"One half the gods dispersed in empty air."
Poland was not to be liberated; the crisis was superb, but the weapon was
not equal to the blow. It was the first instance in which the French
Emperor was found inferior to his fortune. With incomparable force of
intellect, Napoleon wanted grandeur of mind. It has become the custom of
later years to deny him even superiority of intellect; but the man who, in
a contest open to all, goes before all--who converts a republic, with all
its ardour, haughtiness, and passion, into a monarchy at once as rigid and
as magnificent as an Oriental despotism--who, in a country of warriors,
makes himself the leading warrior--who, among the circle within circle of
the subtlest political intrigues, baffles all intrigues, converts them
into the material of his own ascendency, and makes the subtlest and the
boldest spirits his instruments and slaves--has given sufficient evidence
of the superiority of his talents. The conqueror who beat down in
succession all the great military names of Europe, must have been a
soldier; the negotiator who vanquished all existing diplomacy, and the
statesman who remodelled the laws, curbed the fiery temper, and reduced to
discipline the fierce insubordination of a people, whose first victory had
crushed the state, and heaped the ruins of the throne on the sepulchre of
their king--must have been a negotiator and a statesman of the first rank.
Or, if those were not the achievements of intellect, by what were they
done? If they were done without it, of what value is intellect? Napoleon
had then only found the still superior secret of success; and we deny his
intellect, simply to give him attributes higher than belong to human
nature.--No man before him dreamed of such success, no man in his day
rivalled it, no man since his day has attempted its renewal. "But he was
fortunate!" What can be more childish than to attempt the solution of the
problem by fortune? Fortune is a phantom. Circumstances may arise beyond
the conception of man; but where the feebler mind yields to
circumstances, the stronger one shapes, controls, and guides them.
This man was sent for a great purpose of justice, and he was gifted with
the faculties for its execution. An act of imperial guilt had been
committed, of which Europe was to be purged by penalty alone. The fall of
Poland was to be made a moral to the governments of the earth; and
Napoleon was to be the fiery brand that was to imprint the sentence upon
the foreheads of the great criminals. It is in contemplations like these,
that the Spirit of history ministers to the wisdom of mankind. Whatever
may be the retribution for individuals beyond the grave, justice on
nations must be done in this world; and _here_ it will be done.
The partition of Poland was the most comprehensive and audacious crime of
the modern world. It was a deliberate insult, at once to the laws of
nations and to the majesty of the great Disposer of nations. And never
fell vengeance more immediate, more distinct, or more characteristic. The
capital of Austria twice entered over the bodies of its gallant soldiery;
Russia ravaged and Moscow burnt; the Prussian army extinguished by the
massacre of Jena, and Prussia in a day fettered for years--were the
summary and solemn retribution of Heaven. But, when the penalty was paid,
the fate of the executioner instantly followed. Guilt had punished guilt,
and justice was to be alike done upon all. Napoleon and his empire
vanished, as the powder vanishes that explodes the mine. The ground was
broken up; the structures of royalty on its surface were deeply fractured;
the havoc was complete; but the fiery deposit which had effected the havoc
was itself scattered into air.
His re-establishment of Poland would have been an act of grandeur. It
would have established a new character for the whole Revolution. It would
have shown that the new spirit which had gone forth summoning the world to
regeneration, was itself regeneration; that it was not a tempter, but a
restorer; that all conquest was not selfish, and all protestation not
meant to deceive. If Napoleon had given Poland a diadem, and placed it on
the brow of Kosciusko, he would, in that act, have placed on his own brow
a diadem which no chance of the field could have plucked away; an
imperishable and dazzling answer to all the calumnies of his age, and all
the doubts of posterity. He might even have built, in the restoration of
the fallen kingdom, a citadel for his own security in all the casualties
of empire; but, in all events, he would have fixed in the political heaven
a star which, to the last recollection of mankind, would have thrown light
on his sepulchre, and borne his name.
