M. de

mous approval, it was now determined by deserts, and striking work there. the Messrs. Robertson that they would add la Condamine saw bull-fights at Cuença, a third volume, and entitle it "Dr. Francia's five days run: ing; and on the fifth day, saw Reign of Terror." They did so, and this his unfortunate too audacious surgeon maslikewise the present reviewer has read. sacred by popular tumult there. He sailed Unluckily the authors had, as it were, the entire length of the Amazons River, in nothing more whatever to say about Dr. Indian canoes; over narrow Pongo rapids, Francia, or next to nothing; and under this over infinite mud-waters, the infinite tancondition, it must be owned they have done gled wilderness, with its reeking desolation. their book with what success was well pos on the right hand of him and on the left; sible. Given a cubic inch of respectable and had mischances, adventures, and took Castile soap, To lather it up in water so as celestial observations all the way, and made to fill one puncheon wine-measure: this is remarks! Apart altogether from his merithe problem; let a man have credit (of its dian degrees, which belong in a very strict kind) for doing his problem! The Messrs. sense to world-history and the advanceRobertson have picked almost every fact of ment of all Adam's sinful posterity, this significance from "Rengger and Long- man and his party saw and suffered many champ," adding some not very significant hundred times as much of mere romance reminiscences of their own; this is the adventure as the Messrs. Robertson did: square inch of soap: you lather it up in Robertsonian loquacity, joviality, Commercial-Inn banter, Leading-Article philosophy, or other aqueous vehicles, till it fills the puncheon, the volume of four hundred pages, and say, "There!" The public, it would seem, did not fling even this in the face of the venders, but bought it as a puncheon filled; and the consequences are already here: Three volumes more on "South America," from the same assiduous Messrs. Robertson! These, also, in his eagerness, this present reviewer has read; and has, alas, to say that they are simply the old volumes in new vocables, under a new figure. Intrinsically all that we did not already know of these three volumes, -there are craftsmen of no great eminence who will undertake to write it in one sheet! Yet there they stand, three solid-looking volumes, a thousand printed pages and upwards; three puncheons more lathered out of the old square inch of Castile soap! It is too bad. A necessitous readywitted Irishman sells you an indifferent gray-horse; steals it over night, paints it black, and sells it you again on the morrow; he is haled before judges, sharply cross-questioned, tried, and almost executed, for such adroitness in horse-flesh; but there is no law yet as to books!

M. de la Condamine, about a century ago, was one of a world-famous company that went into those equinoctial countries, and for the space of nine or ten years did exploits there. From Quito to Cuença, he measured you degrees of the meridian, climbed mountains, took observations, had adventures; wild Creoles opposing Spanish nescience to human science; wild Indians throwing down your whole cargo of instruments occasionally in the heart of remote

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 if 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 or the human mind, propagate themselves in that way; like to cov er the face of the earth, did not man's indig nant providence with reap-hook, with rake, with autumnal steel-and-tinder, intervene.

*Condamine: Relation d'un Voyage dans l'Intérieur de l'Amérique méridionale.

It is frightful to think how every idle vol- totally omit. Francia, the sanguinary ty ume flies abroad like an idle globular down-rant, was not bound to look at the world beard, embryo of new millions; every word through Rengger's eyes, through Parish of it a potential seed of infinite new down- Robertson's eyes, but faithfully through his beards and volumes; for the mind of man own eyes. We are to consider that, in all is feracious, is voracious; germinative, human likelihood, this Dionysius of Paraabove all things, of the downbeard species! guay did mean something; and then to ask Why, the author corps in Great Britain, in quietness, What? The running shriek every soul of them inclined to grow mere once hushed, perhaps many things will dandelions if permitted, is now supposed compose themselves, and straggling frac to be about ten thousand strong; and the tions of information, almost infinitessimally reading corps, who read merely to escape small, may become unexpectedly luminous! 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, (if 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

