conjecture what I leave unsaid; while to shew a hope of convincing such as have made a full and irrevocable surrender of their judgment, were only to libel my own." To this we shall only add one fact of our own; and this is, that anybody who has seen the popular books of religious instruction that are to be found on every parlour window throughout Spain-the books that answer there to our Pilgrim's Progress, Whole Duty of Man, Nelson's Fasts and Festivals, and the like-must be aware that Mr White has much understated the actual horrors of this auricular system. The deliberate filth of these bookswe speak advisedly-is certainly a thousand miles beyond anything that is to be found in the worst books forbidden to be sold in England, on the score of their indecency. Under the pretence of confessorial privilege, the priestly authors of these books have arranged, in the form of catechisms, &c., the most minute revelations of all the symptoms of every lawless passion-even of those which it is impossible to name to English ears. Stories of ghosts, and dreams, and visions, worked up often with very considerable vigour of fancy and language, intersperse the details of these horrors; and saints, and martyrs, and virgins, are made to take a part in their exposition. We are really quite serious when we say, that no books that ever were written by English profligates by profession-nay, that none we have ever heard of as existing even in France -come near, speaking merely of sensual filth, to some of the most favoured manuals of Spanish piety-manuals which are put into the hands of every girl and boy as soon as they can spell out the words; and which are at this moment carried about as perpetual vade-mecums in the sleeves of many thousands of Spanish Father Confessors. : As for the priests themselves, Mr White certainly represents their state very boldly. Mark these emphatic words "Among my numerous acquaintance in the Spanish clergy, I have never met with any ONE, possessed of bold tadents, who has not, sooner or later, changed from the most sincere piety to a state of unbelief." The following is part of a story of which Mr White does not expressly sag that he himself is the hero; but it is impossible not to suspect that such is the fact, knowing, what everybody does know, of Mr W.'s own history. "This first taste of mental liberty was more delicious than any feeling I ever experienced; but it was succeeded by a burning thirst for everything that, by destroying my old mental habits, could strengthen and confirm my unbelief. I gave an exorbitant price for any French irreligious books, which the love of gain induced some Spanish booksellers to import at their peril. The intuitive knowledge of one another, which persecuted principles impart to such as cherish them in common, made me soon acquainted with several members of my own profession, deeply versed in the philosophical school of France. They possessed, and made no difficulty to lend me, all the Antichristian works, which teemed from the French press. Where there is no liberty, there can be no discrimination. The ravenous appetite raised by a forced abstinence, makes the mind gorge itself with all sorts of food. I suspect I have thus imbibed some false, and many crude notions from my French masters. my circumstances preclude the calm and dispassionate examination which the subject deserves. Exasperated by the daily necessity of external submission to doctrines and persons I detest and despise, my soul overflows with bitterness. Though I acknowledge the advantages of moderation, none being used towards me, I practically, and in spite of my better judgment, learn to be a fanatic on my own side. But "Pretending studious retirement, I have fitted up a small room, to which none but my confidential friends find admittance. There lie my prohibited books, in perfect concealment, in a well-contrived nook under a stair-case. The Breviary alone, in its black-binding, clasps, and gilt leaves, is kept upon the table, to check the doubts of any chance intruder." Descending from these the educated gentlemen of the Spanish Churchwhose lofty principles of moral action certainly require no comment after what has been quoted, we come to the clergy of mere laziness-the monks; and then, many steps lower, to the chosen shepherds of the vulgar-the friars. Mr White says, "their distinguishing characters are vulgarity, filth, and vice," -and then proceeds as follows: "The inveterate superstition which still supports these institutions among us, has lost, of late, its power to draw reeruits to the cloister from the middle and higher classes. Few monks, and scarcely a friar, can be found, who, by taking the cowl, has not escaped a life of menial toil. Boys of this rank of life are received as novices at the age of fourteen, and admitted, after a year's probation, to the perpetual vows of obedience, poverty, and celibacy. Engagements so discordant with the first laws of human nature could hardly stand the test of time, even if they arose from the deepest feelings of enthusiasm. But this affection of the mind is seldom found in our convents. The year of noviciate is spent in learning the cant and gestures of the vilest hypocrisy, as well as in strengthening, by the example of the professed young friars, the original gross manners and vicious habits of the probationers. The result of such a system is but too visible. It is a common jest among the friars themselves, that in the act of taking the vows, when the superior of the convent draws the cowl over the head of the probationer, he uses the words Tolle verecundiam Put off shame.' And, indeed, were the friars half so true to their profession as they are to this supposed injunction, the church of Rome would really teem with saints. Shameless in begging, they share the scanty meal of the labourer, and extort a portion of every