The fall of the Foxite ministry opened the way to a new cabinet, and I
resumed my office. But we marched in over ruins. In the short period of
their power, Europe had been shattered. England had stood aloof and
escaped the shock; but to stand aloof then was her crime--her sympathy
might have saved the tottering system. Now, all was gone. When we looked
over the whole level of the Continent, we saw but two thrones--France and
Russia; all the rest were crushed. They stood, but their structure was
shattered, stripped of its adornments, and ready to crumble down at the
first blow. England was without an ally. We had begun the war with Europe
in our line of battle; we now stood alone. Yet, the spirit of the nation
was never bolder than in this hour, when a storm of hostility seemed to be
gathering round us from every quarter of the world. Still, there were
voices of ill omen among our leading men. It was said, that France and
Russia had resolved to divide the world between them--to monopolize the
East and the West; to extinguish all the minor sovereignties; to abolish
all the constitutions; to turn the world into two vast menageries, in
which the lesser monarchies should be shown, as caged lions, for the pomp
of the two lords-paramount of the globe. I heard this language from
philosophers, from orators, even from statesmen; but I turned to the
people, and I found the spirit of their forefathers unshaken in them
still--the bold defiance of the foreigner, the lofty national scorn of his
gasconading, the desire to grapple more closely with his utmost strength,
and the willingness, nay, the passionate desire, to rest the cause of
Europe on their championship alone. I never heard among the multitude a
sound of that despair which had become the habitual language of
Opposition. They had answered the call to arms with national ardour. The
land was filled with voluntary levies, and the constant cry of the people
was--conflict with the enemy, any where, at any time, or upon any terms.
More fully versed in their national history than any other European
people, they remembered, that in every war with France, for a thousand
years, England had finished with victory; that she had never suffered any
one decisive defeat in the war, that where the forces of the two nations
could come fairly into contact, their troops had always been successful;
and that from the moment when France ventured to contest the empire of the
seas, all the battles of England were triumphs, until the enemy was swept
from the ocean.
The new cabinet formed its plans on the national confidence, and executed
them with statesmanlike decision. The struggle on the Continent was at an
end; but they resolved to gird it with a chain of fire. Every port was
shut up by English guns; every shore was watched by English eyes. Outside
this chain, the world was our own. The ocean was free; every sea was
traversed by our commerce with as much security as in the most profound
peace. The contrast with the Continent was of the most striking order.
There all was the dungeon--one vast scene of suffering and outcry; of
coercion and sorrow; the conscription, the confiscation, the licensed
plunder, the bitter and perpetual insult. The hearts of men died within
them, and they crept silently to their obscure graves. Wounds, poverty,
and ferocious tyranny, the heart-gnawing pangs of shame, and the thousand
thorns which national and conscious degradation strews on the pillow of
men crushed by the insolence of a soldiery, wore away the human race;
provinces were unpeopled, and a generation were laid prematurely in the
grave.
The recollections of the living world will long point to this period as
the most menacing portion of all history. The ancient tyrannies were bold,
presumptuous, and remorseless monopolies of power; but their pressure
scarcely descended to the multitude. It crushed the senator, the
patrician, and the man of opulence; as the tempest smites the turrets of
the palace, or shatters the pinnacles of the mountain range. But the
despotism of France searched the humblest condition of man. It tyrannized
over the cottage, as fiercely as it had swept over the thrones. The German
or Italian peasant saw his son torn away, to perish in some distant
region, of which he knew no more than that it was the grave of the
thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow shepherds and vintagers. The
despotism of France less resembled the domination of man, from which, with
all its vigilance, there is some hope of escape, than the subtlety of a
demon, which has an evil and a sting for every heart, and by which nothing
can be forgotten, and nothing will be spared. In the whole immense circle
of French dominion, no man could lay his head down to rest, with a
security that he might not be roused at midnight, to be flung into a
captivity from which he was never to return. No man could look upon his
property, the earnings of his manhood, the resource for his age, or the
provision for his children, without the knowledge that it was at the mercy
of the plunderer; no man could look upon the birth of his child, without
the bitter consciousness that another victim was preparing for the general
sacrifice; nor could see the ripening form or intellect of those who were
given to him by Providence for the comfort and companionship of his
advancing years, without a conviction that they would be swept away from
him. He felt that he would be left unsheltered and alone; and that those
in whom his life was wrapt, and whom he would have gladly given his life
to save, were destined to perish by some German or Russian bayonet, and
make their last bed among the swamps of the Danube or the snows of Poland.
