present

been uncommon: and the prolongation of the duties of the body may be necessary now from the nature of the funds to be distributed. Nor is it necessary to suppose that any direct attempt against the liberties and independence of the Church of England has been here planned by the ministers of the Crown, whatever may have been contemplated by the sectarian members of the House of Commons. But undoubtedly a machine has been constructed, which, if permitted to establish itself, and proceed any farther with its present operations, may, in a very few years, lay the Church prostrate at the feet of any Irish demagogue or Socinian manufacturer who may happen, for the curse of his country, to be thrust into power in the legislature.

The Bishop of Exeter was the first to point out the magnitude of this danger, and we refer to his lordship's last charge for the best exhibition of its character*. We are indeed in a great strait. We have made the monarch, in his own person, the supreme ruler of the Church—and the monarch is now in the hands of a majority of the House of Commons-a majority no longer secured even as lukewarm nominal members of its religious communion. And yet a body has been established which, with all its seeming precaution of oaths, and its conditions of co-operation, may soon be com pletely manageable by any minister of the Crown, whoever he be. It is fixed on an independent basis-has its seals, its officers, its power of administering oaths and examining witnesses-and has become, in fact, the depository of a very large portion of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the king. It commences with proposing to cut down our cathedral institutions to such a point that their longer existence will be impossible-to make a vital change in their patronage-to take into its hands a considerable portion of the Episcopal revenues and distribute them to the bishops as their stipendiaries-to interfere with the parochial superintendence of bishops within their own dioceses-and to receive and distribute at will a large portion of ecclesiastical revenue, which was never intended to be so distributed, least of all by such a body.

The State, that is, its present miserable representatives, the Commons of Great Britain, are on the verge of apostatizing from the Church, and dragging the nation with them by the help of a papistical majority. One more election may decide the act; and with all the cheering hopes before us, no one can look without intense anxiety to the possibility of their frustration. Is this a

The reader will find the character of this Commission further expounded in Mr. Benson's admirable Letter to the Bishop of Lincoln, which reaches us as this article is passing through the press.

time

time for creating any power-for permitting any precedentwhich after such an apostacy may be turned against the Church? Is it not a time for the most careful observation and vigilance; for checking every fresh encroachment of the State; for marking the limits of her power; for securing retreats and bulwarks for the Christian faith in any emergency? Let the people of England remember that they are the Church, and not the clergy-that their liberties are at stake, and their religion threatened-and they will recall themselves to thought and action. We trust that something more than a few faint remonstrances-that a general movement throughout the country will be roused in opposition to these fearful innovations. We trust that one unhappy precedent in the history of the late act will never again be followed-that no further recommendations of the Commission will be assented. to by the Crown, till the bishops at large have been consulted and have sanctioned them. We trust that a little reflection will cancel the errors already committed, and will wholly and entirely suppress the alterations proposed for the future; and that the Church will be left to herself to work out, not by statutes and bills, but by the energy of her own heart, and the reviving spirit of her ancestors, the salvation of herself, and in herself the salvation of the country.

ART. VIII.-Portugal and Gallicia, with a Review of the Social and Political State of the Basque Provinces, and a few Remarks on Recent Events in Spain. 2 vols. post Svo.

1837.

THIS

Lond.

HIS is a very remarkable work. It is not only a graphic description of the face of the country, and an impartial and sagacious account of the moral and political condition of Spain and Portugal; but it relates also a series of personal adventures and perils, very unusual in modern Europe; and which, while they do honour to the spirit of him who sought information at such risks, exhibit more of the real state of the Iberian Peninsula than could have been obtained by a less ardent and less intrepid inquirer.

There is no name in the title-page, but the author is known to be the Earl of Carnarvon, who seems to have combined the modern thirst for information with the adventurous spirit of the ancient Herberts, and who has the additional quality of being a very elegant and amusing writer.

In July 1827, his Lordship (then Lord Porchester) embarked on board a steam-packet for Lisbon, where he landed on the 2nd

of

of August. Our readers will recollect that this was the crisis when a kind of impromptu constitution, which Dom* Pedro of Brazil had hastily concocted at Rio, was imposed on the Portuguese people, under the auspices of an English army occupying the capital and of an English fleet in the Tagus. Our readers will also recollect what we before said of the anomaly which this affair exhibited, of a foreign potentate-for such the Emperor of Brazil was by his own admission-assuming, under the pretexts of a liberal policy and of a regard for popular rights, to dictate to a distant and independent nation a constitution of his own personal manufacture; the most daring exertion of the old divine right of despotism-not even excepting Buonaparte's attempts in the same line-that had ever been exhibited. The real object of this imperial liberalism was soon seen! Pedro had discovered that his position at Rio was untenable, and he devised this plan of conferring the crown on his then infant daughter, as the only means of preventing the legal and really constitutional settlement of the kingdom under the right heir, and of keeping the throne of Portugal open for his own occupation whenever he might be able to make his escape from the perilous thraldom of his Brazilian empire. The Portuguese nation were indignant at this insulting juggle. They endeavoured to throw off this foreign imposition. Their resistance, and the interference of other powers (particularly England and France), gave the rights of the puppet queen a consistency which Pedro, when he at last escaped from Rio, found to his great disappointment he could not in the first moment shake-and he therefore was obliged to appear in the character of defender of the throne which he intended to have filled in his own right; but no one who knows anything of the facts can doubt that to the last he entertained those hopes, and would probably have been, for a time at least, successful in the attempt, but that he, most opportunely for the constitutional party, died, and left his daughter in undivided possession of the whole of the liberal support, foreign and domestic. We shall not recapitulate the proofs which we formerly advanced (Quart. Rev. vol. xlix. p. 829) to show that by the fundamental constitution of Portugal, enacted by the Cortes of Lamego in 1145, and confirmed on the

The Spaniards spell the word Don-the Portuguese always Dom.

