cerity of its pledges, and to develope the | in the future, found a suitable expression in riches of this noble island. A great experi- the address of the Queen's ministers to their ment will soon be in progress in the attempt to raise tropical produce by free labour. We believe it will be a successful one. It must, should it so prove, effect an entire revolution in the present colonial economy of Spain. There will no longer be even a pretext for conniving at the slave trade, and the gradual extinction of slavery within the Spanish dominions will be assured. No one can desire a sudden emancipation of the Negro race in Cuba, Porto Rico, or in any other portion of the world, but a policy of progressive amelioration and ultimate freedom must and will be the necessary result. We believe such a consummation to be the sincere wish of the Spanish people.

Sovereign on the restoration of San Domingo to the Crown. God,' they say, 'who during a period the memory of which is imperishable exalted this monarchy, and who has preserved the purity of its reputation in the midst of long and terrible trials, has permitted it to recover from its past weakness, and to be able to embrace a people who were separated from its bosom in days of perturbation and debility which will never return.' The revival of Spain can excite in this coun try no feeling but one of unqualified satisfaction. 'Great Britain and Spain,' in the words of Lord Russell, 'have for long periods of time, and in circumstances of high moment to each, been faithful and active allies, and Spain, while retaining her originality of their alliance has been greatly useful and character, is far from being so much in the highly honourable to both. It is a fundarear of modern nations as is sometimes sup- mental maxim of British policy to wish well posed.* Much that may yet be objectionable to Spain, and earnestly to desire her welfare in her government she owes to the principles and prosperity."* While endeavouring to on which she was long ruled. From the bring prominently forward the very strong time of the Arab invasion down to the con- grounds which exist for believing that she is quest of Granada this high-minded people at length arousing herself and taking the had scarcely any political intercourse with right course of industry and enterprise, we the rest of Europe. They had little know- have left ourselves no room to notice the ledge of anything beyond their mountain many attractions of the country which are barrier; and their isolation, combined with pleasantly set forth in the Letters from their strong religious temperament, made Spain,' the work of a very accomplished them the willing victims of ecclesiastical am- man. Neither have we entered at length bition. Spain long tried to impose her yoke upon the history of the court or the conand her faith upon Europe. It was a rash duct of the political leaders of Spain; and in and hopeless struggle against the laws of so- particular we have with some difficulty abciety; and, baffled in the enterprise, she sank stained from adverting at present to certain into profound and apparently hopeless ex- financial shortcomings of the Spanish Gohaustion. It is but a corpse that I have re-vernment, because we are persuaded that animated,' said Alberoni, the minister of Philip V., when contemplating the results of the temporary energy he had infused into the State; and when I die, it will again quietly lay itself down in its tomb. But the nation never lost its vitality, and the national character survived the national humiliation. The royal authority has stood unshaken amidst all the political tempests that have desolated the Spanish peninsula. Indeed the people can appreciate no government of which monarchy is not the presiding principle, and they are but too prone to consider it as the only substantial power of the State. Loyalty is an inextinguishable passion, and the throne is based on ancient traditions, although surrounded and supported by modern institutions.

เ

The feeling of the Spanish people on the return of prosperity, and their just confidence

Such, at least, is the opinion of a recent French writer of great intelligence. See 'L'Espagne en 1860,' par Vidal.

the time cannot be far distant when it will proudly redeem the honour of the country, and efface from its escutcheon a great and lamentable blot.

ART. VI.—1. Addresses delivered on different Public Occasions by His Royal Highness the Prince Albert. 1857.