I am not now speaking from the natural abhorrence of the Briton for
tyranny alone. The proofs are before the eye of mankind. Within little
more than half the first year of the Polish campaign, three conscriptions,
of eighty thousand youths each, were demanded from France alone. Two
hundred and forty thousand living beings were torn from their parents,
and sent to perish in the field, the hospital, and on the march through
deserts where winter reigns in boundless supremacy!
Let the man of England rejoice that those terrible inflictions cannot be
laid on him, and be grateful to the freedom which protects the most
favoured nation of mankind. Arbitrary arrest and the conscription are the
two heads of the serpent--either would embitter the existence of the most
prosperous state of society; they both at this hour gnaw the vitals of the
continental states; they alienate the allegiance, and chill the
affections; even where they are mitigated by the character of the
sovereigns, they still remain the especial evils which the noblest
patriotism should apply all its efforts to extinguish, and the removal of
which it would be the most illustrious boon of princes to confer upon
their people.
But the ramparts of that empire of slavery and suffering were to be shaken
at last. The breach was to be made and stormed by England; Europe was to
be summoned to achieve its own deliverance; and England was to move at the
head of the proudest armament that ever marched to conquest for the
liberties of mankind.
She began by a thunder-clap. The peace with Russia had laid the Czar at
the mercy of France. Napoleon had intrigued to make him a confederate in
the league against mankind. But the generous nature of the Russian monarch
shrank from the conspiracy, and the secret articles of the treaty of
Tilsit were divulged to the British cabinet. I shall not now say from what
authority they came; but the confidence was spontaneous, and the effect
decisive. Those Articles contained the outline of a plan for combining all
the fleets of subject Europe, and pouring the final vengeance of war on
our shores. The right wing of that tremendous armament was to be formed of
the Danish and Russian fleets. This confederacy must be broken up, or we
must see a hundred and eighty ships of the line, freighted with a French
and Russian army, at the mouth of the Thames. There was not a moment to be
lost, if we were to act at all; for a French force was already within a
march of the Great Belt, to garrison Denmark. The question was debated in
council, in all its bearings. All were fully aware of the hypocritical
clamour which would be raised by the men who were lending themselves to
every atrocity of France. We were not less prepared for the furious
declamation of that professor of universal justice and protector of the
rights of neutral nations--the French Emperor. But the necessity was
irresistible; the act was one of self-defence; and it was executed
accordingly, and with instant and incomparable vigour. A fleet and army
were dispatched to the Baltic. An assault of three days gave the Danish
fleet into our hands. The confederacy was broken up by the British
batteries; and the armament returned, with twenty sail of the enemy's
line, as trophies of the best planned and boldest expedition of the war.
Napoleon raged; but it was at finding that England could show a
promptitude like his own, sanctioned by a better cause. Denmark complained
pathetically of the infringement of peace, before she had "completed her
preparations for war;" but every man of political understanding, even in
Denmark, rejoiced at her being disburdened of a fleet, whose subsistence
impoverished her revenues, and whose employment could only have involved
her in fatal hostilities with Britain. Russia was loudest in her
indignation, but a smile was mingled with her frown. Her statesmen were
secretly rejoiced to be relieved from all share in the fearful enterprise
of an encounter with the fleets of England, and her Emperor was not less
rejoiced to find, that she had still the sagacity and the courage which
could as little be baffled as subdued, and to which the powers of the
North themselves might look for refuge in the next struggle of diadems.
This was but the dawning of the day; the sun was soon to rise. Yet, public
life has its difficulties in proportion to its height. As Walpole said,
that no man knows the human heart but a minister; so no man knows the real
difficulties of office, but the man of office. Lures to his passions,
temptations to his integrity, and alarms to his fears, are perpetually
acting on his sense of honour. To make a false step is the most natural
thing in the world under all those impulses; and one false step ruins him.
