection, as a sequel to the friendship of our Lisbon days, when he was a little child, and you came to Janellas Verdes (the British Legation), and were in your brilliant military, patriotic, heroic days. I am still, and, I fear, ever shall be, a great invalid! but I keep to my friendships; and am proud of numbering you amongst my hommes illustres ! though I cannot write terse parallels, like Plutarch, or I would compare you to the Cid.

Whilst at Lisbon, in the interim between his periods of residence at Rome, the premiership was repeatedly pressed upon him by the king, and in January, 1869, his Majesty wrote, "I cannot dispense with the service I request of you." To obey this command, he took leave of the pope, and was on his way back when, on reaching Bordeaux, he received a telegram, announcing that the ministers retained their posts; and that the legation at Paris was at his disposal.

His mission to Paris did not last long, and was principally remarkable for his conferences with the French emperor touching the proposed union of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns on the head of Dom Fernando. In the mean time misgovernment and popular discontent had reached their acme in Portugal, and in May, 1869, Saldanha felt imperatively called upon to repeat the part which he had so successfully enacted some three or four times already. He proceeded to the palace and told the king he must dismiss his ministry: "I had many times the honor of saying to his Majesty that his persistence in retaining the ministry might be fatal to him. I reminded him of Charles X. and Polignac; of Louis Philippe and Guizot; of Isabella II. and Gonzalez Bravo."

On the king still hesitating, he said:

The Bedford motto.

Sire, I am unwilling to be considered ambitious, or disloyal to the crown; but I might appear so, if I did not endeavor to prevent a revolution which should oblige me to become head of a revolution, such as I know I shall be the regent. I will, therefore, put myself at the able to guide and control for your Majesty's advantage; and be assured that I will not, in my old age, dishonor my steadfast principles of loyalty.

He was as good as his word. He had only to hold up his hand to produce a military demonstration in unison with the popular feeling; and, after some show of resistance, the ministry resigned, and he again became lord of the ascendant. Tranquillity being thus restored, he tendered in the evening the resignation of the offices he had accepted in the morning. The king replied by forcing on him an additional office, the department of foreign affairs, and as its representative he addressed a circular to the diplomatic agents abroad, recapitulating and justifying what had been done.

He was now in his eightieth year, and all Europe was disposed to echo the remark of the Times, that "there was something so extravagant in the idea of a nation crouching at the feet of an octogenarian general." But, be it observed, it was the voluntary act of the nation; and it was moral rather than physical force which enabled him to execute this coup d'état.

His next and last administration had lasted one hundred days, when he accepted the post of minister to the Court of St. James's, upon the understanding that no political reaction would be attempted by his successors. He led, as might have been anticipated from his advanced age, a quiet, unobtrusive life in London, so quiet that Lord Derby, sitting next the duchess one day at dinner, said to her, "I am going to try to pick a quarrel with Portugal." "Indeed," was the reply, "why so?" "Oh!" rejoined his lordship, "only that I may have the pleasure of seeing the marshal oftener at the Foreign Office."

Some scraps of his conversation have been preserved. By way of an apology for the surrender at Sedan, it was observed that the "French had exhausted their powder." "They had their bayonets," was his dry rejoinder. When he was asked to what he imputed Napoleon's constant success until Waterloo, "Because until then he had never encountered an English army." When an aide-de-camp remonstrated with him for walking his

horse back from the front during a hot fire, he sententiously made answer, "In the presence of an enemy advance at a gallop, but retire at a foot's pace."

His most important work, in two parts, was published during his residence in England; the first part in 1874, the other in 1876. The translated title is

The Voice of Nature; or the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of GOD shown in Creation; in the connection between the Inorganic and the Organic World; and in the Adaptation of External Nature to the Structure of Plants, and to the Moral and Physical Constitution of Man.

The Archbishop of York acknowledged the reception of a copy in these compli

mentary terms:

ments, assaults, and battles, in which I have led my comrades to victory, I never undertook impossibilities.

He might have said nearly the same of his political exploits, of his coups d'état which, rash as they generally appeared, never failed when he was left to himself. Nor is it enough to say that they were well planned and well executed; or that he was eminently endowed with courage and decision, the qualities which carry all before them in revolutionary times. Uniform success on such a variety of occasions cannot be explained away in this fashion. Why was he trusted by soveralong that he was defying their authority, eign after sovereign, telling them all keeping order by disorder, and committing treason out of loyalty? Why did the people as well as the army rise at his bidding whenever he proclaimed that the hour for action had struck? Why did En

I have read with great interest your important work: Whilst there are, of course, some things in it which are written from the standpoint of another Church, it is impossible not to admire, and appreciate highly, such an earnest attempt to defend the truth against dis-glish ambassadors encourage and applaud belief. I doubt not that it will do much good.

