expenditure, and the imposition of additional taxation, caused several attempts to effect the overthrow of the administration, but they were unsuccessful. An insurrection broke out in February, 1844, in a regiment stationed at Torres Novas, and was not finally suppressed till the end of April, in the same year. Yet, notwithstanding these tumults, Portugal is, on the whole, progressive, and the people are improving. These beneficial changes may be owing more to the goodnature of the queen than to her great abilities; but she evidently desires to promote the happiness of her people; she is not a bigot; and the contrast between her character and that of Dom Miguel, should lead the Portuguese to thank Providence that Dona Maria is their sovereign. Her subjects did love her but she is gone from them; she died Nov. 13th, 1853, aged thirty-four years. In early youth she was beautiful and graceful, later in life she was too corpulent. Her education had been careful and suitable to her rank, and from the day she ascended the throne till her lamented death, the royal household was a model of purity and propriety. She was a true wife, a tender mother, and exemplary in all her duties.

MARIA CHRISTINA,

QUEEN dowager and ex-regent of Spain, daughter of Francisco Genari, king of Naples, was born in 1806. She was of the Bourbon line of princes; consequently, a distant relation of Ferdinand VII., king of Spain, to whom she was married, December, 1829. Ferdinand was then forty-five years of age, coarse, vulgar, and sensual; he had been married three times, and had treated each of his successive wives with the grossest abuse, -one was even supposed to have died by poison, administered by his hand; his constitution was exhausted by a dissolute life, and his mind, always inferior, had become nearly fatuous. Christina was in the beautiful bloom of youth and health, with a vigorous, though ill-regulated mind, and very captivating manners. It was not possible she could either love or esteem Ferdinand; but who had ever taught her these feelings were required towards her husband? Ambition and policy are the governing motives of royal (and, usually, of aristocratic) marriages. Shall we condemn Christina because she followed the rule of her order? Let us be just; though she doubtless married Ferdinand from selfish motives, she was a much better wife than he deserved, and her influence in annulling the absurd Salic law has been of advantage to the Spanish nation; because had Don Carlos, a fanatic monk, succeeded his brother Ferdinand, the awful horrors of religious despotism and persecutions, worse, far worse, even than their civil wars, would have deluged the country in blood, and stifled the last sigh of freedom.

The reputation of Christina had spread through the kingdom long before her arrival; and on her appearance in Madrid, her youth, beauty, and affability, realized the most sanguine expectations,

and filled all Spain with enthusiasm. She studieă from the first to make herself popular, and succeeded; she flattered the prejudices of the people, conformed to their usages, and adopted their dress. All this, aided by a countenance beaming with benevolence, and a charming smile which always played about her lips, soon caught the hearts of her subjects.

During her marriage with Ferdinand, she became the mother of two daughters; the present queen of Spain, Isabella II., born October 10, 1830, and Louisa, now wife of the Duke de Montpensier, born January 30, 1832. Through the influence of the queen, Ferdinand was induced, in March, 1830, to revoke the Salic law. The effect of this measure being to deprive the king's brother, Don Carlos, of the succession in favour of Isabella, gave rise to many intrigues during the latter part of Ferdinand's life, and after his death caused a dreadful civil war. During the illness of the king, in the last three years of his life, he appointed the queen regent of the kingdom, and on his death, in September, 1833, he left the regency, during the minority of Isabella, to Christina.

The death of the king was the signal for a war, which burst out at once in all parts of Spain. The country was almost equally divided between the adherents of Don Carlos, called Carlists, and the supporters of Isabella II., called Christinos, from the regent. After changing her ministers several times, Christina attempted to govern the kingdom without sharing her authority with any representative assembly. Finding herself unsuccessful in this, she appointed two ministers successively, who were to give a more popular form to the government. But the dissatisfaction still continuing, Maria Christina was forced, by a military insurrection at La Granja, where she was residing, on the 13th of April, 1836, to issue a decree, pledging herself to adopt the constitution of 1812, with such modifications as the Cortes might agree to. But afterwards, when the Cortes enacted the law of the "ayuntamientos," limiting the powers of the municipalities of the kingdom, it met with so much opposition, that it was found impossible to execute it. Maria Christina, in her perplexity, confided to Espartero, who was ceedingly popular, the formation of a new ministry. Espartero required her consent to the repeal of the obnoxious law, the dissolution of the existing Cortes, and the removal from her person of certain individuals. Unwilling to comply with these conditions, and unable otherwise to carry on the government longer, she resigned the regency, and retired into France, in October, 1840. Her husband, Munoz, for she had married her favourite, and the children she had by him, accompanied her. Munoz had been originally a private in the king's guard, and even during the king's life, Christina had received him to her confidence, and bestowed on him wealth and rank. There are also rumours and reports current, accusing her of illicit intercourse with this man while Ferdinand was living.