The rumour reached me that there were dissensions in the cabinet; and,
though all was smooth to the eye, I had soon sufficient proof that the
intelligence was true. A prominent member of the administration was the
object of the intrigue. He was an intelligent, high-spirited, and
straightforward man, open in language, if the language was not of the most
classic order; and bold in his conceptions, if those conceptions were not
formed on the most accomplished knowledge. He had attained his high
position, partly by public services, but still more by connexion. It was
impossible to refuse respect to his general powers, but it was equally
impossible to deny the intellectual superiority of his competitor. The
contrast which they presented in the House was decisive of their talents
for debate. While the one spoke his mind with the uncultured expressions
of the moment; the other never addressed the House but with the polished
and pointed diction of the orator. He was the most accomplished of
debaters.--Always prepared, always pungent, often powerful. Distinguished
in early life by scholarship, he had brought all the finer spirit of his
studies into the business of public life. He was the delight of the House;
and the boundless applause which followed his eloquence, and paid an
involuntary tribute to his mastery of public affairs, not unnaturally
stimulated his ambition to possess that leading official rank to which he
seemed called by the right of nature. The rivalry at length became open
and declared; it had been felt too deeply to die away among the casual
impressions of public life; it had been suppressed too long to be forgiven
on either side; and the crisis was evidently approaching in which it was
necessary to take a part with either of those gifted men.
I seldom spent more anxious hours in the course of an anxious life, than
during the period of this deliberation. I felt all the fascinations of the
man of genius. On the other hand, I respected all the solid and manly
qualities of his opponent. In a personal view, the issue of the contest
was likely to produce evil to my own views. I was still a dependent upon
fortune. I had new ties and interests, which made official income more
important to me day by day. In the fall of the administration I must
follow the general fate.--In making my decision with the unsuccessful
candidate for power, I must go down along with him; and the claims of the
competitors were so equally balanced, and both were so distinguished, that
it was beyond all conjecture to calculate the result. I, too, was not
without many a temptation to perplex my judgment. The rivalry had at
length become public, and the friends of each were active in securing
opinions among the holders of office. The whole was a lottery, but with my
political existence dependent on my escaping a blank. In this dilemma I
consulted my oracle, Clotilde. Her quick intelligence decided for me at
once. "You must resign," said she. "You value both; you cannot side with
either without offending their feelings, or, what I more regard,
distressing your own. Both are men of intelligence and honour, and they
will understand your motives and respect them. To retain office is
impossible."
"But, Clotilde, how can I bear the thought of reducing you and my infants
to the discomforts of a narrow income, and the obscurity of a life of
retirement?"
"A thousand times better, than you could endure the thought of retaining
office against your judgment, or taking a part against a friend. Follow
the impressions of your own generous nature, and you will be dearer than
ever to Clotilde--even though it condemned us all to the deepest
obscurity." Tears gushed into her eyes as she spoke the words; and in her
heart she was evidently less of the heroine than in her language: the
children had come playing round her feet at the moment; and the family
picture of the reverse in our fortunes, filled with this cluster of young
faces, unconscious of the chance which lay before them, was too severe a
trial for a mother's feelings. Her tears flowed abundantly, and the
beating of her heart showed the anguish of her sacrifice. But she still
persisted in her determination. As I took leave of her to go down to the
House, her last words, as she pressed my hand, were--"Resign, and leave
the rest to fortune."
A motion on the subject of the rival claims had been appointed for the
evening; and the premier was to open the debate. The House was crowded at
an early hour; and as my services were required in the discussion, I
postponed the communication of my resolve, until the division should
announce that my labours were at an end. But the hour passed away in
routine business. Still, the premier did not appear. The anxiety grew
excessive. At length whispers ran round the benches, of a rencounter
between the two distinguished individuals; and, like all rumours of this
nature, the results were pronounced to be of the most alarming kind. The
consternation was gradually mitigated by the announcement that one of the
combatants remained unhurt, but that the other had received a mortal
wound. The House was speedily deserted; and all rushed out to ascertain
the truth of this melancholy intelligence. Yet, nothing was to be gathered
among the numberless reports of the night, and I returned home harassed
almost into fever. The morning quieted the general alarm. The wound was
dangerous, but not mortal; and both combatants had sent in their
resignation. It was accepted by royalty, and before another night fell; I
was sent for by the premier, and offered one of the vacant offices.
