the glorious King Alonzo Henriquez, the founder of the monarchy; and that it should be so ordained, that the throne may never again be inherited by any foreign king or prince whatsoever; so that the sovereign who is to be such over this kingdom of Portugal, be a natural and legitimate Portuguese born in the kingdom, and held bound to abide and dwell personally therein," &c. &c. The petition of the Nobility prayed, that " a law be passed, ordaining that the succession of this kingdom shall not at any time come to a foreign prince, nor to his children, notwithstanding they may be next of kin to the last King in possession. Further, that when it happens that the sovereign of these realms succeeds to any larger kingdom or lordship, he shall always be bound to reside in this; and having two or more male children, that the eldest shall succeed to the foreign kingdom, and the second to this one of Portugal." The third estate, the Clergy, adopted the same sentiments, declaring that" experience having shewn the injuries which result to kingdoms from princes, who are not natural born, succeeding thereto, they submitted to the King the expediency and fitness of putting an end to those grievances," &c. &c. The King, John the Fourth, immediately acquiesced in those petitions; his answers confirming their requests were embodied into letters patent, and the law of the Cortes of Lamego, thus reinforced, became once more the law of the land, by decree of the 12th of September 1642, signed by the King. The state of the question having been thus given from acknowledged documents, the conclusion is inevitable, that whoever may have the right to the Portuguese throne, Dom Pedro and his descendants have none. His right is nullified by the ancient laws, by his own direct acts, and by the national opinion. If he cannot govern Portugal in his own person, he cannot govern it by a delegated authority, let the name be Donna Maria, Count Palmela, or what it will. At this moment there is not the slightest evidence that he has any valid portion of the national will on his side. He has been a twelvemonth in Europe, and not a single province of Portugal has declared in his favour; he has been nearly three months in Portugal, and notwithstanding proclamations, and the lavish distribution of money, no portion of the people have joined him; no man of rank has come over to his side; he has seized on a single strong position, and in that he is besieged. In that position, too, he is sustained altogether by foreign succours, for if he were left to his Portuguese resources, he must surrender within a week. His provisions, his ammunition, his arms, his troops, come from foreign countries. His recruits Poles, Swiss, French, English-every thing but Portuguese; while his adversary is surrounded by all the influential classes, traverses the provinces with a couple of grooms, is every where received with triumphal arches, feasts, and congratulations; and fights his competitor's foreign brigades, at the head of a native militia. This settles the question of public opinion; and if Dom Pedro is to be made Regent of Portugal, it must be by the bayonet. The personal merits of the competitors can be a matter of but little import to us. They are, probably, nearly on a par for good and evil. The brothers are both brave, and possibly both disposed to use their authority as men born under arbitrary governments are in the habit of doing. Dom Pedro has been already expelled from a throne for alleged unconstitutional and arbitrary conduct. Dom Miguel has, at least, the advantage of him in this point, for he has not been so expelled; and the nation even plunge into foreign war to keep him on the throne. He has been called a tyrant; but it is clear that he has not yet earned the odium of his country. That there may be men in Portugal who love the charter, and hate the King,—that there may be real lovers of liberty, who prefer the constitution of Dom Pedro to the ancient forms of government,-that there are many Voltairists, French agents, avowed atheists, and conscious Jacobins, who would prefer any change that gave them a chance of general rapine or revenge, that Dom Miguel may have imprisoned open repugnants to his authority, or hanged soldiers mutinying under arms, may all be true; but as neither the attachment of the one to the charter, nor the corruptions of the other, can prove that the rule of Dom Pedro is the national wish, so neither the imprisonment, nor even the death, of the individuals in question, can stigmatize the government with the name of tyranny. Unquestionably his reign has not exhibited any of those sweeping executions, that love for indiscriminate vengeance, that passion for a fierce and bloody exercise of power, which deserves the name of tyranny. There has been no one instance of the death of a man of rank or fortune on the scaffold,—there has been no death, even of the lowest order, so far as we have heard, without a trial, there has been no arbitrary confiscation, certainly there has been no systematic public plunder, viclence, or vindictiveness. And yet the throne has been perpetually in a situation which might have offered strong temptations to severity. Surrounded with incentives to the most violent exercise of power; party, whether right or wrong, busy, for the last four years, against the possessor of the throne; conspiracy incessantly sowed in the provinces; correspondence with foreign and hostile courts sedulously sustained; a rival sovereign going the rounds of Europe, and canvassing commiseration from every people; Dom Pedro holding an integral portion of the realm in actual possession, and fit ting out from it an expedition against the royal authority; attempts of all kinds made to rouse the populace to revolt, to corrupt the army, to shake the credit of the throne with foreign powers, and, finally, to drive its possessor to the last extremities of personal disgrace and ruin;-if personal vengeance could be justified, it might seek its justification in circumstances like these. Yet this vengeance has never been detected. We in vain at this moment ask if there is on record a single authentic charge of cruelty against the possessor of the Portuguese