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will attain to complete fruition of man's beautiful heritage, the earth." 1

Lastly, we have the Llanos of the Orinoco, huge intertropical steppes, with a mean annual temperature of 84° Fahrenheit, likewise of inferior importance, although their terrible horsemen have made themselves very famous in the wars which have been waged on their northern border.

The last physical feature of South America to which I wish you to attend is its marvellous network of water communication. First, flowing into the Caribbean Sea, we have the river of the United States of Colombia, the Magdalena, a stream between 600 and 700 miles in length,-small indeed for South America, but which would be counted of the first magnitude in Europe. By it one can ascend for some hundred miles to Honda, which is not very far from the capital, Bogotá. A short land journey takes one from Bogotá to a navigable stream which falls into the mighty Orinoco, the Rio Raleana, as it was called by the companions of the prince of English adventurers, Sir Walter Raleigh. From the basin of the Orinoco, the wonderful natural canal of the Cassiquiare leads us straight into the Rio Negro, and so to the incomparable Amazons, the grandest of all earth's waters, one of the subordinate affluents of which is said to be navigable by vessels of 300 tons from the sea to within 150 miles of Quito, the capital of Ecuador, while vessels of 1000 tons can ascend the main stream as far as Nauta. The southern tributaries of the Amazons again take one into the very centre of the continent, so that a trifling expenditure of labour would enable a traveller to go from Pará to Buenos Ayres by river with only one trans-shipment.

With these preliminary remarks, I pass to the more immediate subject of this evening's lecture.

Putting aside the few colonies belonging to European Powers in South America, that continent is politically divided

1 The Naturalist on the River Amazons. By Henry Walter Bates. London: Murray, 1864.

into ten very unequal parts, namely:—the United States of Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, the Argentine Confederation, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador.

UNITED STATES OF COLOMBIA.- Commencing our journey at the isthmus, we find ourselves in the territory of the United States of Colombia, which fills up the whole of the north-west angle of South America. It is a wide region, extending over something like 480,000 square miles; that is to say, more than fifteen times the size of Scotland, and comprehends every variety of climate-from mountains covered with eternal snow, through great ranges of temperate upland and delicious cool valleys, down to the torrid and most dangerous region along the coast. Few parts of South America have, so far as I know, been so little described by recent European writers. Indeed, the only very recent description of the country at large, on which I have been able to lay my hands, is a pamphlet by Mr. Powles,1 published two or three years ago for the use of certain English speculators, who had become deeply interested in the agricultural capabilities of Colombia by having large tracts of land assigned to them. In Spanish times it was visited by Humboldt, who, however, spent most of his time in Venezuela; and in the middle distance we have the two volumes of Colonel Hamilton, who was sent on a diplomatic mission to Bogotá by Mr. Canning, and whose account of the ascent of the Magdalena, before the steamboat period, is very interesting. The State of Panamá is traversed, of course, every year by numbers of Englishmen, but the rest of the country seems to have few attractions for them, though the great Falls of Tequendama must certainly be among the most extraordinary natural objects in the world.

All you need care to know of the political history of Colombia is, however, soon told. In the old days, when the 1 New Granada and its Internal Resources. By J. D. Powles. London: Baily, 1863.

M

Castilian was still in the land, it formed part of the provinces of the Terra Firma, which comprehended the captaincy-general of Quito, the captaincy-general of Caracas, and the viceroyalty of the New Granada. In 1810, as we shall presently see, a revolution broke out at Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, a few weeks before a similar outbreak at Buenos Ayres set the whole of the rest of the continent in a blaze. The war which ensued raged for fourteen years. When the storm had rolled away-and a fearful storm of smoke and blood it was-the three old provinces of the Terra Firma were united for a few disturbed and anxious years under the remarkable man who had earned, with great justice, the title of their Liberator. In those days his name was a household word in England; but we live so quickly, and forget so soon, that it well may be that many here present do not know to whom I am alluding.