ex

In a popular work,* written by an American, these charges are reiterated, and also that both Isabella and Louisa belonged to Munoz. But a few pages further on, the author, apparently forgetting these assertions, remarks of the young queen, that "her father (Ferdinand) was one of the most worthless wretches who ever disgraced a throne;" and afterwards says, that Isabella "bears a marked resemblance to the portraits of Ferdinand VI."- which is somewhat remarkable, if she is the child of Munoz. In the same work, detailing the scandalous quarrels of Christina with the adherents of Don Carlos, even during the dying scene of Ferdinand VI., it is asserted that "the robust child, Louisa, came rushing from the nursery, and, with puny fist and more formidable tooth and nail, played a conspicuous part in the peril of the fray."

Ferdinand

Louisa was born January 30, 1832. died September 29, 1833, when this child was just twenty months old. If she could then aid her friends so effectually, it is no wonder the astute Louis Philippe desired to secure such a prodigy of female heroism for the advancement of his ambitious plans. Seriously, this story is so palpably false, that it need only be fairly stated to refute itself. We allude to it here, to show how little dependence is to be placed on the thousand slanderous reports put in circulation by the British press, (pity an American should ever adopt them,) concerning Christina. Her great crime is, that she preferred the French to the English alliance, and has been endeavouring, during her regency, and through her influence over Isabella, to free Spain from its dependence on the latter power.

Is Christina wrong in this? Does not every State and people, who experience British rule or Briti alliance, feel too heavy for endurance the weight of its sovereignty, and the waste of its selfishness? Let miserable Ireland, plundered India, bankrupt Jamaica, and opium-poisoned China, reply. In Napier's "History of the Peninsular War," the author, though a Briton, acknowledges the selfish policy of the English government in regard to Spain. He owns that the British army destroyed the manufactories of cotton and woollen goods which fell in their way; and which the French had spared. The Spanish manufactories have never recovered from this destructive policy of manufacturing England, then the dear ally of Spain.

Maria Christina is a woman of vigorous mind and far-seeing policy. She made Isabella queen; she sustained her on the throne; is it likely that she has been plotting to make this daughter's married life miserable? Had Christina been as wicked as the English press represents her, and desired to place Louisa on the throne, she would have found the means to do it,-following the example of a Spanish king. That Christina, who returned to Madrid in 1845, used her influence to prevent the marriage of Isabella with a Coburg, and to prevail on her to wed a Bourbon, is no doubt true; but this was done to thwart England and benefit Spain, Abbott's Kings and Queens

where her children were to rule, and not to tyrannize over her daughter.

Nor have the courts of Europe any right to point the finger of scorn at Christina, because she places her children by Munoz among the nobility of Spain; some of the highest among England's titled families are descended from the illegitimate children of their kings.

We are not vindicating the character of Christina because of examples of royal profligacy; if she has sinned, she should suffer; but vile accusations, or opprobrious epithets, unsupported by any evidence of guilt, are to be classed as slanders, which we do not choose to embody in our Record.

Was born in Staffordshire, England. Her father, James Caldwell, Esq., was Recorder of the borough of Newcastle-under-Line, and also Deputy Lieutenant of the county of Stafford. He was not a magistrate, because, being in principle a dissenter, he refused to qualify by an oath of adherence to the Established Church of England; yet he was highly esteemed, and was a man of remarkable abilities. His fourth daughter was Anne Caldwell, now Mrs. Marsh, who, in talents and character, strikingly resembles her father, and does honour to the careful education he bestowed upon her.

The paternal care and tenderness Mrs. Marsh had experienced, may have had some influence on the manner of her first appearance in authorship. She took, as is well known, the pseudonyme of "An Old Man;" but she is by no means to be confounded with those authoresses who, of late, have abdicated the feminine appellation, together with the delicacy and decorum which are its appropriate boast. Her first production, "The Old Man's Tales," was published in 1837, and was soon followed by "Woods and Fields;" both works were simple in construction and affecting in their catastrophes, and both deeply moved the public heart to sympathize with these sad creations of genius. The power of the writer was universal.7 acknowledged; though the influence of such works

From "Angela."

