ENGLAND,

THE REFUGE OF THE OPPRESSED.

England, like Venice of Old, the refuge of the persecutedEmigration of the Lombards, and the French HugonotsPopularity of Foreign Exiles in England-Mina-Riego's Widow-Arguelles-Franco of Valencia; his Love of Country-Count Santorre di Santa Rosa.

"Whether this portion of the world were rent
By the rude ocean from the continent,
Or thus created-it was sure design'd'
To be the sacred refuge of mankind."

Waller.

IN London, as well as in almost all the country towns, there is a society which has for its object to provide a lodging for the

houseless. Where is the wonder, then, if England is herself the asylum of all the unfortunate? Venice, in her days of glory, was the sanctuary of all the oppressed, whether by kings, by princes, by republics, by popes, or by antipopes. England, which, in the importance of its commerce, and its dominion over the sea, is the Venice of our times, displays the same universal hospitality. Either from justice or from policy, or from a sentiment of generosity and a feeling of her power, she collects under her vast ægis all the conquered and the wrecked whoever they may be. There is scarcely a single nation in Europe which is not her debtor for protection afforded, at one time or another, to a number of its people. When commerce decayed in Italy, and the usurping princes persecuted the wealthy merchants, many of these sought refuge in

England; and a street still remains called "Lombard-street," because they took up their residence on that spot. After the revocation of the edict of Nantes (more fatal to France than the battle of Blenheim), thousands of French Hugonots took refuge in England, and carried thither, among many kinds of manufacture not known before, that of silk stuffs. He who does not disdain to study the history of human vicissitude in the dwellings of filth and poverty, should go to Spitalfields, where he will still find many French names among the weavers, and a street still called after the fleur-de-lys (flowers but too thorny for these poor emigrants). In the more recent political storms of France, England afforded shelter to almost all the French nobility and princes; and a few years after to the constitutionalists, the

republicans, and the adherents of Napoleon, in their turn exposed to persecution. And let it be observed, that an asylum like this, which is granted not by favour or caprice, but by a perpetual law of free states, to all the oppressed, is another beneficent gift of liberty, which, as the common mother of mankind, wipes, with an impartial hand, the tears from the eyes of all her children, and thus assuages the ferocity of man, which would becoine still more cruel by desperation. Among the Italian republics of the middle ages hospitality was so common a virtue as to draw from Machiavel the maxim, "Where banishments deprive the cities of men of wealth and industry, one state grows great by becoming the asylum of the banished."

In 1823, London was peopled with exiles of every kind and every country; constitu