He died at Gloucester Place on November 21, 1876, four days after he had completed his eighty-sixth year. The body was conveyed to Lisbon and buried in state with royal honors. He died in embarrassed circumstances, and a pension of 533 was granted by the Chambers to the widow, with one of 4447. to his sole surviving son.

The career of which we have given little more than an outline was and is wholly without parallel, precedent, or example in any country. Saldanha has been called the Espartero of Spain, but he presents rather a contrast than resemblance to the Spanish dictator, who grasped the supreme power which Saldanha repeatedly refused. At the risk of being thought paradoxical, we should say that he had more in common with the Iron Duke, asking first in a crisis how the king's (or queen's) government was to be carried on, always guiding his course by the public weal as his polestar, and subordinating even principle to broad considerations of expediency. There is extant a letter from Saldanha to a minister of war, in which

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measures so much opposed to English notions of legality? They must one and all have given him credit for honesty of purpose; and his consistency of aim is beyond dispute. The two things which he kept steadily in view throughout were the monarchy and the Liberal constitution; and on a careful analysis it will be found that the preservation of one or the other was involved in every exceptional proceeding on which he staked his honor and his life. He acted strictly on the maxim,

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Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus. He was pre-eminently the man for an emergency, but he never intrigued to create or accelerate one: he never came till he was wanted; and whenever he put his shoulder to the wheel, it was on the eve of an otherwise inevitable crash. This is a decisive answer to the current

calumny that he remained quiet whilst his pecuniary affairs were in a satisfactory state, and that, when he wanted money, he made a revolution. Moreover, to suppose him possessed of such a talisman, such an Aladdin's lamp, is simply to exalt his influence, his powers of mind and strength of character at the expense of his disinterestedness; which is not commonly the strong point of men who win their way to eminence, of men who leave footprints on the sands of time.”

his statesmanship was not of the highest His views were not far-reaching, and order, or he would have established something permanent, something to obviate the constant recurrence of the evils to

which his drastic remedies were applied. | fortable square box in the north aisle, But he has left a reputation that his coun- well-cushioned and carpeted, with plenty trymen will not speedily let die. When a deputy towards the close of 1870 stated in the Chamber at Lisbon, that Saldanha had not stood alone as the champion of the Constitution, another indignantly replied:

True: but without the Marshal Saldanha, the cause of liberty was lost. He is our only general; and base is it to deny his work. If France, instead of Bazaines and Leboeufs, had had Marshal Saldanha, she would not, at this moment, be trampled upon by Prussia.

From Temple Bar.

GIRL AND GRANDFATHER.

I

of high hassocks, on one of which I generally sat, my head resting on my grandfather's knee. We were great allies, he and I, and braved my grandmother's looks of mild disapproval on many minute occasions, when her sense of propriety was ruffled by some childish freedom of gesture, or breach of rules conventional. She was a strict disciplinarian, and could not forget how in her young days the maternal hand had held a stick when the hour of correction came, a vision which always Although, therefore, he may not be made me rejoice in secret that my greatplaced by posterity where his biographer grandmother was safe out of sight and would fain place him-in the category reach before I came into a world, where, of statesmen and warriors alongside of as a rule, children were naughty. No Washington - he will fill some of the reforming finger had as yet been laid on most luminous pages in Portuguese his- Aspenkirk Church. The large east wintory, and take high rank amongst the dow, thickly festooned with ivy, looked brightest illustrations of the nineteenth beautiful in my inexperienced eyes. century who just fall short of being great. did not know how hideous the whitewashed walls and great high pews were, but I hated old Robbie, the clerk, who took so prominent a part in the services, and whose droll nasal performances, and self-satisfied smirk, used to excite me to illicit smiling, which not all the cold se THE pretty, sleepy parish of Aspenkirk verity of my grandmother's eye could conlay basking in the fervid blaze of a noon- trol. Heavens! what a performance was tide sun, one Sunday, early in June, some the "Old Hundredth" in those days at five-and-forty years ago. It was the hour Aspenkirk Church! There was no organ, of morning service, and the doors of the nor can I remember any tuneful voices, old parish church stood open, so that the but I can still hear Robbie, in high monorector as he stood preaching in the worm- tone, giving out each line successively, eaten pulpit, a commanding-looking figure before it was sung by the congregation of in his black gown, could see all around untutored north-country voices at the full him, not only the living flock of which he pitch of the lungs. One hymn-tune which was the shepherd, and who now sat re- was in use, and which, in spite of barbarspectfully hearkening to his accents of ous treatment, still haunted my ear and rolling thunder, but also the quiet, grassy gave me pleasure, I never heard elsegraves outside, where the village fore- where, till after many years, in a French fathers lay taking their rest under the convent, I found it again, and recognized daisies. I, too, could see from the corner in the old Latin invocation to Mary, where I sat in my grandfather's pew, a chanted so pathetically by the nuns of green patch of churchyard, with a butter- Avranches, the identical melody that had Hy skimming about the porch, which was charmed me in Aspenkirk Church when I very refreshing to me after keeping my was a child. But this is a digression. eyes dutifully fixed on my prayer-book Let us get outside the church this glorious such a long, long time. Close to the summer day, for the rector's discourse is door sat the workhouse children, who also over, the first rush of Cumberland clogs snatched a fearful joy as they sniffed the has escaped into the churchyard, the lads summer air, but woe to the wight whose and lasses are sidling off in company, the roving eye, or gently protruded head was farmers gathering in knots for a gossip detected by the guardian's searching about the hay and other rustic matters, glance. Crack went the cane on poor and their wives and daughters are exwoodenpate, to his grief and anguish, and changing civilities and the tittle-tattle of at the well-known sound my heart would the week, before dispersing to their sevbleed for woodenpate as I thought how eral homes. Through them all strides sore his head would be next time he had the rector, in gown and college cap, his hair brushed. Our pew was a com- tall, spare, and aristocratic. Bob go the