WOMAN'S INFLUENCE.

The author of the first of this series of imaginative works was, of course, supposed to belong to the masculine gender; but the truth was not long concealed. Mrs. Marsh's writings are most essentially feminine; none but a woman could have penned them. That gushing spring of tenderness was never placed in a man's bosom; or, if it were, it would have been dried up by passion, or frozen by mingling with the selfish current of out-of-door life, long before the age of book-making had arrived. Mrs. Marsh has a peculiar gift of the pathetic; for the most part, it is difficult to read her stories without tears. You may criticise these stories; you may point out incongruities, errors of style and of language; yet they have a mastery over your feelings; they cause emotions which you cannot control-and this is the power of genius, ay, genius itself. Her tender epithets and prodigal use of "pet names" may be censured; few writers could so constantly indulge themselves in this way without taking the fatal "step" into the "ridiculous," which is never to be redeemed. But no candid reader can ever accuse Mrs. Marsh of affectation; she writes spontaneously, and it is evident she throws herself into the situations she describes, and pours out the overflowings of a mind of deep sensibility and tenderness.

Without cramming the reader with "morality in doses," Mrs. Marsh never lets an occasion pass for enforcing truth and virtue; her works are pervaded by a spirit of gentle piety, and benevolence is evidently a strong principle in her nature. Her later productions, though not so painfully interesting as the two first, show more knowledge, judgment, and right discipline of mind; yet one fault, which belongs to many female novelists, may be noted-too many characters and too many incidents are crowded in each work. Still, "Angela" is one of the most charming pictures of disinterested, struggling virtue, English literature can boast; and this work and "Mordaunt Hall" have obtained the notice and eulogiums of the most eminent French critics.

Mrs. Marsh is very happy in delineations of rural scenery; she revels in describing parks and gardens; these pictures are, probably, idealized. Such hues of beauty so justly blended; such streams and shades; such summer terraces and poetic groves, might, perhaps, be sought in vain through "Merry England." But it is the province of the fine arts to embellish; we go to them for

How much influence woman exercises in society! They need not busy and bestir themselves to increase it; the responsibility under which they lie is heavy enough as it is.

It is a trite remark, this; but I wish that all women could be brought conscientiously to reflect, as some few of them certainly do, upon the account they shall be able to render for the power they do, or might have exercised.

To say nothing of that brief but despotic sway which every woman possesses over the man in love with her-a power immense, unaccountable, invaluable; but in general so evanescent as but to make a brilliant episode in the tale of life- how almost immeasurable is the influence exercised by wives, sisters, friends, and, most of all, by mothers!

Upon the mother, most of all, the destiny of the man, so far as human means are to be regarded, depends. Fearful responsibility! and by too many mothers how carelessly, how thoughtlessly, how frivolously, how almost wickedly, is the obligation discharged. How carelessly, at the very outset, is the young child left in the nursery, abandoned to the management and training of, at best, an ignorant, inefficient nurse; or too often, far, far worse, to an unprincipled or interested one ! From these imperfect influences, to say the very best of them, at times assisted by those of the footman, groom, and other inhabitants of the stable-yard, to be at once handed over to the chance direction of a school-chance direction, I say, for in the very best of schools so much must necessarily depend upon chance-upon chances of observation upon the part of the master-chance companions-chance temptations-chance impressions that without- a most serious and correct attention to the guiding influences from home, the boy is left exposed to all sorts of false directions, some of which it is almost certain he will follow. Thus he grows up to be a man, imperfect and contradictory; his moral character unformed -his aspirations ill-directed-his temper undisciplined-his principles unsettled. He enters life an ill-trained steed; and the best that can be hoped for him is, that the severe lash of disappointment, contradiction, and suffering, will, during the course of his career, supply the omissions of his youth, and train him at last, through much enduring, to that point from which a good education would have started him.

EMPLOYMENT.

Let a lady provide herself with active and useful employment to fill up a large portion of every day, and feed and enlarge her mind by reading books worth reading during the other; and let her read with selection, and select with care. At all events, if she choose to employ her time in reading without selection, let her not think she is employing herself well.

From "The Wilmingtons."

A SAD SPECTACLE.

The poor sufferer died in doubt, irresolution, and ill-defined terrors, as she had lived. She was a believer without a strengthening faith; amiable and affectionate, without selfdevotion and courage; sensible of her defects, repentant, and contrite, without power to correct, or effort to amend.

