INDE X. EMBELLISHMENTS. F PAGE 1. Portrait of GEORGE FREDERICK HANDEL, en- Fog-Seas of the Moon-Chambers' Journal, graved by Sartain. 276 2. PORTRAIT OF JENNY LIND, engraved by Sartain. 3. HIS MAJESTY MOHAMMED, SHAH OF PERSIA, engraved by Sartain. 4. PORTRAIT OF LOUIS AGASSIZ, engraved by Sartain. Food, some talk about-Fraser's Magazine, G Gold in its Natural Sources-London Quarterly 204 281 425 326 Browning's, Mrs., Poems-North British Review, 27 Insanity, Disease, and Religion-London Quar Educational Essays-London Quarterly Review, 49 Ladies of the Reformation-Wife of Calvin- 82 Lunatic Asylums-London Quarterly Review, 492 Sea, Physical Geography of the-Edinburgh Re- M Mercier, Catherine-Tait's Magazine, MISCELLANEOUS.-Chinese Customs the Anti- 545 289 566 428 564 429 372 227 CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS, from the grave in which he lies, still confers new and very unexpected gifts upon Spain. In the fif teenth century he gave her the New World. In the nineteenth, that New World gives back historians to Spainhistorians, who not only investigate and describe with becoming enthusiasm her great actions and her conquests in that new hemisphere which is their country, but who follow the destinies of Spain herself to their ancient source, upon her own soil, and in the past annals of Europe. It is from America that we have, in our own time, received the most extensive survey of Spanish literature and the most captivating narratives of Spanish political history; for Ferdinand the Catholic, Isabella of Castille, Charles V., and Philip II., inspire as much curiosity and interest to these Transatlantic historians as the exploits of Cortes in Mexico, or of Pizzarro in Peru. 1. History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain. By WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. 2 vols. London: 1855. 2. The Rise of the Dutch Republic; a History. By JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY. 3 vols. London: 1856. VOL. XLI.-NO. I. TIMES.* Nor is this the only circumstance worthy of remark in the volumes now before us. These historians of European or American Spain are neither Spaniards nor Catholics. They belong to another race; they profess another faith; they speak another tongue. Washington Irving, Prescott, and Ticknor, are (so to speak) Englishmen and Protestants; for the sons of Protestant England are now the rulers of that continent which was dis covered and conquered nearly four hundred years ago, by the ancestors of Catholic Spain. The history of Spain has fallen, like her Transatlantic empire, into the grasp of foreigners and of heretics. Is this, then, one of the strange caprices of fate in the destinies of nations? Or is it one of those mysterious designs of Providence upon mankind which remain impenetrable, even after the lapse of ages? Not so: it is a natural and consequential fact, which may be fully explained by the history of Spain and of Europe for four centuries-it is a sentence warrantably pronounced and justified by the course of with himself, pronounced his third abdica- | then said to contain 350 walled towns, tion, and sought, in the Monastery of and more than 6000 small towns or burghs. Yuste, the repose he needed for his body Antwerp boasted of 100,000 inhabitants; and his soul, he bequeathed to his son, and even the Venetian ambassador, in Philip II., the most vast and powerful spite of his national predilections, did not monarchy which Christendom had ever scruple to compare that city to the Queen known. In Europe, Spain, the north and of the Adriatic. Such was the activity of the south of Italy, and the Low Countries the manufacturing population in these -that is to say, Holland, Belgium, and towns of Flanders, that, according to six of the finest of the present departments Guicciardini, children of five or six years of the north and north-east of France. In old were profitably employed; and in the Africa, several of the most important posi- rural districts, amidst fields tilled and tions on the northern coast, Oran, Tunis; watered as carefully as the plain of Greand, on the western coast, the Cape Verde nada, the intellectual culture of the peoIslands and the Canaries. In Asia, the ple was so diffused, that, if we may believe Archipelago of the Philippines, and several the same authority, it was rare to meet a of the Spice Islands. In America, the peasant who could not read and write. Archipelago of the West Indies, Mexico, Thus, in the Spanish empire, the arts of Peru, and those unexplored territories war and the arts of peace flourished with which the Romish theocracy had assumed equal splendor; and the same sovereign the right to grant in fee to Spanish ambi- had at his disposal the gold of Mexico tion. Philip was also the husband of the and Peru, the infantry of Spain, the indusQueen of England. The empire of Ger- try of Flanders, the science, the taste, and many, which his father had not succeeded the statecraft of Italy. in transferring with his personal sceptre, devolved on his uncle Ferdinand-an ally so near that he rather resembled a vassal. Save this imperial dignity, Philip succeeded to all the dominions of his father, who had seen, to borrow a fine expression of Montesquieu, "the world expand to enlarge the field of his greatness ;" and it was under his reign that the pride of his subjects first boasted that the sun never set within his territories. For that period of the world, and in comparison with the contemporary wealth of other nations, the internal prosperity of these possessions was not less brilliant. In Spain, an official document, of 1492, sets down the population of the kingdom of Castille alone at 6,750,000-about double the amount estimated by Mr. Hallam to have formed at that time the population of this country. The permanent revenue of the Crown of Castille, which in 1474, at the accession of Isabella, was only 885,000 reals, had risen in 1504 to 26,253,334 reals; and the supplies voted by the Cortes for that year added 16,113,014 reals-in all, 42,396,348 reals, or about £400,000. The discovery of America, and the intercourse between the several portions of the monarchy, had given a rapid impulsion to the commercial activity of Spain; her mercantile marine reckoned, towards the close of the fifteenth century, nearly 1000 vessels. Still greater was the progress and the opulence of the Flemish provinces, These resources lay at his disposal, in Spain at least, without contention and without control. Ferdinand and Isabella, in the first instance-after them Charles V.-had vanquished the adversaries, and crushed the obstacles, which had formerly limited the authority of the Crown. No divisions existed between the kingdoms of Spain. No unbelievers shared the territory with the Christian people. With the exception of Portugal, marriage and conquest had reduced the Peninsula to a single state. Unity had triumphed in the government as well as in the territory. The Mendozas, the Guzmans, the Ponces de Leon-those haughty nobles who could arm, one against the other, a thousand pikemen, ten thousand men-at-arms, and who burned in Seville fifteen hundred houses of their foes-had been subdued by the Crown, and were now arrayed about it for its honor and its service. The Commons of Castille, and that heroic pair who had marched at their headDon Juan de Padilla and Doña Maria Pacheco, his wife-had failed, in 1522, in their struggle for liberty. Neither the feudal nobility nor the municipal bodies of Spain had accurately measured their pretensions by their strength; both these orders had been wanting in political intelligence and in the spirit of organization and of accommodation which can alone insure that success which is not won without difficulty by the best of causes. Neither |