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 abovementioned. 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 humors, with fits of vehement illnature: 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 addition; 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. The 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, cap, and black college serge gown, a lank was accordingly despatched to the Univer-rawboned creature, stalking with a downsity of Cordova in Tucuman, to pursue his look through the irregular public streets curriculum in that seminary. So far we of Cordova in those years, with an infiniknow, but almost no farther. What kind tude of painful unspeakabilities in the of curriculum it was, what lessons, spiritual interior of him, is an interesting object to spoonmeat, the poor lank sallow boy was the historical mind. So much is unspeakcrammed with, in Cordova High Seminary; able, O Rodriguez; and it is a most strange and how he took to it, and pined or throve on Universe this we are born into; and the it, is entirely uncertain. Lank, sallow boys theorem of Ignatius Loyola and Don Fatin the Tucuman and other high seminaries pauncho Usandwonto seems to me to hobare often dreadfully ill-dealt with, in re-ble somewhat! Much is unspeakable; spect of their spiritual spoonmeat, as times lying within one, like a dark lake of doubt, go! Spoon-poison you might often call it of Acherontic dread, leading down to Chaos rather as if the object were to make them itself. Much is unspeakable, answers Mithridateses, able to live on poison? Francia; but somewhat also is speakable, Which may be a useful art, too, in its this for example: That I will not be a kind? Nay, in fact, if we consider it, these priest in Tucuman in these circumstances; high seminaries and establishments exist that I should like decidedly to be a secular there, in Tucuman and elsewhere, not for person rather, were it even a lawyer that lank, sallow boy's special purposes, rather! Francia, arrived at man's years, but for their own wise purposes; they were changes from Divinity to Law. Some say made and put together, a long while since, it was in Divinity that he graduated, and without taking the smallest counsel of the got his Doctor's hat; Rengger says, Disallow boy! Frequently they seem to say vinity; the Robertsons, likelier to be incorto him, all along: "This precious thing rect, call him Doctor of Laws. To our that lies in thee, O sallow boy, of 'genius,' present readers it is all one, or nearly so. so called, it may to thee and to eternal Na- Rodriguez quitted the Tucuman Alma ture, be precious; but to us and to tempo- Mater, with some beard on his chin, and rary Tucuman, it is not precious, but per-reappeared in Assumpcion to look out for nicious, deadly: we require thee to quit practice at the bar.

this, or expect penalties!" And yet the What Rodriguez had contrived to learn, poor boy, how can he quit it; eternal Na-or grow to, under this his Alma Mater in ture herself, from the depths of the Uni- Cordova, when he quitted her? The answer verse, ordering him to go on with it? is a mere guess; his curriculum, we again From the depths of the Universe, and of say, is not yet known. Some faint smathis own Soul, latest revelation of the Unitering of Arithmetic, or the everlasting verse, he is, in a silent, imperceptible, but laws of Numbers; faint smattering of irrefragable manner, directed to go on with Geometry, everlasting laws of Shapes; 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 Rodriguez 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 law suit: 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!

these things, we guess, not altogether in the dark, Rodriguez did learn, and found extremely remarkable. Curious enough: That round Globe put into that round Drum, to touch it at the ends and all round, it is precisely as if you clapt 2 into the inside of 3, not a jot more, not a jot less: wonder at it, O Francia; for in fact it is a thing to make one pause! Old Greek Archimedeses, Pythagorases, dusky Indians, old nearly as the hills, detected such things; and they have got across into Paraguay, into this brain of thine, thou happy Francia. How is it, too, that the Almighty Maker's Planets run, in those heavenly spaces, in paths which are conceivable in thy poor human head as Sections of a Cone? The thing thou conceivest as an Ellipsis, the Be this as it may, the lean Francia pro- Almighty Maker has set his Planets to roll secutes his studies at Cordova, waxes grad-in that. Clear proof, which neither Loyola ually taller towards new destinies. Rodri- nor Usandwonto can contravene, that Thou guez Francia, in some kind of Jesuit scull-too art denizen of this universe; that Thou