product of the earth from the farmer. Shameless in conduct, they spread vice and demoralization among the lower classes, secure in the respect which is felt for their profession, that they may engage in a course of profligacy without any risk of exposure. When an instance of gross misconduct obtrudes itself upon the eyes of the public, every pious person thinks it his duty to hush up the report, and cast a veil on the transaction. Even the sword of justice is glanced aside from these consecrated criminals. I shall not trouble you with more than two cases out of a multitude, which prove the power of this popular feeling. consists in a soft clear-toned voice, a tender and affectionate manner, and an incredible fluency of language. Being, by his profession, under a vow of absolute poverty, and the Franciscan rule carrying this vow so far as not to allow the members of the order to touch money, it was generally understood that the produce of these apostolical labours was faithfully deposited, to be used in common by the whole religious community. An incident, however, which lately came to light, has given us reason to suspect that we are not quite in the secret of the internal management of these societies of saintly paupers, and that individual industry is rewarded among them with a considerable share of profits. A young female, cousin of the zealous preacher in question, was living quite alone in a retired part of this town, where her relative paid her, it should seem, not unfrequent visits. Few, however, except her obscure neighbours, suspected her connection with the friar, or had the least notion of her existence. An old woman attended her in the day-time, and retired in the evening, leaving her mistress alone in the house. One morning the street was alarmed by the old servant, who, having gained admittance, as usual, by means of a private key, found the young woman dead in her bed, the room and other parts of the house being stained with blood. It was clear, indeed, upon a slight inspection of the body, that no violence had taken place; yet the powerful interest excited at the moment, and before measures had been taken to hush the whole matter, spread the circumstances of the case all over the town, and brought the fact to light, that the house itself belonged to the friar, having been purchased by an agent with the money arising from his sermons. The hungry vultures of the law would have reaped an abundant harvest upon any lay individual who had been involved in such a train of suspicious circumstances. But, probably, a proper douceur out of the sermon fees increased their pious tenderness for the friar; while he was so emboldened by the disposition of the people to shut their eyes on every circumstance which might sully the fair name of a son of St Francis, that, a few days after the event, he preached a sermon, denouncing the curse of Heaven on the impious individuals who could harbour a belief derogatory to his sacred character. "The most lucrative employment for friars, in this town, is preaching. I have not the means to ascertain the number of sermons delivered at Seville in the course of the year; but there is good reason to suppose that the average cannot be less than twelve a-day. One popular preacher, a clergyman, I know, who scarcely passes one day without mounting the pulpit, and reckons on three sermons every four-and-twenty hours during the last half of Lent. "Of these indefatigable preachers, the greatest favourite is a young Franciscan friar, called Padre Rz, whose merit "Crimes of the blackest description were left unpunished during the last reign, from a fixed and avowed determination of the King* not to inflict the punishment * Charles III. of death upon a priest. Townsend has mentioned the murder of a young lady, committed by a friar at San Lucar de Barrameda; and I would not repeat the painful narrative, were it not that my acquaintance with some of her relatives, as well as with the spot on which she fell, enables me to give a more accurate state ment. “A young lady, of a very respectable family in the above-mentioned town, had for her confessor a friar of the Reformed or Unshod Carmelites. I have often visited the house where she lived, in front of the convent. Thither her mother took her every day to mass, and frequently to confession. The priest, a man of middle age, had conceived a passion for his young penitent, which, not venturing to disclose, he madly fed by visiting the unsuspecting girl with all the frequency which the spiritual relation in which he stood towards her, and the friendship of her parents, allowed him. The young woman, now about nineteen, had an offer of a suitable match, which she accepted, with the approbation of her parents. The day being fixed for the marriage, the bride, according to custom, went, attended by her mother, early in the morning to church, to confess and receive the sacrament. After giving her absolution, the confessor, stung with the madness of jealousy, was observed whetting a knife in the kitchen. The unfortunate girl had, in the meantime, received the host, and was now leaving the church, when the villain, her confessor, meeting her in the porch, and pretending to speak a few words in her ear-a liberty to which his office entitled him-stabbed her to the heart in the presence of her mother. The assassin did not endeavour to escape. He was committed to prison; and after the usual delays of the Spanish law, he was condemned to death. The King, however, commuted this sentence into a confinement for life in a fortress at Puerto Rico. The only anxiety ever shewn by the murderer was respecting the success of his crime. He made frequent inquiries to ascertain the death of the young woman; and the assurance that no man could possess the object of his passion, seemed to make him happy during the remainder of a long