the confiscation of his territorial revenues:-they were strictly fulfilled. His caro Prence de la Paz had the primitiæ of every remittance. Sooner should the entire Court want, than the favourite be exposed to any deficiency in his usual luxuries by this late curtailment of their fortunes. At the same time, he refused Torlonia's solicitations for a Grandeeship of Spain: he neither gave, promised, nor entreated. In this he was only prudent. Ferdinand was proud as well as poor: he would have refused even such a bauble, though it might have obviated the necessity of greater punctuality—no small consideration to a Spanish minister. As it was, Charles stood out the siege; but did not the less, when the quarter was up, continue petitioning from his petitioner.

Charles was unquestionably improved, like many, other riders, by his fall, così disfalto, ottimo. I heard several traits of clumsy good-nature, which, as royalty goes, did him infinite honour. He had now and then his sensibilities, and sometimes, though rarely, his delicacies. He seldom evinced those miserable after-yearnings for the toy that is irretrievably lost; nothing of those posthumous galvanic efforts at importance which often survive the living principle of rank and fortune. Even whilst King (and I had it from an authority the best possible, the Foreign Ambassador, whom, of all others, he most hated), Charles was distinguished by an invincible affability and kindness, a bonhommie, which ran down to an extreme. The Spaniard was drowned in the man; and the sovereign used to slide away, in his audiences, to the têteà-tête familiarity of a personal friend. The King and the Ambassador afterwards met at Rome: he did not forget the interviews of Madrid, or the treaty of Badajos: but there was some difficulty in bringing about an interview, without compromising the little dignity which was still left him. The Ambassador had also his importance to maintain. The diplomacy which reconciled these niceties was curious, but they did the King honour. He remembered the hand to which, more than any other, he had been indebted for the integrity of his monarchy. Ferdinand would have acted otherwise; he never would have forgotten the obligation.*

The Queen was only known at Rome for having an enviable stock of diamonds, and a store of constancy à toute epreuve. The guardsman of her youth was the grave courtier of her old age. Godoy was her favourite, her Potemkin to the last. Not a detail of her toilette which was not still submitted to his surveillance. The colour of her dresses, the changes of her jewellery, were all subjects of solemn debate; nor was it unusual, whilst mass was still going on, to send up three wigs, one after the other, before she could exactly hit upon his choice. Her life was retired, her character concentred and saturnine; yet I never heard that she evinced a greater degree of penitence than was the etiquette amongst her royal brothers and sisters for the irregularities of her youth. Were she so disposed, few queens, I believe, had better cause. Courts are proverbially licentious; but no court was more gravely, and profoundly, and prodigally so, none so piously and dogmatically corrupt, as this same Court of Spain. Its vice was slow, plebeian, stupid; its pleasures joyless and unenjoyed: every thing was brought ignobly down to mere fact; no concealing graces, no redeeming illusions,—all was selfish, sullen gratification; alternating indeed with the wretched hypocrisy of set sermon and set prayer, and the whole monstrous system built up on the patience of a most enduring people; connived at by an aristocracy who shared in the degeneracy, and blest by prelates and churchmen, who, for the prosperity of the church, thought no sacrifice or compromise too great. The scandal was notorious and placarded, the whispers loud, but there was no need that the Messalina should change her dress-it was sufficient, she was devout. Any one who has the curiosity to dip into the pages of Du Clos, or

*Base throughont, Ferdinand, the Miguel of Spain, as Miguel is the Ferdinand of Portugal, asked in marriage the daughter of this very man (the present Princess G), was refused, and calumniated him afterwards. Of such vile clay are these idols made! But what must be the idolaters?

the Princesse des Ursins, will there find the type of those disgraceful imbecilities which reached the fulness of their perfection under Charles: he was a sort of Philip of his day. Yet with all this,-inept, grovelling, and abandoned as it was, (and the secret history of the day teems with anecdote of the most disgusting and damning proof,)—the Court was only then preparing the harvest which has since been reaped; ripening that despotism of blood, as well as vice, which is still in progress-Heliogabalus preluding to Nero, King Crane following up King Log. The sæva ac lenta natura of the son is the only eulogy I know on the flagitia atque dedecora of the reign of his father. Charles was not the unkind son, the ungrateful captive, the perjured ruler, the πηλον άιματι πεφυρμένον, by whom he has been succeeded.*

The Duchesse de Chably was pointed out to me at the other end of the room: she neither had, nor claimed, any other consequence than what might be derived from her relationship to the effete King of Sardinia; who, too stupid for a king, or tco wise, preferred to be a monk, and endeavoured to be a saint. She seemed a mere make-up figure in the gallery, and did her part well, which was keeping quiet. Her purchase of the Villa Ruffinella from the Prince of Canino, and a few profitable excavations of Tusculum, and the old Etrurian town, had brought her, unwittingly, a little later, into some sort of enviable notoriety at Rome.

