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onwards, and on her arrival in the court of Madrid itself, her entire journey being one long unintrerupted ovation. The impurificados continued, to the last, to hope and to expect the most agreeable results from the marriage, although certainly without any very specific grounds of encourage

ment.

The Queen reached Aranjuez the 8th of December. She was received there by the two Infantes, Don Carlos and Don Francisco, the former of whom had authority to enter into the contract of marriage as proxy for the King. On the 11th she entered Madrid, amid all the rejoicings so peculiar to the Spanish people. The King and Queen of Naples and their daughter were attended by a brilliant cortège of the public authorities and troops from the gate of Atocha, by which they entered Madrid, to the Palace at the other extremity of the city. Ferdinand and his two brothers rode on horseback by the side of the coach which contained the young Queen, with the manolos of Madrid dancing the fantastic mogiganga before them through the principal streets, every house being ornamented with brilliant hangings suspended from the balconies, and every avenue and window full of the multitudes of admiring spectators. The contract of marriage was subscribed by the royal parties in person that evening, and the next day the religious ceremony of the velacion was solemnized in the convent of Atocha. Splendid illuminations, with bull fights and theatrical representations prepared for the occasion, completed the rejoicings of the inhabitants of Madrid.

Meanwhile no act of amnesty made its appearance. The Duque de Frias and some other principal grandees, who had been living under a kind of general distrust on account of their liberal opin

LAW OF SUCCESSION.

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ions, embraced this occasion to offer their congratulations, and to propitiate the good will of the King. It was whispered that Ferdinand himself proposed that the healing measure, which the popular sentiment called for, should be frankly accorded. He countenanced the public expectations by some unequivocal acts emanating from himself. Thus he invited the venerable and amiable Don Manuel Josef Quintana, who, like every other ardent friend of letters, had favored the cause of the Constitution and had been since frowned upon by the court, to write an epithalamium, and liberally recompensed the poet for his performance. But the representations of Don Francisco Tadeo Calomarde, the Minister of Grace and Justice, and delegate of the apostolical party in the cabinet, overcame the better intentions of the King, and prevented his recovering the forfeited title of amado Fernando, which the war of independence had consecrated. Only a few scanty favors were dealt out to individuals, who, like the Conde de Cartagena, Don Pablo Morillo, bore the stigma of royal reprobation after having served their country but too faithfully and zealously.

The promise of offspring by his Queen was hailed by Ferdinand with peculiar joy in consideration of the long disappointment of his wishes in this respect. He took occasion from the circumstance to revive the ancient constitution of the Spanish monarchy in regard to succession. When Philip of Anjou became King of Spain, among other violent changes in the institutions of the country, he saw fit to introduce the Salic law of his own family, in derogation of the rules of descent, which had elevated himself to the throne, and which had always obtained in the states of Castile. In anticipation of the possibility that

the unborn infant might prove a daughter, and that no male offspring might be granted to his prayers, Ferdinand, in the plenitude of the legislative authority of absolutism, repealed the Salic law of Philip V, and restored the rules of succession of the Gothic and Austrian lines, which devolve the descent upon females, in default of male heirs. The result justified the forethought of the King, as the child proved to be a daughter, who now, therefore, has pretensions to the crown, adverse to those of Don Carlos.

An opportunity was not long wanting, to test the stability of Ferdinand's throne. Contemporaneously with the events of the Three Days, a party of Spanish exiles in England, buoyed up by delusive expectations of receiving effective support within the Peninsula, were preparing an expedition against their country. The French Revlution came to fill them with extreme confidence of success, and incited them to redoubled exertions. They vainly imagined that Spain was ripe for revolt, and that nothing was needed but a few bold spirits to fire the train. General Mina was looked up to, on all hands, as the most suitable person to command the projected expedition; but he, it seems, had more accurate knowledge of the state of feeling in Spain, and was more capable of judging concerning it,than many of his countrymen. From the very outset, he distrusted the means possessed by them, denying that any impression could be made with such slender resourBut the ardor of General Torrijos overcame the caution of Mina; and arrangements were made to convey a ship-load of arms and munitions of war to the south of Spain, with a few patriots and a bale of proclamations, as the means of revolutionizing the Peninsula. The vigilance of the Spanish embassador detected the plans in agitation,

ces.

was less to reform, and of course less talk of reformation. As for the subjects of Switzerland, they, on the whole, had gained materially by the vicissitudes of the age, being raised from the condition of wretched dependants to that of free and sovereign Cantons. Thus it was with Vaud, Argau, Thurgau, and the Tessino.

From the year 1815 to that of 1830, no historical event of any importance occurred in Switzerland. The Republic remained in a state of unnatural and forced tranquillity, under the influence of the Holy Alliance, which, having contributed so largely towards reinstating the aristocracy in their ancient power, had unanswerable claims on their subserviency. Of course, they were not seldom called upon to manifest their grateful sense of past favors. They were required to send away the Italian emigrants, and they did it. They were required to enslave the press, and they did it. Notwithstanding the warning experience of past misfortunes, new capitulations were tracted with the King of Naples for supplying him with hired troops from the Republic. The Diet was filled with disputes, and plans of public utility were occasionally proposed, but to no purpose, until the flame of revolution burst out where it was least expected.

con

It was among the Italian bailiwicks of the Tessino that the work of reformation was undertaken by the people, in the month of June 1830, a month before the Revolution of the Three Days in Paris. This little Canton, therefore, deserves the credit of having commenced the task of overthrowing the structures raised by the Congress of Vienna. Some changes, it is true, had been introduced in the constitutions of Vaud and Lucerne, but they were deceptive and incomplete. But an attack of the landamman Quadri on the liberty of the press

and the public rights of the people was the signal of revolution in the Tessino, and gave the first effective impulse to the cause of political reform in Switzerland.

In July, the Diet assembled at Lucerne, and passed much time in discussing the movement of the Tessino. Every shade of opinion made its appearance, as well the unshaken republicanism of Appenzell, as the quietism and attachment to the existing order of things of Friburg and Zurich. But nothing came of it. The Diet left this subject to discuss the penal code of the Swiss regiments in the service of France; and at the very period when the wiseacres of the Diet were adjusting the conditions of service,the patriots of the Parisian barricades were cutting up or making prisoners the regiments themselves, and thus summarily disposing of the articles of capitulation.

The spectacle of the great events of July, seemed to fill the Swiss with a kind of stupor. Agitated as the people of Switzerland themselves were by projects and wishes of reform, they could not, for the moment, satisfy themselves what influence over their own condition the changes in France were to operate. It was plain to see, however, that liberty must gain by the shock, which the dethronement of Charles X had given to the institutions of the year 1814. Appenzell was the first to collect itself, and to speak of reforms at home; and Soleure followed in the same track. But the earliest popular meeting was among the inhabitants of Argau. There is a ruined castle, the stonghold of the counts of Lenzbourg, and once the abode of a warlike and chivalrous court, where the Swiss minnesingers of the thirteenth century came to sing at the feudal banquet. At the foot of this relic of another age the people of Argau assembled, on the 7th of September 1830, demand