2. Prince Albert's Speeches. People's Edition.

THERE are events--the paralysing nature of which seems to arrest the hand of Time himself, causing a recoil, equally from the Past and the Future, in which the mind of an individual or of a nation stands for awhile giddily still, like a ship struck between two seas. Of this character is the event under which

* Despatch from Lord J. Russell to Mr. Edwardes, May 14, 1861.

the country is still stunned-the death of the | Prince Consort. We were all at the busy work or idle play of life, adding house to house and field to field, preparing for a great mart of the inventions and productions of the civilized world, and seeing no cloud, except one, which we made equally sure to repel or disperse; when suddenly, and to many without the slightest preparation, there appeared a handwriting on the wall, and the millions of the land gazed upon it with sorrowful anxiety. The metaphor goes no further. For whom did that writing concern? Not the tyrant swelling with pride, or the Sybarite revelling in excess; not one who, in any sense, was using the sacred things of the Lord's temple for unhallowed purposes, but a Prince, gentle, pure, and upright, wise and good. Let us not, however, act or speak as if the death of the righteous, even in the vigour of his days and the zenith of his usefulness, were a strange, or, in every sense, an evil thing, in this imperfect world. Much mercy has been shown by the Dispenser of events. He has been cut off by no accident harrowing the soul with second causes-by no assassin sullying our resignation with feelings of resentment. He has died with his own beloved ones about him, cared for and tended by the highest skill in the land; with the prayers of multitudes of the subjects of that agonized Lady besieging Heaven, all importunate for his life, and the wail of a great nation rising muffled about his couch. It is sufficient that in the hands of the Lord are the issues of life and death, and that without His knowledge not a sparrow falls to the ground.

gularity as its light. The other, endowed
with that perfect balance of mental powers
and moral qualities-the totus teres-which
needs to be known as a whole before it can
be appreciated in its parts; appealing not to
our love of the marvellous, or thirst for ex-
citement, but to our deeper sympathies and
nobler aspirations, and therefore slow to find
favour in a world more quickly caught by
dazzling eccentricities than by the steady light
of a general superiority of being. Of this last
class of character, and from the station he
occupied and the opportunities he enjoyed,
one of the most perfect examples which his-
tory will, perhaps, ever record, was that illus-
trious man whose career is thus early closed.

Looking back now at the time when the
Prince first came to this country, a young
and untried foreigner, to whom we gave so
much, and from whom we expected so little, the
nation seems to have been strangely blind to
the promise which we now feel always beam-
ed from that firm and serene brow. There
was no outburst of congratulation that a lot
so brilliant should have fallen, to all appear-
ances, so auspiciously. We waited and
watched, with no very eager interest, pre-
pared rather to discover those errors and
shortcomings known to be inseparable from
youth-and not youth only-and royalty,
than to hail any dawning signs of a great and
exceptional career. Nor was our blindness
intentional or malicious. Behind the consti-
tutional restraints imposed on all English
monarchs, to which the other Self of a reign-
ing Queen was necessarily subject-restraints
imposed purposely to neutralize the personal
propensities of the individual, and to level
each in succession to the same safe and just
medium-from behind these limits royalty
assumes but a colourless, however imposing,
character to the great mass of the people. If
the private life be outwardly decorous, little
is said, and that little often not true.

Nor let it either ungratefully and untruly be said that we have utterly lost him whom we so deeply lament. A life spent among us for above twenty years in one ceaseless stream of good and wise works, no death of the body can be said to sweep away. In the light of a glorious example, long watched by the good with ever-increasing admiration, But to say nothing of this incapacity of that life is ours still. Let us, therefore, en-judging, what right had we to raise any hopes deavour, in all humility, to trace something beyond that same measure of respectability of the character and habits of a mind which and decorum? What precedent had we for has left as a legacy a standard of conduct so a Prince leading a life, setting an example, far raised above all former precedent; enlist- and creating for himself a carcer, for the good ing the help of his own honoured words in of a country, such as we now proudly, fondly, our task, by referring, as we proceed, to that and sadly look back upon? If any one had small volume of his 'Speeches' on various ventured to prophesy that this untried youth public occasions, wherein the mind may be and foreigner was to be foremost in the ranks said to have traced an unassailable record of of every form of intelligence, foremost in itself. plans of active philanthropy, foremost in diligence, order, and judgment, in purity of morals, and the practice of every domestic virtue, he would have been scouted as a dreamer of dreams. A youth just twenty years of age, and yet fully furnished in every scholarly department of learning and taste; a modern

There are two classes of character to which

the term greatness is applied. The one possessing gorgeous powers, unsustained by any corresponding elevation of the whole man, which crosses our path in this world like a meteor, attracting notice as much by its irre