Her life had been like a confused skein of delicate and valuable thread, tangled for want of careful development. She came to the end of it, and all was still confusion, and all useless in spite of its adaptation to so many fine purposes; and may those in danger of the same waste of existence, for want of courage to meet its demands and defy its pains, and they are many,-pause upon the slight sketch of this ineffectual character. Forbear to sigh, for sighs are weakness, but brace up the feeble knees, and endeavour to amend.

A NARROW MIND.

Mrs. Vernon was a very excellent woman, in that form of excellence which was the result of the strict but somewhat narrow education of many years ago. She thought justly, but she judged rigidly. She was ready to make every personal sacrifice to duty herself, but she was too fond to impose her own notions of duty upon others. She was sympathetic and kind where she understood the sentiment before her, but she was cold, and almost pitiless, to sorrow of which she could not appreciate the cause; and what she could not understand was sure to appear to her unreasonable. She was enthusiastic in her love of the excellence which she comprehended, but some of the finer forms of excellence she did not comprehend. Then, she had not a shadow of indulgence for the frailties of our nature. Every thing took a positive form with her, for good or bad. She had not breadth of understanding sufficient to take in the whole of a matter, and strike the balance of equity between contending qualities.

From "Mordaunt Hall."

AN ENGLISH GARDEN.

A beautiful garden it was, the sun brightly shining, and every thing around breathing freshness and sweetness. She passed through the arched walk amid the thick shrubberies, which led to the fine gardens of Mordaunt Hall.

The walls were lofty, and covered with fruittrees; and the beds, laid out in fine symmetrical order, were filled with rows of vegetables in prodigious abundance, growing with a luxuriance and in a profusion that showed neither pains nor exThe pense was spared upon their cultivation. area of two acres thus occupied was traversed each way by a broad gravel-walk, on either side of which were beds filled with gay, but common, flowers; with knots of roses from distance to distance, alternating with honeysuckles, all cut in low, round bushes. The bloom of these was gone, but there was no deficiency, as yet, of gay coloring; for rich tufts of China asters, purple and

pink convolvuluses, African marigolds, sun-flowers, purple phlox, and, in short, an abundance of those common though autumn flowers, of which I, old man as I am, find myself, from association, so fond, were growing there. Opposite to the door at which she entered, the long line of forcing-houses was glittering in the morning sun. There were vines, loaded with purple and amber bunches of fruit growing in inexhaustible profusion; while the crimson peaches and green and purple figs, in their full ripeness, were peeping temptingly among their leaves. The abundance of every thing around was so great, that it was evidently impossible that the family could consume one half of what was thus produced; and, in spite of the calls upon Penny's stores, resulting from the recent wedding-day, over-ripe fruit strewed the ground unheeded, while peas and bean-stalks, still loaded, were blackening and yellowing in the sun; and vegetables running on all sides to waste.

This prodigality of wealth was, however, the only thing that at all militated, to the judicious eye, against the pleasure afforded by the spectacie of these fine, well-ordered gardens.

The dew hung sparkling upon the leaves and flowers, the sun shone reflected from a plashing fountain, that played in the middle of a small pond in the centre of the garden, where the walks crossed. The sweet smell of the plants, the fresh, pure air of the morning playing upon her cheek, and the early birds hopping about, and along the walks, saluting her with their cheerful carols and chirpings, filled her with a sensation of unusual delight, as Alice opened for her the garden door.

THE CHRISTIAN.

He who walks with God, who lives in his presence, whose mind is filled with the image of wisdom far above human wisdom, goodness far above human goodness, justice to which a last appeal may be made, and with whom justice will ever be found he who sees his beauty in this garb of external nature, so exquisite an exposition of the Divine mind; for, shattered and disordered as it is by some evidently external force, enough remains to prove the beauty, grace, and order of the unblemished original-he who does this lives in a new element. His thoughts, his imagination, his views, are purified and elevated.

SIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES. Oh, vice is a hideous thing!

A hideous, dark mystery-the mystery of iniquity! Its secret springs are hidden from our view, but its more obvious causes and consequences are palpable and demonstrable; and it is with its consequences, in our narrow circle of knowledge, that we alone should attempt to deal.

Many subtle and questioning intellects perplex themselves with the inquiry, Whence the remote, original cause of the sin and evil around us, and why?-a question it is not given to any man, under the condition of our present existence, to answer; but scarcely any one sufficiently fixes his attention upon that which it is our main business to know, and which we can know: the efficient

causes, and more especially the consequences, of ein.