too, in some inconceivable manner, wert | Robertsonian "Reign of Terror" itself is present at the Council of the Gods!-Faint willing to admit, nay, repeatedly asserts, smatterings of such things Francia did and impresses on us. He was so just and learn in Tucuman. Endless heavy fod- true, while a young man ; gave such divine derings of Jesuit theology, poured on him prognostics of a life of nobleness; and and round him by the wagon-load, inces- then, in his riper years, so belied all that! santly, and year after year, he did not learn; Shameful to think of: he bade fair, at one but left lying there as shot rubbish. On time, to be a friend-of-humanity of the the other hand, some slight inkling of first water; and then gradually, hardened human grammatical vocables, especially of by political success, and love of power, he French vocables, seems probable. French became a mere ravenous goul, or solitary vocables; bodily garment of the "Ency-thief in the night; stealing the constituclopédie" and Gospel, according to Volney, tional palladiums, from their parliamentJean-Jacques and Company; of infinite im- houses-and executed upwards of forty port to Francia! persons! Sad to consider what men and Nay, is it not in some sort beautiful to friends-of-humanity will turn to! see the sacred flame of ingenuous human For the rest, it is not given to this or as curiosity, love of knowledge, awakened, yet to any editor, till a Biography arrive amid the damp somnolent vapors, real and from Paraguay, to shape out with the metaphorical, the damp tropical poison- smallest clearness, a representation of jungles, and fat Lethean stupefactions and Francia's existence as an Assumpcion adentanglements, even in the heart of a poor vocate; the scene is so distant, the conParaguay Creole? Sacred flame, no bigger, ditions of it so unknown. Assumpcion yet than that of a farthing rushlight, and city, near three hundred years old now, with nothing but secondhand French class- lies in free-and-easy fashion, on the left books in science, and in politics and morals bank of the Parana River; embosomed nothing but the Raynals and Rousseaus, to among fruit-forests, rich tropical umbrage; feed it-an ill-fed, lank-quavering, most thick wood round it everywhere-which blue-colored, almost ghastly-looking flame; serves for defence too against the Indians. but a needful one, a kind of sacred one Approach by which of the various roads even that! Thou shalt love knowledge, you will, it is through miles of solitary search what is the truth of this God's shady avenue, shutting out the sun's glare; Universe; thou art privileged and bound overcanopying, as with grateful green awnto love it, to search for it, in Jesuit Tucu-ing, the loose sand-highway,—where, in man, in all places that the sky covers; and shalt try even Volneys for help, if there be no other help! This poor blue-colored inextinguishable flame in the soul of Rodriguez Francia, there as it burns better or worse, in many figures, through the whole life of him, is very notable to me. Blue flame though it be, it has to burn up considerable quantities of poisonous lumber The people of that profuse climate live from the general face of Paraguay; and in a careless abundance, troubling themsinge the profound impenetrable forest-selves about few things; build what wooden jungle, spite of all its brambles and lianas, carts, hide-beds, mud-brick houses are ininto a very black condition,-intimating dispensable; import what of ornamental that there shall be decease and removal on the part of said forest-jungle; peremptory removal; that the blessed Sunlight shall again look in upon his cousin Earth, tyrannously hidden from him, for so many centuries now! Courage, Rodriguez!

Rodriguez, indifferent to such remote considerations, successfully addicts him self to law-pleadings, and general private studies, in the city of Assumpcion. We have always understood he was one of the best advocates, perhaps the very best, and what is still more, the justest that ever took briefs in that country. This the

the early part of this century (date undiscoverable in those intricate volumes), Mr. Parish Robertson, advancing on horseback, met one cart driven by a smart brown girl, in red bodice, with long black hair, not unattractive to look upon; and for a space of twelve miles, no other articulate-speaking thing whatever.*

lies handiest abroad; exchanging for it Paraguay tea in sewed goatskins Riding through the town of Santa Fé, with Parish Robertson, at three in the afternoon, you will find the entire population just arisen from its siesta; slipshod, half-buttoned; sitting in its front verandahs open to the street, eating pumpkins with voracity,sunk to the ears in pumpkins; imbibing the grateful saccharine juices, in a free and easy way. They look up at the sound of your hoofs, not without good humor. Frondent trees parasol the streets,-thanks to * Letters on Paraguay.