Such are the chances of public life. The lottery had been drawn, and mine
was a prize. With what feelings I returned on that night to my fireside;
with what welcome I was received by my gentle, yet heroic, wife; or with
what eyes I glanced upon my infants, as they came to ask the paternal kiss
and blessing before they parted for their pillows, I leave to those who
know the rejoicing of the heart, to conceive.
Those events had shaken the ministry, as dissensions always have done; and
it still cost us many a severe struggle to resist the force of Opposition
combined with the clamours of the country. England and France now
presented a spectacle unexampled in the annals of hostilities, engaged in
a war which seemed interminable--both determined to conquer or perish;
both impelled by the most daring courage; yet neither able to inflict the
slightest blow upon the other, with but fifteen miles between. France was
nearer to Russia, nay, was nearer to the remotest extremity of Asia, than
to England. In the midst of the fiercest war, both preserved the attitude
of the most profound peace. The lion and the tiger, couching on the
opposite sides of some impassable ravine, each watching the fiery eyes and
naked fangs of the other, would have been the natural emblems of this
hopeless thirst of encounter between the two most powerful and exasperated
nations of the earth.
It is no superstition to trace those events to a higher source than man.
The conclusion of this vast conflict was already written, in a record
above the short-sighted vision and infirm memory of our nature. In all the
earlier guilt of Europe, France has been the allotted punisher of the
Continent; and England the allotted punisher of France. I make no
presumptuous attempt to explain the reason; but the process is
incontestable. When private profligacy combines with some atrocious act of
public vice to make the crimes of the Continent intolerable, France is
sent forth to carry fire and sword to its boundaries, to crush its armies
in the field, to sack its cities, and to decimate its population. Then
comes the penalty of the punisher. The crimes of France demand purgation.
The strength of England is summoned to this stern duty, and France is
scourged; her military pride is broken; her power is paralysed, peace
follows, and Europe rests for a generation. The process has been so often
renewed, and has been completed with such irresistible regularity, that
the principle is a law. The period for this consummation was now come once
more.
I was sitting in my library one evening, when a stranger was introduced,
who had brought a letter from the officer commanding our squadron on the
Spanish coast. He was a man of noble presence, of stately stature, and
with a countenance exhibiting all the vivid expression of the South. He
was a Spanish nobleman from the Asturias, and deputed by the authorities
to demand succours in the national rising against the common enemy,
Napoleon. I was instinctively struck by the measureless value of
resistance in a country which opened to us the whole flank of France; but
the intelligence was so wholly unexpected, so entirely beyond calculation,
and at the same time so pregnant with the highest results to England, that
I was long incredulous. I was prepared to doubt the involuntary
exaggeration of men who had every thing at stake; the feverish tone of
minds embarked in the most formidable of all struggles; and even the
passion of the southern in every event and object, of force sufficient to
arouse him into action. But the Asturian was firm in his assurances, clear
and consistent in his views, and there was even a candour in his
confession of the unprepared state of his country, which added largely to
my confidence. Our dialogue was, I believe, unprecedented for the
plainness of its enquiries and replies. It was perfectly Lacedaemonian.
"What regular force can Spain bring into the field?"
"None."
"What force has Napoleon in Spain at this moment?"
"At least two hundred and fifty thousand men, and those in the highest
state of equipment and discipline."
"And yet you venture to resist?"
"We have resisted, we shall resist, and we shall beat them."
"In what state are your fortresses?"
"One half of them in the hands of the French, and the other half, without
garrisons, provisions, or even guns; still, we shall beat them."
"Are not the French troops in possession of all the provinces?"
"Yes."
"Are they not in fact masters of the country?"
"No."
"How am I to reconcile those statements?"
"The French are masters by day; the Spaniards are masters by night."
"But you have none of the elements of national government. You have lost
your king."
"So much the better."
"Your princes, nobles, and court."
"So much the better."
"Even your prime minister and whole administration are in the hands of the
enemy."
"Best of all!" said the respondent, with a frown like a thunder-cloud.
"What resource, then, have you?"
"The people!" exclaimed the Spaniard, in a tone of superb defiance.