The Ex-Queen of Etruria was a somewhat more interesting personage of the same group. She had just entered, leading by the hand the young King Louis, her son. Here titles are like German counters at a game at cards, and make no impression on any other nerves than those of the English, who stare at a king as an American young lady at one of our lords. The boy was unaffected, and gentle, and, for a young foreigner, manly. The Queen herself, a homely specimen of royalty: her figure and face ample and inexpressive; her mouth rising into a disagreeable gaping above her teeth; and her teeth such as scarcely to apologise for such a mouth ;-yet, over this watery and washy image (for her complexion did not even rise into the vigour of olive) there was a nameless something, between goodhumour and good-nature. Her existence was a monotony; yet she bore the weight of this dead blank like a queen: her destiny was a tint or two more diversified than her neighbour's. Hereditary Princess of Parma and Piacenza, then Queen of Etruria,† an old title a little modified and revised, (there was a Marquess of Etruria, ally of John XI.) in the general confusion she lost her place, but got out of the crowd, and waited quietly till events should allow her to scramble or slide into it again. The traces she left of her passage were generally favourable. No one execrated her like the Duke of Modena, as a pilferer of the poor man's pocket, or a Briarean inquisitor into the domesticity of an entire state. She had, besides, a rival of a very formidable character to contend with; the Princess Eliza governed in the neighbourhood.

The degeneracy has been indeed headlong. Charles III. was the great man of the family. In his twenty-five years' reign at Naples, Spain redeemed her character of tyranny, and atoned, by the presents she had made, for many, if not all, her viceregal crimes. His government was a series of great and enlightened acts-great in any government, exploits in his own.

† And "adopted daughter of Napoleon;" she begging, he granting, the strange title. It is singular, or rather it is not, that she should have preferred, and Rome have admitted, the honours of an usurper. A sister of Ferdinand, and a Bourbonjusqu'aux doigts! But Marie Louise is an Imperial Majesty by the same sort of patent, and the granter himself a Serene Highness at Parma, (see the Orders for his funeral,) and Mons. le General at St. Helene! These are trifles, and Napoleon would have despised them: his name could have well done without them. But if we think so harshly of the man for asking, what must we think of a Congress for refusing! That, of the two children, the latter was the most childish of the two.

August.-VOL. XXIII. NO. XCII.

K

Some years after, all this phantasmagoria had changed or disappeared: the Ex-Queen had become a real Duchess, and no complaint was made of the descent or exchange. The gold tinsel was sacrificed to the solid silver without a sigh: she left in haste her palace at Rome to rule over scarcely a larger realm-the Lucchese at Lucca. Yet, mere shred of territory as it was, a ci-devante must have been pleased with any thing which could give her a court, a ministry, a royal villa, and one or two towns. She did not belie her reputation: she was just, and more generous: the Bonapartes found her a protectress on the turn of the wheel. The Princess Borghese was permitted not only to remain in the Duchy, but was treated with a consideration which she scarcely could have hoped for from a restored legitimate. She had her villas and residence, and was in one instance presented with a piece of ground by the Duchess herself. If we consider that all this occurred in a territory formerly under the rule of her own sister, and where deeper traces and more affectionate and well-merited recollections existed of the ex-dynasty, than in almost any other part of Italy, we shall duly appreciate the superiority manifested over all those puny jealousies and retaliations which at that period characterised the councils of more than one of the restored. The lawsuit with the King of Sardinia failed; but the King of the Netherlands was more fortunate. St. Leu, the private purchase of Louis Bonaparte, was confiscated; and, by a decree of his own courts, the confiscation was made good. The Prince Borghese was a native prince, rich, and a formidable or persuasive pleader. Louis was a stranger, and not quite so rich or fortunate, it may well be imagined, as the Prince Borghese.* The new Duchess of Lucca died very soon after her installation, regretted by her new subjects, and was succeeded by her son. The spirit of her government survives in his; but his means are not equal to his will: like her, he depends upon others. The bankers of Rome and Genoa, like those of Germany, are the absorbents which come between the Prince and his people. They draw up the taxes, as the sun the clouds; but, unlike the sun, they seldom return them back in dews and refreshment to the land. The fact is, the tenure of his estate (it is little more) is too temporary, or precarious, to excite much interest about its future finances. On the death of Maria Louisa, he will return, it is understood, to his old hereditary Farnesian dominions. The Duc de Reichstadt, it is true, is not a cardinal; but he will be provided for by Metternich, or events elsewhere.