children, the women curtsy; he nods, I stood up, confused, and properly overpleasant and royal-looking, as he passes through them all down the churchyard path, his eagle eye sweeping their ranks, and an indescribable effluence of high breeding and careless kindheartedness playing about him like an invisible atmosphere.

"Ah! Mrs. Somerby," he cries out to my grandmother, "what a fine rose you have there! Why have I none like this in my garden?"

powered by such an honor. Miss Betty's girdle-cakes were the creamiest in the parish; moreover, her cow," Miss Story," was an old acquaintance, having been once a calf in our Holm field. Her garden lay in pleasant proximity to a broad and silvery river, and there, on a bed of fine gravel, I could enjoy an unmolested half-hour at the agreeable game of ducks and drakes.

I demurely thanked Miss Betty, whose "Dear! Mr. Featherstone," she says, old, puckered, parchment mask took an "you have finer far than this, for certain," additional crease of approbation. I was as she puts the rose into his hand. only a visitor at my grandmother's house, He stood smelling it critically. and was to return to my parents in Scot"Where will you match me a fragrance | land shortly. I think Miss Betty somelike this among all the apothecary's gums?" 'says he, in that deep, rolling voice that always sounded to me like the sea. He carried it off with him as he disappeared through the door in the rectory wall, and from that day the bush on which the ruddy rose had grown was called the "apothecary's rose.' My grandmother's quaint-looking conveyance, styled the minibus," was standing waiting for us outside the churchyard wall, under the shade of a great elm-tree, but old Farmer may just go on whisking his tail at the flies for another ten minutes, for the meetings at the church-gate are not to be scrambled through all in a moment.

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how expected to inhale, through my small personality, some impressions of the northern metropolis, as her sister, Miss Anne, always dubbed the city of my birth. Of Miss Anne I was considerably afraid. She was much more imposing than Miss Betty; wore a silk gown, and confined her hair by a very broad fillet of black velvet, which gave her an impressive appearance. She was generally spoken of in respectful tones, as "a woman of very superior mind." She was portly in person, and condescending in manner, but she had a displeasing custom of always coming down on me with a sudden public appeal on historical questions, which was sorely disconcerting, and made me timid in her august presence. Only last week, at my grandmother's tea-table, just when the hot, buttered cakes were coming in, she had startled me by the abrupt question, "Now then, Miss Charlotte, what is your opinion of the character of Henry VIII.?"

I sat down on a gravestone, and waited contentedly enough while grandmamma gossiped. Mary Atkinson" slumbered below. I began to draw mental pictures of Mary Atkinson's past, present, and future condition, who had lain here for fifteen years. Her natural body must have been eaten by the worms long ago. Tremblingly I felt that upon the style of I wondered if her bones were quite gone my reply would depend Miss Anne's also, and if the coffin was empty, and what opinion of the system of education in the was going on inside it now; and where northern metropolis, and that my mother Mary Atkinson's soul was waiting all this and my governess stood upon their trial time, and if she were not rather tired of in that dread moment. Grandpapa had waiting, and feeling chilly without her old somehow come to my aid, as he generally body? Suddenly I heard a cracked, did in awkward emergencies, and I was quavering voice close at my ear, which saved for the time. But now, again, I made me start up in apprehension. Mary saw her steadily approaching. Surely Atkinson's voice might sound as queer as she would not desecrate the holy day with that if she had nothing but a few bones profane antiquarian researches. There left; but, oh relief! it was only Miss was no saying. I slipped out at the Betty Jefferson, who stood looking curi-churchyard gate, and made for the "miniously at me from under her long poke bus," where I sat, full of hopes and fears, bonnet, eccentrically trimmed with a a distinct hope being that my grandmother knotted bunch of worsted stay-laces. My grandmother's more familiar tones saluted