We never could satisfy ourselves of the strict propriety of this part of Mr. Canning's policy-though it stood on very different grounds from our recent intervention -having been required under ancient treaties against a threatened invasion from Spain. The invasion we always believed to be a problematical danger; but such as it was, it soon vanished altogether, and the Duke of Wellington's government very properly recalled our forces.

We request our readers to turn to that article where the question of the Portuguese succession is treated on grounds which have not been, and which, we believe, cannot be, contradicted either in law or in fact.

accession

accession of the house of Braganza in 1640, which is at once the Bill of Rights' and Act of Settlement' of Portugal, Dom Miguel was the legal heir to the Portuguese throne. The fact is as indisputable as that William IV. has a better claim to the throne of England than the Duchess of Angoulême, or any other foreign descendant of James II. Such was Dom Miguel's right in lawwhat his claim was under the modern doctrine of the right of a people to choose their own sovereign, Lord Carnarvon will tell us by very emphatical facts. So that in whatever way the question could be discussed-whether on constitutional right or on popular favour-there is no doubt-not the slightest, we will venture to assert-that Dom Miguel was the rightful sovereign of Portugal; and that if it had not been for foreign intervention (so deprecated by the liberals in principle, but so shamefully employed in practice) he would have been, by the all but unanimous concurrence of the nation, maintained on the throne to which the constitution called him, and which the nation itself had forced him to ascend. We have already said (ib. 535) that between Pedro, Maria de Gloria, and Miguel, 'we do not care a fig, and would not cast our old pen into the balance in favour of any one of them personally;' nor do we think that English interests were in any way concerned in the litigation-but historical truth obliges us to re-assert as a matter of fact, that such was the true state of the question of the Portuguese succession.

While the first introductory scenes of this great drama of fraud and violence were playing, Lord Carnarvon arrived in Lisbon; and it is not too much to say that, although his lordship is too fair and too sagacious a man to have implicitly adopted ex-parte prepossessions, the inclination of his mind was originally in favour of the new constitution, which by its plausible professions naturally won the good-will of the friends of civil and religious liberty. His lordship appears to have been converted by personal experience from his original impressions; and his final testimony, therefore, against the liberal policy of England both in Portugal and Spain, is of the greatest authority, and indeed we think ought to be, even with the most determined Pedroites and Christinos of this country, quite decisive-with the Pedroites and Christinos of the Peninsula, neither it nor any other appeal to principles of truth and justice can of course have any effect, seeing that their own personal interests, place, power, and impunity are deeply concerned with the maintenance of that illegal and unjust system of which the British cabinet are, if not the original promoters, at least the most efficient support.

We regret that we cannot consider Lord Carnarvon's book in a merely literary view, and confine our observations to the at once

accurate

accurate and brilliant description of his travels in Portugal and Spain. He is an enthusiastic yet discriminating admirer of the beauties of nature, which, he never fails to people, as it were, with lively and characteristic sketches of the costume, manners, and morals of the inhabitants. What the face of the country offers to him or to any traveller, he describes with great clearness and power, but he goes in quest of what few travellers give themselves much trouble to investigate-the feelings and habits, the social and intellectual condition of the people; but in this research he has naturally fallen in with matters of such pressing political interest and importance, as must necessarily absorb the greater share of the attention either of reader or reviewer,

On the 24th of August, 1827, his lordship set out for a tour through the centre and north of Portugal and the adjoining Spanish province of Gallicia. He had already made an excursion to Cintra -occupied by the British Guards: he now proceeded by Mafra, Alcobaça, and Batalha towards Oporto. On the banks of the Mondego he met a labourer, who greeted him with a heartfelt Vivan los Ingleses,' the first and last tribute of popular enthusiasm towards my country that my ear met in Portugal.' (vol. i. p. 45.) We shall see, by and by, that the once revered and beloved character of an Englishman has been changed, by our impolitic intervention, into a positive incentive to insult; and although in the better regulated countries of Europe there is not the same danger which Lord Carnarvon experienced, yet we believe every recent continental traveller must have seen that an Englishman is visited with the sins of his government, in the dislike and jealousy with which he is everywhere regarded, and particularly in those quarters where the name of England had been, for the last hundred and fifty years, most respected and honoured. The policy of Lord Palmerston has cooled our friends and heated our enemies; and, what is worse, has made such breaches in the international law of Europe, as may hereafter afford precedents, out of our own book, dangerous to our national existence.

.

At Oporto Lord Carnarvon was kindly received by the governor, Count Villa Flor, and his beautiful lady. The count was one of the chiefs of the constitutional party, and was entrusted with the command of this district, second only in importanceif, indeed, it was even second-to that of Lisbon. He was now in the full bloom of power, having been the chief hand in putting down the anti-constitutional insurrection in Traz os Montes; but he used his power with moderation, and endeavoured to restore peace and confidence by official impartiality and personal affabi

lity,