But the Duchess of Lucca was not the only person who dropped out of this ring. The Queen of Spain was long tottering: she survived but a few years. Nothing could be more extravagantly superb than her funeral in Santa Maria Maggiore. In a city which exists on ceremonies, it still lives as an unrivalled specimen of theatrical effect. The colossal bier, the black velvet sweeping from marble pillar to pillar, the torchlight, and De profundis of all the religious orders of Rome, are commemorated with greater accuracy and exultation than any event of her multifarious reign. Her features were squeezed and painted into some pretension to humanity; and borne uncovered as she was through the streets, the rouge and wig, and tight, drum-drawn skin, gave death a sort of advantage over life. I did not hear that any one wept at her decease, except the few of her domestics who had been just dismissed. Godoy philosophized on the frailty of all things human, admired the music, praised the bier, went home, and dined.

*Yet the disinterestedness of Louis should have pleaded for him. He refused a large pension on his abdication, and took little more with him than his philosophy to Gratz. The King should have behaved, at least, as well as his subjects. St. Leu, besides, was a trifle, not more than 3001. per annum, if so much. He lost it in a Dutch court; but he still has that which cannot be taken away by courts or princes, the grateful recollections of his former subjects, and the consciousness of having acted up to his noble device. "Fais le bien advient qui pourra." How few kings, even without a Napoleon to command them, can say so much! Can any Say more?

But the demise of the King was somewhat more affecting. He had long contemplated a visit to his brother, Ferdinand of Naples, from whom he had been now separated for very many years. A slight fit of illness hastened his departure; he was apprehensive they might never meet again. His arrival at Naples, which lies rather out of the high-road for the passage of royalty, was hailed as an event. The meeting of the two brothers was more than ordinarily affectionate: Charles burst into tears. He had been but a few days in that capital, when news, first of the illness, then of the death of the Queen, arrived. Ferdinand undertook to break the melancholy intelligence to his brother. He appeared, at sunset, at his palace in a full suit of mourning: Charles understood the delicacy of the hint, uttered a few words, hung down his head, and never raised it more. A few days after, he fell into a lethargy, took to his bed, and died. Few loved so long or so well, so entirely or so indulgently. His nature never belied itself; he was Charles, le bon Charles, to the last.

I have omitted in this sketch one whom I was as curious to behold, plebeian as he was, as any of the royal personages near. Godoy retired, rather earlier than usual, to a small conversazione of his own, and I had not the opportunity I desired of making his acquaintance. In the hurried interval of a prima sera, I prevailed on an Ex-Colonel G to present me to his Ex-Royal Highness. The next day was fixed for my introduction.

We found, on our arrival at an early hour in the morning, the Prince just returned from his villa, formerly the Mattei, near the Colosseum. His costume was perfectly groomish; and his person accorded rather too much with his costume. He came up to me with great prevenance; but the only things I could gaze on were his top-boots, strange adulterations of our English ones, and his brown, jean, painters-looking cap. Years, and comfort (which is the happiness of such minds) had bloated him out into a corpulency which is still progressive: joined to a certain roughness of form and complexion, it stamped his origin too strongly on every line. In his features or expression, there was nothing-no stubborn workings of mind chiselled them up here and there; no keen cuttings of disappointment sharpened them into point and angle; nothing sad or stern cast its philosophic shadows over their changes: all was smooth animal life; just that sort of well-conditioned being he might have been, had he never risen higher than a sergeant of the Guard. Yet in this age of see-saws, few have had so many or such rapid revolutions. It is much to rush up from a postilion into a king; but here, in its very fulness and flush, is, an alliance with legitimacy, which stamps the base alloy at once into gold. His conversation was gay and bustling; and he jostled on with great good-humour, and no hesitation, through a most motley leash of languages, French seamed on Spanish and Italian; thinking very loud and very carelessly; and, when words failed, stilting up the thoughts with gestures of every idiom, and scrambling away, through briar and bramble, from painting to politics, from himself to others, from Godoy to the Prince of the Peace, from the Prince of the Peace, as he was at Madrid-King absolute-to what he was at Rome, "le Philosophe malgré lui." Every thing seemed shaken out at once upon his face, hands, and tongue. We talked a great deal, laughed a great deal, and heard a great deal, and he seemed the best "bon diable" in the world, for the "mauvais sujet” which we all knew he was. The English were his favourites, as I at first thought, in compliment to his visitor; nothing, as I knew by experience, being so easy as to shift the magic lanthorn; but I soon found out he had a deeper ground for his panegyric. He was fretted, and still fumed at the superiority, the diablerie of the French. "Les Angliers (I first took it for Sangliers) did every thing every thing was to be attributed to les Angliers." Lord Wellington was his Mars Gradivus, and our King, I believe, his Jove. Then there was a word of shrinking commendation ventured for the Spaniards; he would have loved them if he could: "Mais il y avait encore de ses torts." On his own conduct, and all that he did, ought to have done, and did not, he was by no means less liberal and frank. He was al