Simon Bolivar was born in 1783 at Caracas, and came of a good Venezuelan family. He was educated partly at Madrid, and married a Spanish lady of rank, who, however, died early. When the Venezuelan Revolution first broke out on MaundyThursday of 1810, Bolivar was sent as an envoy to London, where he received but little encouragement. Returning from Europe, he was made governor of the strong town of Puerto Cabello, and from that time forward he was the most prominent figure in the terrible and ferocious wars which ended in the downfall of Spanish power in South America. The chief theatre of his activity was his native Venezuela; but he triumphed not less in New Granada, in Peru, and in Bolivia, was hailed as the Liberator, and was under various titles Dictator of large parts of the revolted colonies of Spain. Constantly harassed by faction, sometimes in great danger of assassination, one day the idol and the next the abomination of the multitude, he ended in deep dejection a chequered and far from blameless career at Carthagena in 1831.

Thus far Dryasdust and our ordinary biographical diction

aries; now you shall listen to Mr. Carlyle, who, in his very characteristic essay on Francia, writes as follows:

"And Bolivar, 'the Washington of Columbia,' Liberator Bolivar, he too is gone without his fame. Melancholy lithographs represent to us a long-faced square-browed man: of stern, considerate, consciously considerate aspect, mildly aquiline form of nose, with terrible angularity of jaw, and dark deep eyes, somewhat too close together (for which latter circumstance we earnestly hope the lithograph alone is to blame); this is Liberator Bolivar, a man of much hard fighting, hard riding, of manifold achievements, distresses, heroisms and histrionisms in this world; a many-counselled, much-enduring man, now dead and gone; of whom, except that melancholy lithograph, the cultivated European public knows as good as nothing. Yet did he not fly hither and thither, often in the most desperate manner, with wild cavalry clad in blankets, with War of Liberation to the 'death?' Clad in blankets, ponchos the South Americans call them; it is a square blanket, with a short slit in the centre which you draw over your head, and so leave hanging; many a liberative cavalier has ridden in those hot climates without further dress at all, and fought handsomely too, wrapping the blanket round his arm when it came to the charge.

"With such cavalry, and artillery and infantry to match, Bolivar has ridden, fighting all the way, through torrid deserts, hot mud-swamps, through ice-chasms beyond the curve of perpetual frost-more miles than Ulysses ever sailed; let the coming Homers take note of it. He has marched over the Andes more than once, a feat analogous to Hannibal's, and seemed to think little of it. Often beaten, banished from the firm land, he always returned again, truculently fought again. He gained in the Cumana regions 'the immortal victory' of Carabobo and several others; under him was gained the finishing 'immortal victory' of Ayacucho in Peru, where old Spain, for the last time, burnt powder in those latitudes and then fled

without return. He was Dictator, Liberator, almost Emperor if he had lived. Some three times over did he in solemn Columbian parliament lay down his dictatorship with Washington eloquence, and as often, on pressing request, take it up again, being a man indispensable. Thrice, or at least twice, did he, in different places, painfully construct a Free Constitution consisting of two chambers, and a supreme governor for life, with liberty to name his successor,—the reasonablest democratic constitution you could well construct; and twice, or at least once, did the people, on trial, declare it disagreeable. He was, of old, well known in Paris, in the dissolute, the philosophicopolitical, and other circles there. He has shone in many a gay Parisian soirée this Simon Bolivar; and in his later years, in autumn 1825, he rode triumphant into Potosi and the fabulous Inca cities, with clouds of feathered Indians somersaulting and war-whooping around him, and ‘as the famed Cerro, metalliferous mountain came in sight, the bells all pealed out, and there was a thunder of artillery,' says General Miller! If this is not a Ulysses, Polytlas, and Polymetis, a much-enduring and many-counselled man, where was there one? truly a Ulysses whose history were worth its ink, had the Homer that could do it made his appearance

All that has occurred since his death has shown that Bolivar was too sanguine, that his countrymen were not ripe for a free government, and that the difference between the countrymen of Washington and them was as great as the difference between Washington and himself.

Bolivar's republic of "Colombia," for so all this' vast country was called when those of us who are now in middle life were learning geography, held together till 1830. Then, however, the centrifugal forces obtained the ascendant, and after a period of struggle, the three old divisions of the Spanish provinces already mentioned, the two captaincies-general, and the viceroyalty, set up each for itself, under the names of 1 Miscellaneous Essays, vol. iv. London, 1865,

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