throne. The English newspapers, undoubtedly, have decided otherwise. There is not a Radical journal, from the Land's End to the Orkneys, that has not sat in judgment on him, and summarily pronounced him to be a monster. The Radical orators in the House, the echoes of the Radical journals, and who dare not be any thing else, have followed this high authority, and blackened him with the most sulky physiognomy of despotism. But if we demand the facts for our own guidance, we still are answered by mere declamation. The charge against Dom Miguel of having violated his oath, a charge which has earned for him the angry animadversions of the successive Foreign Secretaries, Lords Aberdeen and Palmerston, is of a more serious quality. Our business is not to vindicate him; but let us know the exact state of the case, before we fasten upon a prince the charge of perjury more than upon any other man. The only known and formal declaration on the point is his oath to the charter taken at Vienna. That oath was, unquestionably, taken under circumstances in which no oath should be demanded of any individual. The Prince was not a free agent-he was under duresse. He had been sent a prisoner to Vienna-he had been kept there in surveillance for three years and a half-he might have been kept there during his life, if it had answered the policy of Austria. At the end of the three years and a half an oath was tendered to him, notoriously opposed to all his opinions. Who can tell but the refusal of that oath would have been the sentence of his exile or imprisonment? Who is there now to tell us the distinct features which might have made an oath of that nature no more valid than an oath extorted by the pistol of a highwayman? All is cloudy still. On this point we have no materials for decision. Common justice must wait for clearer information than any that has reached the world. Dom Miguel's presumed pledges to our King and his Ministers, have not yet been presented to the public knowledge with even the feeble and imperfect formality of the Vienna oath. Whether they were delivered as promise, opinion, or conjecture; whether they were solemnly given, or simply expressed in the laxity of conversation, or extorted in the shape of hopes or fears, remains to be told. This only is certain, that at the time of Dom Miguel's brief sojourn in this country, the late King was unfortunately in a state of health which nearly precluded all public business; and of the Foreign Secretary it is enough to say, that he was Lord Dudley, a nobleman whose condition of mind then was nearly as eccentric as it is now. With a Sovereign racked by pain, and a minister proverbial for the ramblings of his mind, we must require more evidence than has hitherto transpired, to decide that any pledge was given which could convict the giver of a deliberate intention to deceive. But let us suppose that he did intend to deceive-that he was dipped in the deepest stain of tergiversation -what is that to the English people? Where have we acquired the right of bringing foreign princes into judgment, let their veracity be what it may? The point is altogether personal. It involves no breach of national treaty, it has perfected no national offence. It may be a matter for the Portuguese nation to consider. But it is evident that they have not considered it to be worth their attention; and what right have we to declare to Portugal that she shall not have a King according to her own choice, because he broke his oath to his Austrian jailer, or beguiled the wandering intellects of an English Secretary? To put the extreme caseif Dom Miguel were personally guilty of every crime that could degrade the human character, we might scorn and hate the individual, we might pronounce him unfit to sit upon a throne, if we will, but the arbitration does not rest with us. The Portuguese nation, fully acquainted with the man and the character, have chosen him for their monarch. And which among our most red-hot settlers of nations, will venture to say that they must wait for the approbation of England on the matter? if they have chosen ill, the ill be on them. But the choice can be no more an affair of ours than the calamity. The Portuguese have shewn that their choice was spontaneous; they have since shewn that they adhere to their choice; they y are at this hour holding out defiance to the two most powerful nations of Europe, England and France, in assertion of their choice and in the name of common sense, ise, what right have say that they shall not have the King Whom they have chosen? In these remarks we justice, freedom to s * have no idea of charging the English councils with any factious and intermeddling ambition. They may have been involved in the dispute by the original weakness of Mr Canning's intervention-policy, and by the new system of flattering the French government. We speak of the whole transaction, not in the spirit of party, but in the common sense of everyday life. With the Portuguese choice of the sitter on the throne, England has unquestionably no right whatever to interfere. ད་་་་ But in one point we must beware lest we are, however unconsciously, drawing a degree of guilt upon ourselves; and that point is, the present practice of raising soldiers for the Portuguese contest. No man has a right to shed the blood of man but in self-defence, or for the protection of the weak, and this latter only in extreme cases. The soldier fighting. for his country, fights virtually in self-defence. But who can place the recruits that are going off daily to fight in Portugal, in the list of selfdefenders? We are not at war with Portugal as a nation, yet do we not sanction, by this winking at the act, the crime of men going to shoot Portuguese for their pay? The same rule which now leads the British recruit to fight in Portugal, would sanction murder on the high-road. The highwayman shoots men for what he can get by it. What personal feeling can the British half-pay officer, or the common soldier, have in the quarrel between two Portuguese princes? His feeling is, notoriously and simply, a desire to be employed, to get pay and promotion, and for that purpose he sheds the blood of Portuguese officers and