life." The whole of this book is rich with similar details. We have merely extracted a single morsel or two, by way of specimen. The part in which the nuns are treated of, contains, indeed, not a few things which we should scarcely be pardoned for transplanting " pueris into pages liable to be seen virginibusque." What we have extracted, however, may, we dare say, be accepted as furnishing a sufficient justification of our own strong language at the outset. The population of Spain, then, was, at the time when Buonaparte invaded her soil, everywhere under the undisputed, at least unchallenged, influence of this despotic clergy. Holding an enormous proportion of the land in property-drawing tythes from all the rest-furnishing confessors and directors to every individual, from the King to the hangman-omnipotent over the women-artfully adapting themselves to the wants, and desires, and weaknesses of every class of society-this great body, embracing, be it observed, a vast number of deliberate infidels, predominated wide and far; and their rule there was no one to question. Second only to this influence, and most closely allied with it, was that of the Spanish nobility. They were, of course, universally educated by the clergy. The highest offices and emoluments of the church were, almost without an exception, in the hands of persons born within their own class. Humbled into the semblance of slavish submission at the court where they were compelled to reside during a great part of the year, the Spanish Signiors enjoyed, when visiting their vast estates in the country, a measure of feudal authority and influence, such as has been altogether undreamed of in England for the last two or three centuries. There the lord and the bishop were all in all; and both, it is fair to say, exerted their sway in a style well calculated to secure the love and attachment of the peasantry. In the capital, on the other hand, the court and the clergy were all in all; while, in the commercial sea-port towns, the influence of the nobles was, comparatively speaking, unknown; and the clergy held their sway, the only universal sway, divided with an aristrocracy of mere wealth. Such was the state of Spain when Buonaparte began that part of his career, of which, as it has been so recently and so ably sketched in the Quarterly Review, (article on Southey's History of the Peninsular War,) we shall say nothing at present. Such, in every particular, was the state of the Spanish mind-such were the predo minating influences under which it had been for centuries, and was still accustomed to exert its faculties, when that glorious burst of national enthusiasm took place, to which the voice of England answered with the note of an universal sympathy, and the vow of a fraternal co-operation. The priests, the nobles, the peasants, the whole people, rose as with one heart-it was a nation, not a faction, that called and it was a nation, not a faction, that made answer. Within the Spanish nation, how ever, there did already exist a faction, and this faction was destined to be the instrument for heaping upon it evils, of a new kind indeed, but not inferior to those under which it had long been contented to labour. A faction had been rearing itself unseen, and unnoticed, which was now to take advantage of a time of danger, that ought to have united all, for the rash promulgation of opinions that could not have, and had not, any other effect but that of rending asunder every bond of union that did exist; and which, but for the presence of the English army, must have been the means of laying the Spanish nation prostrate and fettered at the feet of Napoleon. It had been the curse of Spain, that whatever notions of civil liberty had found access among any classes of her population, had come in tainted with the Jacobinical extravagances of infidel and revolutionary France. The priests themselves had known no melium between their breviaries and the Dictionnaire Philosophique. And now, at the moment when the result of all those French principles and schemes was visibly embodied before their eyes, in the presence of a French invading army, headed by the lieutenants of a French military despot, even now it was that these rash men dared to pollute for the first time the ears of their own countrymen with the open enunciation of all the most violent and insolent dogmas of the creed of infidelity and Republicanism. These were the men who took to themselves the name of Liberales; they consisted for the most part of mercantile men-a few nobles, and but a few, joined with them and the Cortes of Cadiz con voked under their influence, and assuming a station to which it had no claim on pretences utterly false, promulgated the constitution of 1812. That promulgation was for the moment overlooked by many who were quite aware of what was meant, from the natural reluctance to anything like discussion in the then state of the Country-many, very many, rather than let the French know that the nation was not at one, thought themselves justified, and in so far, doubtless, they were so, in giving no external resistance. But this would not do. The prejudices of the great mass of the nation were insulted, at the same moment when the church and the nobility were thus openly attacked; and the church, robbed of her power and her patrimony, and the nobility robbed by one scratch of the pen, of all their privileges, nay, deprived of all power whatever in the state, and the people of Spain, accustomed for centuries to reverence their clergy, and obey their feudal lords, refused, from that moment, to continue that patriotic warfare, which, in its first movements, had commanded the admiration, and roused the hopes, of the world. They said, these men are not for our Spain, no, nor for the right Spain; they are for a Spain of their own imagining, an unchristian, a republican, a French Spain. If Frenchmen must rule us, we prefer living Joseph to dead Voltaire-let them fight their own battle-the cause is no longer ours.