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would not ask Miss Betty to Fairholm till after my departure, for the good lady, having a nervous disinclination to sleep alone in the yellow guest-chamber, had invited me, on a recent occasion, to keep her company there. Should I ever forget

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the vague, unutterable terrors of that night, when I, aroused by some inexplicable sympathy with Miss Betty's wakeful fears, opened my eyes in a pitchy darkness within that hearse-like bed, and heard in the unearthly silence the odd, croaking voice of Miss Betty proclaiming nervously, "How deadly still all is!"

My grandmother joined me at last, and we drove home to Fairholm in our usual jog-trot fashion, picking up my grandfather after we had gone about a mile. There were two little cupboards in the "minibus," whence grandmamma always produced some relishing gingerbread cake to beguile the long drive of four miles. What a pretty rural drive it was through the Aspenkirk plantations! How fragrant the odors of pine and fir! What a liberal margin of short, sweet turf bordered the park-like road on either side! Here and there we passed a cottar's cow, peacefully grazing on the roadside, followed step for step by a little herd-girlpatient virtue in miniature-for whom there was generally a bit of gingerbread to spare. Why does no gingerbread taste the same nowadays?

them in the coverts where they reared their young; to stand in the early morning, as the mower whetted his scythe, and smell the new-cut grass; to hunt the mushroom ere the dew dried upon the meadow, and gather the eggs for breakfast from the cackling hens; to watch the cows, over the byre-door, as they yielded their milk to the pail, and stand aside as they passed me lowing to the fragrant pastures. Here I learned the names and properties of flowers and herbs, and wrought in a corner of my own with spade and watering-pot; watched the bloom on the plum, as it swelled to ripeness on the sunny wall, and the cherries reddening day by day beneath the net, among their pointed, glossy leaves. Down in the hayfields, I played till I was weary, and read fairy-tales underneath the gold tassels of the laburnum-tree. And moving through all, was the influence of a mighty affection, which tinctured everything in which I lived, moved, and had my being. Never have I loved any human being as I loved my grandfather. I loved my grandmother also, but in quite a secondary way. She was less indulgent, more.impatient of the small mistakes and blunders of childhood. Narrower grew the lanes, and more A little wholesome fear tempered my love tortuous. The hedges and ditches here- for her, yet I liked well to lay my round abouts are all a tangle of meadow-sweet young cheek against her soft, velvety old and ragged robin. The home landscape one, or to trot by her side as she visited is tame and monotonous; but in the dis- the dairy and larder, and to watch her tance rise the blue hills of the Borderland. decant her clear gooseberry wine into the And now we must cross Lyn Bridge. quaint old pint decanters, with roses How black and sullen the river looks on wrought into the crystal. My first view the one side under the cliffs of red sand- of her in the day was always pleasant. stone, and how brightly it ripples on the She sat in a sunny window of the break other! Then we turn a sharp corner, and fast parlor, which looked into the garden descend gently for half a mile, through-in sober, black gown, a clean muslin grandpapa's fields and plantations. At kerchief folded across her bosom, pinned last we sight our own pretty homestead, at the throat by a little rose in garnets, and Farmer, with no need of admonition, turns into the courtyard, his labors ended for the day.

CHAPTER II.

READER, let me linger a moment over the memory of Paradise, for such was Fairholm to me. The days I passed there were purely happy, the only days out of a long life that shine ever un dimmed in memory's golden light Arcadian days, when my soul, like a bud, began to open softly to the morning sun, and no cankering worm crept nigh the days that rolled by blessedly uneventful, as I learned to read out of Nature's book, and to rejoice in the operations of her hands; to distinguish the notes of the birds, and watch

favored blossom

the only ornament she ever wore, a gift of my grandfather in his courting days. She was always reading the same little book, Bogatzky's "Golden Treasury," whence she gathered, I fancy, her note for the day. I can see her well-cut features, her calm, sensible, spirited expression, and the little stiff brown curls upon her forehead, for she did not then wear her own hair. I now know that the mistress of Fairholm was a very handsome woman. My grandfather was not handsome a homely-looking, blue-eyed man of medium stature and ruddy complexion. His smooth, bald crown I admired exceedingly. I was not the only person who paid him homage. John Somerby was master wherever he stepped. Another bright tint at the breakfast-table

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