soldiers; strangers, whom he would never meet but for thus seeking their blood; and with whom he has no m more national or personal quarrel than with the man in the moon. Beyond all doubt, this act of utterly unprovoked and unnecessary aggression in the individual, is murdermurder in the eyes of God and man. In this statement, we advocate the cause, no more of Dom Miguel than of Dom Pedro. Embarking in the service of either, the British officer would be equally criminal. Our government may not be able to prevent the entering of private and mi 1 litary persons into the quarrels of order to quiet the public tumults, and foreign countries. But over its half- preserve any shew of dependence on pay list it has a hold; and if it shall Dom Pedro. But with this nominal suffer a single individual to raise Sovereign the Portuguese nation nien in this country for either of the were not content. They considered parties, it, beyond all controversy, a regency to be an acknowledgment puts itself into a position of bellige of dependence on a power which rency. On this head we shall re- had constituted itself altogether a joice to see our policy retracted. If separate and foreign state. With a the Portuguese princes will continue perfectly justifiable national feeling, to present to Europe a spectacle un- they refused to suffer the colony to precedented among all the frightful, become the disposer of the parent disgusting, and guilty spectacles of state; and they, in 1828, proclaimed later times, two brothers seeking Dom Miguel king, for the mere obeach other's blood; let the British ject of national independence, and in take the only part suitable to a wise undoubted consistency with the spirit and moral people; let the British na- of their whole code of laws referring tion distinctly refuse to be an ac- to the throne. Dom Pedro now, complice in this hideous exhibition; . for the purpose of shaking Dom Mior, if we must exert our power, let guel's succession, transferred to his us exert it to conciliate and appease, daughter, Donna Maria, a right which and put forth our intervention to stop existed no longer, he having already a contest which outrages every pub- alienated it from himself, and set h lic interest, every principle of huma- up as a rival to to the prince of the nanity, and every command of religion. tional onal choice. The Portuguese na The exact state of the question is this. Before the death of the late King John the Sixth, Dom Pedro had, by an act of direct revolt, declared Brazil independent of Portugal, and himself Emperor. On the death of the late King, in 1826, the Portuguese, nation, notwithstanding the revolt, offered their crown to Dom Pedro, on condition of his returning to Portugal, which, by the ancient laws, was essential to his possession of the throne. The throne then, by those laws, came to the second son of the late King, but that son was a prisoner in Austria. A regency was appointed in this emergency, by the influence of Dom Pedro, at the head of which was his sister, the Infanta, which regency was suffered only in consequence of the annexed condition, that on the second son's arriving at the age of twenty-five that son should assume the regency; a provision which notoriously pointed out Dom Miguel, he being twentythree at the time, but incapable of the throne by reason of his being in captivity, But even with this proviso the national discontent grew so vi violent, that it produced the insurrection and invasion, which were put down only by the British troops sent out by Mr Canning, on the pretext that, as coming from Spain, they constituted a Spanish invasion. It was thus found necessary to release Dom Miguel, and appoint him Regent in THE spirit had indeed fled-the ethereal essence had departed—and the poor wasted and blood-stained husk which lay before us, could no longer be moved by our sorrows, or gratified by our sympathy. Yet I stood riveted to the spot, until I was aroused by the deep-toned voice of Padre Carera, who, lifting up his hands towards heaven, addressed the Almighty in extempore prayer, beseeching his mercy to our erring sister who had just departed. The unusualness of this startled me."As the tree falls, so must it lie," had been the creed of my forefathers, and was mine; but now for the first time I heard a clergyman wrestling in mental agony, and interceding with the God who hath said, "Repent before the night cometh in which no man can work," for a sinful creature, whose worn-out frame was now as a clod of the valley. But I had little time for consideration, as presently all the negro servants of the establishment set up a loud howl, as if they had lost their nearest and dearest. "Oh, our poor dear young mistress is dead! She has gone to the bosom of the Virgin!-She is gone to be happy!" "Then why the deuce make such a yelling?” quoth Bang in the other room, when this had been translated to him. Glad to leave the chamber of death, I entered the large hall, where I had left our friend. The Tempest. "Now do pray, Mr Bang," said I, when Don Ricardo broke in"Why, Mr Bang, I am, as you now know, a Scotchman." "How do I know any such thing that is, for a certainty-while you keep cruising amongst so many lingoes, as Tom there says?" "The docken, man," said I.-Don Ricardo smiled. "I am a Scotchman, my dear sir; and the same person who in his youth was neither more nor less than wee Richy Cloche, in the long town of Kirkaldy, is in his old age Don Ricardo Campana of St Jago de Cuba. But more of this anon,-at present we are in the house of mourning, and alas the day! that it should be so." By this time the storm had increased most fearfully, and as Don Ricardo, Aaron, and myself, sat in the dark damp corner of the large gloomy hall, we could scarcely see each other, for the lightning had now ceased, and the darkness was so thick, that had it not been for the light from the large funeral wax tapers, which had been instantly lit upon poor Maria's death, in the room where she lay, that streamed through the open door, we should have been unable to see our very fingers before us. "What is that ?" said Campana ; "heard you nothing, gentlemen?" In the lulls of the rain and the blast, the same long low cry was |