"Still--powerful as a united people are--before you can call upon a
British government to embark in such a contest, it must be shown that the
people are capable of acting together; that they are not separated by the
jealousies which proverbially divide your country."
"Senor Inglese," said the Don, with a Cervantic curl of the lip, "I see,
that Spain has not been neglected among the studies of your high station.
But Spain is _not_ to be studied in books. She is not to be sketched, like
a fragment of a Moorish castle, and carried off in a portfolio. Europe
knows nothing of her. You must pass the Pyrenees to conceive her
existence. She lives on principles totally distinct from those of all
other nations; and France will shortly find, that she never made a greater
mistake than when she thought, that even the southern slope of the
Pyrenees was like the northern."
"But," said I, "the disunion of your provinces, the extinction of your
army, and the capture of your executive government, must leave the country
naked to invasion. The contest may be gallant, but the hazard must be
formidable. To sustain a war against the disciplined troops of France, and
the daring determination of its ruler, would require a new age of
miracle." The Spaniard bit his lip, and was silent. "At all events, your
proposals do honour to the spirit of your country, and I shall not be the
man to throw obstacles in your way. Draw up a memoir; state your means,
your objects and your intentions, distinctly; and I shall lay it before
the government without delay."
"Senor Inglese, it shall be done. In that memoir, I shall simply say that
Spain has six ranges of mountains, all impregnable, and that the Spanish
people are resolved to defend them; that the country is one vast natural
fortress; that the Spanish soldier can sleep on the sand, can live on the
simplest food, and the smallest quantity of that food; that he can march
fifty miles a-day; that he is of the same blood as the conquerors of the
Moors, and with the soldiers of Charles V.; and that he requires only
discipline and leaders to equal the glory of his forefathers." His fine
features glanced with manly exultation.
"Still, before I can bring your case before the country, we must be
enabled to have an answer for the objections of the legislature. Your
provinces are scarcely less hostile to each other than they are to the
enemy. What plan can unite them in one system of defence? and, without
that union, how can resistance be effectual?"
"Spain stands alone," was the reply. "Her manners, her feelings, and her
people, have no examples in Europe. Her war will have as little similarity
to the wars of its governments. It will be a war, not of armies, but of
the shepherd, of the artificer, the muleteer, the contrabandist--a war of
all classes the peasant, the priest, the noble, nay, the beggar on the
highway. But this was the war of her ancestors, the war of the Asturias,
which cleared the country of the Moors, and will clear it of the French.
All Spain a mass of hostility, a living tide of unquenchable hatred and
consuming fire--the French battalions, pouring over the Pyrenees, will be
like battalions poured into the ocean. They will be engulfed; they will
never return. Our provinces are divided, but they have one invincible
bond--abhorrence of the French. Even their division is not infirmity, but
strength. They know so little of each other that even the conquest of one
half of Spain would be scarcely felt by the rest. This will be a supreme
advantage in the species of war which we contemplate--a war of desultory
but perpetual assaults, of hostilities that cease neither night nor day,
of campaigns that know no distinction between summer and winter--a war in
which no pitched battles will be fought, but in which every wall will be a
rampart, every hollow of the hills a camp, every mountain a citadel, every
roadside, and swamp, and rivulet, the place of an ambuscade. We shall have
no battalions and brigades, we require no tactics; our sole science will
be, to kill the enemy wherever he can be reached by bullet or knife, until
we make Spain the tomb of invasion, and her very name an omen, and a ruin
to the tyrant on the French throne."
The councils of England in the crisis were worthy of her ancient name. It
was resolved to forget the long injuries of which Spain had been the
instrument, during her passive submission to the arrogance of her ally and
master. The Bourbons were now gone; the nation was disencumbered of that
government of chamberlains, maids of honour, and duennas. It was to be no
longer stifled in the perfumed atmosphere of court boudoirs, or to be
chilled in the damps of the cloister. Its natural and noble proportions
were to be left unfettered and undisguised by the formal fashions of past
centuries of grave frivolity and decorous degradation. The giant was to
rise refreshed. The Samson was to resume his primal purpose; he was no
longer to sleep in the lap of his Delilah; the national fame was before
him, and, breaking his manacles at one bold effort, he was thenceforth to
stand, as nature had moulded him, powerful and prominent among mankind.