— -Sir Howard Douglas, in his excellent Pamphlet,* dwells at great length on the events we have thus rapidly glanced over-we must make room for his summing up of their consequences. "As nearly the whole of Spain was the time the Extraordinary Cortes was occupied by the troops of Napoleon at formed, very few of the members of that body were duly elected by the provinces and towns of old Spain which they were supposed to represent; and still fewer of the members who took their seats as deputies for the colonies, were chosen by the actual voice of any regularly constituted body of the people. But, as at that period there were many individuals whom the troubles of the war had driven from the provinces, and also many South * Crisis of Spain. American merchants, natives, and others, whom the state of affairs had likewise assembled at Cadiz, there was no difficulty in finding persons belonging, in some way or other, to the different kingdoms, cities, towns, and provinces of Spain, in the Old and New World, to become their ostensible representatives. Some of the members who took their scats for provinces occupied by the French, were chosen, however, in a certain manner, by the patriotic juntas, which, throughout the war, continued to exist in some parts of the country. But even this insufficient mode of election could not take place in towns which the French constantly occupied ; and the list given in the appendix, of the Members of the Extraordinary Cortes by which the constitution of 1812 was formed, will shew, to any person who will take the trouble to examine it with reference to the state of the colonies at that time, and to the permanent possession which the French held of most of the cities named in the list, that very few of the deputies were elected in such a manner, as to authorize them to proceed to the formation of a new constitution for the Spanish monarchy. Their powers, as a provisional government, would never have been questioned had they confined themselves to the provisional administration of the affairs of the kingdom, and to adopt moderate measures of reform; but so soon as they began to form a constitution which, as it quickly appeared by the debates given to the public by the reporters, was to be of a democratical tendency, and greatly resembling the French constitution of 1791, opposition, dissatisfaction, and disunion, began to shew themselves throughout Spain. "The nobles and the clergy soon saw how little their interests were to be considered in the new order of things. Many moderate men, of all descriptions, who would have concurred in any moderate scheme, were thrown at once into determined opposition to such violent measures. The great limitation, or rather the complete annihilation, of the royal prerogative,-the destruction of all feudal tenures, to the severe injury of the fortunes, rights of property, and consequence of the nobles and seniors,-the destruction of the power of the prelates, and in general of all ecclesiastical courts, -and the warning of the sanguinary contests which the constitution of 1791 led to in France, raised against the acts of the Cortes the most determined disapprobation whilst yet their work was in hand, and produced in man yparts of the VOL. XIV. kingdom the most violent opposition, when it came to be promulgated. Royalists, nobles, and clergy, were everywhere vociferous against it. The very persons who had been mainly instrumental in exciting and sustaining the opposition of the people to the French, forsook the cause, when they discovered that the government were acting in violent and direct disregard of the popular objects of the war. The bishop of Orense withdrew from the Regency, when he could no longer stem this tendency to democracy. The very pulpits, and the press in many parts of the country, that had sent forth those addresses which first stirred the people to opposition, now condemned the acts of the government, and in some places the people were distinctly told, that farther exertion would not, in fact, conduce to the great ends which they had taken arms to accomplish; for that a self-constituted government, though competent to administer provisionally the affairs of the country during the cap. tivity of the Sovereign, had made a constitution which was directly in opposition to the popular objects of the war, and which had politically deposed their king; and, consequently, that farther exertion for that government was rebelling against his authority. "We all remember how much the apathy of the Spanish people was complained of, at an advanced period of the war. We all remember how incomprehensible it appeared, that the enthusiastic spirit, which had been displayed at the beginning of the contest, should so soon evaporate. Here then is the solution; and it will account for the fact, that from the year 1811, the exertions of the peasantry were neutralized, and the only desultory operations which took place since that period, were those of Guerillas, (composed chiefly of the wrecks of the Spanish armies,) the greater number of which, and certainly the most active, were commanded by persons who were then, in fact, Liberales, (constitutionalists,) as is now proved by the parts which the Empecinado, Mina, Porlier, El Pastor, and many others, have since taken. "The Constitutionalists were by no means well inclined to Great Britain. They took advantage of her aid for their own views, but they would not be guided by her judgment. It was the pure, ancient, national spirit of the Spanish people that had allied itself with Great Britain in their noble struggle for independence, and not that of the democratical faction which now shewed its principles of government. The merchants of Cadiz, 4 R |