ways throwing himself into an attitude of defence; he saw accusation every where; he was conscious of an outcry on every side; but he knew not the point of attack. His apology ended as it had begun, by merely proving its necessity. Were I to credit him, the Prince of the Peace prophesied, checked, and would have prevented, if mortal hand could have prevented,"si Pergama dextra Defendi possent,"-the impending ruin of his country. But the Napoleon star attained its meridian too rapidly, and the Prince of the Peace had no other rôle left him but the sneaking one of a third-rate philosopher. "Mon cher," he said to the Emperor, over and over again, nous sommes très bien, pourquoi tenter l'impossible!" You see what has followed, helas! I was not heard!-The wooden oracle spoke truth, and was, to his credit, an excellent prophet of past calamity. As he warmed, his politics and invective grew louder, but, as is also usually the case, not more just: he fell on Napoleon, now that he was down, with the violence and courage of a Lancashire boor, or a Windsor mob: he accused Murat, son confrère, of duplicity, ingratitude, (si, signor !) and atrocious robbery. Of the first and last I say nothing; he could hardly escape those vices or virtues of kings and warriors; but of the other, the obligations Murat could have to discharge to the Prince of the Peace, could only have been those of a fellow plunderer: the ingratitude of the dead is an easy topic, and then the accuser brought with him the best of answers to his own accusation. This man was a liveried slave of Napoleon in his most unpardonable exactions, and wore mourning on Murat's death. Of Spain, he spoke without the dishonesty of a single sigh. He left nothing there worth caring about except his feudi. His resignation had nothing reflective in it; it was mere physical sans souci; no weighing of past with present, and both with future, but a happy forgetfulness, more effective than any philosophy of all three. This he carries wholesale into his manners; not a line about him Spaniard; not a gleam through the pinchbeck of a parvenu; no moroseness, no hauteur, no tiptoe walking over the pretensions of others, nothing of that provokingly tranquil insolence which, rather hinted than expressed, tramples and scoffs, and is yet unseizable in the novi homines of our own country. So the machine hurried on, and rattled, he was altogether careless of its wear or appearance. As to his talents, he certainly can choose a picture, could please a queen, and has not done either to a bad purpose; but as to talents for administration, I think him equal to the administration of a household, or a basse cour! By this, however, I do not mean to depreciate either his genius or acquirements; there are many actual rulers of kingdoms (the hereditary blockheads may be excused) who cannot say so much. The dupery, or villany, (and dupery is villany, when men and millions are at stake,) both at Bayonne and later, was no doubt disgraceful to all parties; but misgovernment in Spain had long been its manière d'être, ingrained into all its institutions and habits, as in Ireland; and the only worse thing he perhaps could do, was not to govern at all. This, indeed, he did: frightened or indolent, I know not which, he tumbled and tossed the machine, like a child with a watch, into entire confusion, and then from a feeling of its weight, without an effort or struggle, let it fall desperately and despairingly from his hands; it was always but a slattern sort of concern at best: no reform short of destruction could be looked for; every measure was an expedient or a stratagem; the rack-rent, palliative Irish system of stopping up fissures with straw. The first neglect did away with the piecemeal efforts of years. Napoleon came down, asked, and got. Every thing was in his favour: the moral weakness of Europe operated for him with the same rapidity and certainty of success as the physical weakness of Asia for Alexander. How could such papier-maché systems, such rickety puppets under the name of players, long resist him? They both fell at the first touch of his Quixotic lance. But what opinion are we to entertain of the Marionettes themselves, the Marionette master, or the spectators? We have no reason to marvel at children and their toys, when we thus get behind and examine the wretched pasteboard daub, before which nations of old men, year after year, have crawled in adulation.