These were dreams, but they were high-toned and healthy dreams--the
anticipations of a great country accustomed to the possession of freedom,
and expecting to plant national regeneration wherever it set foot upon the
soil. The cause of Spain was universally adopted by the people and was
welcomed by Parliament with acclamation; the appointment of a minister to
represent the cabinet in Spain was decided on, and this distinguished
commission was pressed upon my personal sense of duty by the sovereign. My
official rank placed me above ambassadorships, but a service of this order
had a superior purpose. It was a mission of the country, not of the
minister. I was to be the instrument of an imperial declaration of
good-will, interest, and alliance to a whole people.
In another week, the frigate which conveyed me was flying before the
breeze, along the iron-bound shore of Galicia; the brightest and most
burning of skies was over my head, the most billowy of seas was dashing
and foaming round me, and my eye was in continual admiration of the noble
mountain barriers which, in a thousand shapes, guard the western coast of
Spain from the ocean. At length the bay of Corunna opened before us; our
anchor dropped, and I made my first step on the most picturesque shore,
and among the most original people, of Europe. My destination was Madrid;
but it was essential that I should ascertain all the facts in my power
from the various provincial governments as I passed along; and I thus
obtained a more ample knowledge of the people than could have fallen to
the lot of the ordinary traveller. I consulted with their juntas, I was
present at their festivals, I rode with their hidalgos, and I marched with
their troops. One of the peculiarities which, as an Englishman, has always
interested me in foreign travel is, that it brings us back to a period
different from the existing age at home. All descending from a common
stock, every nation of Europe has made a certain advance; but the advance
has been of different degrees. Five hundred years ago, they were all
nearly alike. In the Netherlands, I continually felt myself carried back
to the days of the Protectorate; I saw nearly the same costume, the same
formality of address, and the same habits of domestic life. In Germany, I
went back a century further, and saw the English primitive style of
existence, the same stiff architecture, the same mingling of stateliness
and simplicity, not forgetting the same homage to the "divine right of
kings." In Spain, I found myself in the thirteenth century, and but for
the language, the heat, and the brown visages around me, could have
imagined myself in England, in the days when "barons bold" still exercised
the rights of feudalism, when gallant archers killed the king's deer
without the king's permission, and when the priest was the lawgiver of the
land.
Day by day, I saw the pilgrim making his weary way from shrine to shrine;
the landowner caracoling his handsome horse over wild heaths and half-made
highways--that horse caparisoned with as many fantastic trappings as the
charger of chivalry, and both horse and rider forming no feeble
representation of the knight bound on adventure. I saw the monastery of
our old times, exhibiting all its ancient solidity, sternness, and pomp;
with its hundred brethren; its crowd of sallow, silent domestics; its
solemn service; and even with its beggars crowding and quarreling for
their daily dole at its gate. The face of the country seemed to have been
unchanged since the first invasion of the Visigoths:--immense commons,
grown barren from the absence of all cultivation; vast, dreary
sheep-walks; villages, few, rude, and thinly peopled; the absence of all
enclosures, and a general look of loneliness, which, however, I could have
scarcely imagined in England at any period since the Heptarchy. Yet, those
wild wastes were often interspersed with delicious spots; where, after
toiling half the day over a desert wild as Arabia, the traveller suddenly
stood on the brink of some sweet and secluded valley, where the eye rested
on almost tropical luxuriance--all the shrubs and blossoms which require
so much shelter in our rougher climate, flourishing in the open air;
hedges of myrtle and jessamine; huge olives, and primeval vines,
spreading, in all the prodigality of nature, over the rocks; parasite
plants clothing the oaks and elms with drapery of all colours, floating in
every breath of wind; and, most delicious of all, in the fiery centre of
Spain, streams, cool as ice and clear as crystal, gushing and glancing
away through the depths of the valley; sometimes glittering in the sun,
then plunging into shade, then winding along, seen by starts, like silver
snakes, until they were lost under sheets of copse and foliage, unpruned
by the hand of man, and which seemed penetrable only by the bird or the
hare.