Nature and the Virgin. You will be wel- the cow; making of it most things wantcome at their tertulias,-a kind of "swar-ed, lasso, bolas, ship-cordage, rimmings of rie," as the flunkey says, "consisting of cart-wheels, spatterdashes, beds, and houseflirtation and the usual trimmings: swarrie doors. In country places they sit on the on the table about seven o'clock." Before skull of the cow: General Artigas was this, the whole population, it is like, has seen, and spoken with, by one of the Robgone to bathe promiscuously, and cool and ertsons, sitting among field-officers, all on purify itself in the Parana: promiscuously, cow-skulls, toasting stripes of beef, and but you have all got linen bathing-garments," dictating to three secretaries at once.' and can swash about with some decency; They sit on the skull of the cow in country a great relief to the human tabernacle in places; nay, they heat themselves, and even those climates. At your tertulia, it is said, burn lime, by igniting the carcass of the the Andalusian eyes, still bright to this cow. tenth or twelfth generation, are distractive, One art they seem to have perfected, seductive enough, and argue a soul that and one only-that of riding. Astley's would repay cultivating. The beautiful and Ducrow's must hide their head, all half-savages; full of wild sheet-lightning, glories of Newmarket and Epsom dwindle which might be made continuously lumin- to extinction, in comparison of Guacho ous! Tertulia well over, you sleep on hide- horsemanship. Certainly if ever Centaurs stretchers, perhaps here and there on a civilized mattress, within doors or on the housetops.

lived upon the earth, these are of them. They stick on their horses as if both were one flesh; galloping where there seems In the damp, flat country parts, where the hardly path for an ibex; leaping like kanmosquitoes abound, you sleep on high garoos, and flourishing their nooses and stages, mounted on four poles, forty feet bolases the while. They can whirl themabove the ground, attained by ladders; so selves round under the belly of the horse, high, blessed be the Virgin, no mosquito in cases of war-stratagem, and stick fast, can follow to sting,-it is a blessing of the hanging on by the mere great toe and heel. Virgin or some other. You sleep there, in You think it is a drove of wild horses galan indiscriminate arrangement, each in his loping up on a sudden, with wild scream, several poncho or blanket-cloak; with some it becomes a troop of Centaurs with pikes saddle, deal-box, wooden log, or the like, in their hands. Nay, they have the skill, under your head. For bed-tester is the which most of all transcends Newmarket, canopy of everlasting blue; for night-lamp, of riding on horses that are not fed; and burns Canopus in his infinite spaces; mos- can bring fresh speed and alacrity out of a quitoes cannot reach you, if it please the horse which, with you, was on the point of Powers. And rosy-fingered Morn, suffus- lying down. To ride on three horses with ing the east with sudden red and gold, and Ducrow they would esteem a small feat: other flame-heraldry of swift-advancing to ride on the broken-winded fractional Day, attenuates all dreams; and the sun's part of one horse, that is the feat! Their first level light-volley sheers away sleep huts abound in beef, in reek also, and rubfrom living creatures everywhere; and bish; excelling in dirt most places that living men do then awaken on their four-human nature has anywhere inhabited. post stage there, in the Pampas,-and Poor Guachos! They drink Paraguay tea, might begin with prayer if they liked, one fancies! There is an altar decked on the horizon's edge yonder, is there not; and a cathedral wide enough ?-How, over night, you have defended yourself against vampires, is unknown to this editor.

sucking it up in succession, through the same tin pipe, from one common skillet. They are hospitable, sooty, leathery, lying, laughing fellows; of excellent talent in their sphere. They have stoicism, though ignorant of Zeno; nay, stoicism coupled The Guacho population, it must be with real gaiety of heart. Amidst their owned, is not yet fit for constitutional reek and wreck, they laugh loud, in rough liberty. They are a rude people; lead a jolly banter; they twang, in a plaintive drowsy life, of ease and sluttish abundance, manner, rough love-melodies on a kind of -one shade, and but one, above a dog's guitar; smoke infinite tobacco; and delife, which is defined as "ease and scar-light in gambling and ardent spirits, ordicity." The arts are in their infancy; and nary refuge of voracious empty souls. For not less the virtues. For equipment, cloth- the same reason, and a better, they delight ing, bedding, household furniture, and gen- also in Corpus-Christi ceremonies, masseral outfit of every kind, those simple populations depend much on the skin of

* Letters on Paraguay.