Oh, if we steadily kept our minds alive to this most important subject of thought; if men, before they did evil, would only remember its inevitable results; if all the wide-extended sufferings, the sorrows, the pains, the tears, inevitably following upon wrong, were but present to the wrong-doer at the moment of his crime, it is scarcely possible that heart of flesh could resist the piteous picture; that heart of man but must turn appalled from the criminal course upon which he was about to enter.

But we are selfish, careless, unreflecting, blinded by inclination and passion, or by that darkness worse than death which attends upon the slothful indifference to questions of right and wrong. Men pass from day to day, yielding to the temptations of covetousness or pleasure, thoughtless of consequences to themselves in many cases, almost utterly insensible as regards the results to others.

The true moral painter's part it is to hold up a faithful picture to the heart of the long succession of evils which from one crime spring.

The long agonies of a woman's heart, whose affections have been disappointed by the carelessness with which men in ordinary society give rise, by their attentions, to feelings which are the legitimate and natural return of such attentions, is a very serious breach of the law of doing as we would desire to be done by; a breach upon which they, most of them, never reflect at all: but light is this indeed to the crime here perpetrated.

A man should be forced to look steadily into the gulf of despair or far, far, far worse-of degradation and moral ruin into which, for the gratification of the idlest vanity or licentious passion, he plunges a young, innocent, trusting creature, whose only error, it may be, was to love him too well. Men, if they would reflect, must and would shudder and turn aghast from the horrid, horrid spectacle!

But they will not reflect, they will not learn to shudder; the subject is painful, and they pass it from their mind, with a few wicked commonplaces, at which they are too ready. Ridley's treachery was double-dyed in wickedness; but had he not carried his deceit so far-had his victim been a more easy prey, would her fate have been less cruel? As for the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, of those thus led to folly, no one, of course, thinks of them. No man, the slave of his own vices, can be expected to cast a thought upon them; the sum of their misery is never even calculated- -the figures are not even set down.

moral impressions of a child whose being sprang from a parent's sin?" I ask you only to think of the dark confusion of affections and principles, on the hardness and indifference, or both, which must be the result. Did Ridley, intelligent, reflecting, a weigher of things, a deep searcher into metaphysical and moral truths, a man with at least all the intellectual elements which ought to form a great man-did Ridley ever trouble himself once to consider these things, things so nearly connected with his own and with another's soul? No, certainly.

His was an imagination-ah, were mine as bright!-that might have painted to him, in living images, all the consequences of his criminal self-indulgence and most wicked treachery. His mind had power, had it possessed the will, to draw with the pencil of Dante, the appalling picture of that inner hell to which he had condemned the being he pretended to love-once had loved. And the poor father!-the agonies of the gentle, unoffending man, who had welcomed him so hospitably under his lowly roof; whose heart was so full of kind affections, so free from guile, or jealousy, or pride! Yes, Ridley possessed power to have pictured in a way my feeble hand vainly attempts to do, the long death of the soul, the awful dark despair, of a father wounded in a daughter's

honour.

A parent disgraced in his own loving, innocent child. He shall render a heavier account for all this, because he is great, and gifted, and wise, and powerful, and fitted to guide a state and rule the interests of a nation-he shall be the less forgiven, because in the plenitude of his powers he has chosen to step aside to crush a poor little insect in its humble path- he shall be the less forgiven, because the wider the knowledge, and the higher the intellect, and the larger the observation, so much the greater is the power of estimating the claims and appreciating the sufferings of whatever breathes; and that the thoughtless cruelty which we lament and pardon in the untutored child, is odious, is execrable in the man!

• ILLEGITIMACY.

Nothing can compensate to any child the simple fact meeting us at the outset, that of belonging to parents not legally and inseparably united.

This is no evil created, as some have perhaps been led to think, by the artificial arrangements and conventions of man in society; its source is in nature-in that nature, the Author of which made marriage coeval with the creation of man; healthfully to rear the precious plant wherein lies the hidden germ of eternity, requires the element of home-and marriage is the foundation of home. Wherever or howsoever the sacredness of marriage is not reverenced, depend upon it, there the man will ever be found imperfectly developed.

The legitimate orphan child, be he who he may, or where he may, has one great advantage with which he starts in life: his place is marked; he is to set out from the place occupied by his parents Every well-meaning friend has at once a sort of measure given him as to how he ought to be treated