These speeches have a further and incidental interest as the record of the characteristic Associations which have grown in this country during these last fastest and fullest years; marking nothing more strikingly than the decline of that sphere of party for which it was the Prince's gain, not loss, to be ineligible.

small things as in great, from all that could | mark. But here again the lofty tone of the compromise the young and generous Sove- mind, in all its parts, ensured his success. reign at his side. This speech was uttered at Casting aside all ambition of personal display, a dinner at the Merchant Taylors' Company, he sought simply and grandly to fathom the when, thanking them for his admission as a principles of whatever subject he had in freeman, the Prince added, 'I remember well hand, bringing to bear upon it a profoundness with what regret, when, shortly after I came of thought and unstudied nobility of lanof age, the Companies of the Goldsmiths and guage, which, for all the national self-complaFishmongers offered me their freedom, I cency, will ever remain the newest thing an found myself compelled to decline this honour; English public can hear. And the truth was being informed that, identified as they were mighty and always prevailed, and the most by historical traditions with two opposite eloquent of his hearers acknowledged that parties, and still representing these parties, I a new grace, beyond the reach of art, had could make a choice only of one of them; been won in their own national accomplishand being fully sensible that, like the Sove- ment. The man who sees clearly, thinks reign to whom I had just been united, and to correctly, reasons profoundly, and knows devote my whole existence to whom it had largely, has power over all subjects fitted for become my privilege, I could belong only to the human mind to investigate. Wonder the nation at large-free from the trammels therefore ceases as admiration and respect and above the dissensions of political parties.' rise, as we view the varied topics over which But if it was right and wise to forbear all this gifted individual showed equal power. exercise of personal influence, until convinced of its compatibility with that Dignity and that pleasure which alone he studied, it was as difficult, most would have supposed, to know how to apply it within the limits of his position, when convinced that he might do so with propriety. And here the intellectual superiority of the mind at once asserts itself. As Raphael compelled the unfavouring spaces of the Farnesina to minister to the inspiration of some of his finest compositions, so it has ever been the test of true greatness to convert untoward conditions into occasions of the highest success. We find one chief clue to the Prince's unparalleled career in one of those pregnant sentences-we shall later quote it with its context-addressed to a large and cultivated assembly, which startled his hearers into the recognition of a new and remarkable individuality. 'Gentlemen, I conceive it to be the duty of every educated person closely to watch the time in which he lives, and, as far as in him lies, to add his humble mite of individual exertion for the accomplishment of what he conceives Providence to have ordained.' These are the words of a man, who, under the modest profession of studying his own time, was ever reaching forward to convictions far in advance of it; and who, while supposed to be denied the field of politics, quietly instructed the world in that truest science of the politician, which prevents evil by anticipating the coming need.

In a country where scarcely a day passes without examples of the oratory of the most gifted and practised of her children, it was no small test of a Prince, foreign in birth and education, to enter the lists of public speaking, and measure himself against a standard no less peculiar to ourselves than high in

It may be observed that Prince Albert had, from an early period, been solicited to become the President of such philanthropic Societies as were supposed not to commit him on any political topics; a chary compliment which he turned in the end nobly against us.

The first occasion on which His Royal Highness took part in a public meeting was one which the Speeches' do not record. It was held on the 1st June, 1840, when, as President of the 'Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade,' he took the chair at Exeter Hall. Here he spoke a few words upon the object of the meeting, which, there is no reason to doubt, were in every sense his own; showing, as they do, a simplicity and fitness which link them naturally with his maturer expressions. But his extreme youth (he was then not twenty-one) caused little importance to be attached to this appearance. He was thought a great catch for a benevolent party, but the very allusions made in his presence to the necessity for banishing politics for that day, the merit claimed for the intention, and the obvious difficulty of adhering to it, betrayed the total absence of that larger spirit which was mainly to be fostered by that then little known youthful President.

·

A second occasion, also unnoticed in the collection of Speeches,' occurred on the 11th May, 1842, when Prince Albert filled