TO be vested with enormous

0

    He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the roof, and burnt a pinch of powder in it, which sent up a small cloud of aromatic smoke, whereat everybody fell back and began to cross themselves and get uncomfortable. Then he began to mutter and make passes in the air with his hands. He worked himself up slowly and gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got to thrashing around with his arms like the sails of a windmill. By this time the storm had about reached us; the gusts of wind were flaring the torches and making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops of rain were falling, the world abroad was black as pitch, the lightning began to wink fitfully. Of course, my rod would be loading itself now. In fact, things were imminent. So I said:

     

    "You have had time enough. I have given you every advantage, and not interfered. It is plain your magic is weak. It is only fair that I begin now."I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful crash and that old tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along with a vast volcanic fountain of fire that turned night to noonday, and showed a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground in a general collapse of consternation. Well, it rained mortar and masonry the rest of the week. This was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it.It was an effective miracle. The great bothersome temporary population vanished. There were a good many thousand tracks in the mud the next morning, but they were all outward bound. If I had advertised another miracle I couldn't have raised an audience with a sheriff.

     

    Merlin's stock was flat. The king wanted to stop his wages; he even wanted to banish him, but I interfered. I said he would be useful to work the weather, and attend to small matters like that, and I would give him a lift now and then when his poor little parlormagic soured on him. There wasn't a rag of his tower left, but I had the government rebuild it for him, and advised him to take boarders; but he was too hightoned for that. And as for being grateful, he never even said thank you. He was a rather hard lot, take him how you might; but then you couldn't fairly expect a man to be sweet that had been set back so Where you put your eye, you put your bullet..

    authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episode solidified my power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed to be jealous and critical before that, they experienced a change of heart, now. There was not any one in the kingdom who would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my "dream," and listen for the Colt's factory whistle; but that sort of thing played itself out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually living in the sixth century, and in Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum. After that, I was just as much at home in that century as I could have been in any other; and as for preference, I wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country.

     

    The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine down street any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.
    What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep from thinking about it, and contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil. There was nothing back of me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph's case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal it, quite. For it stands to reason that as Joseph's splendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the king, the general public must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was popular by reason of it.
     


    most his time in the morning

    0

      The only thing that she needed to be completely happy was the birth children, but she respected the pact she had made with her husband not to have any until they had been married for five years.Looking for something to fill his idle hours with, Gaston became accustomed to spending the morning in Melquíades' room with the shy Aureli-ano. He took pleasure in recalling with him the most hidden corners of his country, which Aureli-ano knew as if he had spent much time there. When Gaston asked him what he had done to obtain knowledge that was not in the encyclopedia, he received the same answer as José Arcadio: "Everything Is known." In addition to Sanskrit he had learned English and French and a little Latin and Greek. Since he went out every afternoon at that time and Amaranta úrsula had set aside a weekly sum for him for his personal expenses, his room looked like a branch of the wise Catalonian's bookstore. He read avidly until late at night, although from the manner in which he referred to his reading, Gaston thought that he did not buy the books in order to learn but to verify the truth of his knowledge, that none of them interested him more than the parchments, to which he dedicated .

       

      Both Gaston and his wife would have liked to incorporate him into the family life, but Aureli-ano was a hermetic man with a cloud of mystery that time was making denser. It was such an unfathomable condition that Gaston failed in his efforts to become intimate with him and had to seek other pastimes for his idle hours. It was around that time that he conceived the idea of establishing an airmail service.It was not a new project. Actually, he had it fairly well advanced when he met Amaranta úrsula, except that it was not for Macon-do, but for the Belgian Congo, where his family had investments in palm oil. The marriage the decision to spend a few months in Macon-do to please his wife had obliged him to postpone it. But when he saw that Amaranta úrsula was determined to organize a commission for public improvement and even laughed at him when he hinted at the possibility of returning, he understood that things were going to take a long time and he reestablished contact his forgotten partners in Brussels, thinking that it was just as well to be a pioneer in the Caribbean as in- Africa obvious that there's no woman in this house..

       

      While his steps were progressing he prepared a landing field in the old enchanted region which at that time looked like a plain of crushed flintstone, and he studied the wind direction, the geography of the coastal region, and the best routes for aerial navigation, without knowing that his diligence, so similar to that of Mr. Herbert, was filling the town with the dangerous suspicion that his plan was not to set up routes but to plant banana trees. Enthusiastic over the idea that, after all, might justify his permanent establishment in Macon-do, he took several trips to the capital of the province, met with authorities, obtained licenses, and drew up contracts for exclusive rights. In the meantime he maintained a correspondence with his partners in Brussels which resembled that of Fernanda with the invisible doctors, and he finally convinced them to ship the first airplane under the care of an expert mechanic, who would assemble it in the nearest port and fly it to Macon-do. One year after his first meditations and meteorological calculations, trusting in the repeated promises of his correspondents, he had acquired the habit of strolling through the streets, looking at the sky, hanging onto the sound of the breeze in hopes that the airplane would appear.

       

      Although she had not noticed it, the return of Amaranta úrsula had brought on a radical change in Aureli-ano's life. After the death of José Arcadio he had become a regular customer at the wise Catalonian's bookstore. Also, the freedom that he enjoyed then and the time at his disposal awoke in him a certain curiosity about the town, which he came to know without any surprise. He went through the dusty and solitary streets, examining with scientific interest the inside of houses in ruin, the metal screens on the windows broken by rust and the dying birds, and the inhabitants bowed down by memories. He tried to reconstruct in his imagination the annihilated splendor of the old banana-company town, whose dry swimming pool was filled to the brim with rotting men's and women's shoes, in the houses of which, destroyed by rye grass, he found the skeleton of a German shepherd dog still tied to a ring by a steel chain a telephone that was ringing, ringing, ringing until he picked it up and an anguished and distant woman spoke in English, and he said yes, that the strike was over, that three thousand dead people had been thrown into the sea, that the banana company had left, and that Macon-do finally had peace after many years.


      It was the butterflies

      0

         She felt so defeated that she left the garage without seeing the new models and she spent the night turning over in bed and weeping with indignation. The American redhead, who was really beginning to interest her, looked like a baby in diapers. It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia. She had seen them before, especially over the garage, and she had thought that they were drawn by the smell of paint. Once she had seen them fluttering about her head before she went into the movies.

         

        But when Mauricio Babilonia began to pursue her like a ghost that only she could identify in the crowd, she understood that the butterflies had something to do with him. Mauricio Babilonia was always in the audience at the concerts, at the movies, at high mass, and she did not have to see him to know that he was there, because the butterflies were always there. Once Aureli-ano Segun-do became so impatient with the suffocating fluttering that she felt the impulse to confide her secret to him as she had promised, but instinct told her that he would laugh as usual and say: "What would your mother say if she found out?" One morning, while she was pruning the roses, Fernanda let out a cry of fright and had Meme taken away from the spot where she was, which was the same place in the garden where Remedios the Beauty had gone up to heaven. She had thought for an instant that the miracle was going to be repeated with her daughter, because she had been bothered by a sudden flapping of wings the othersideofabandonment at that instant..
        . Meme saw them as if they had suddenly been born out of the light and her heart gave a turn. At that moment Mauricio Babilonia came in with a package that according to what he said, was a present from Patricia Brown. Meme swallowed her blush, absorbed tribulation, even managed a natural smile as she asked him the favor of leaving it on the railing because her hands were dirty from the garden. The only thing that Fernanda noted in the man whom a few months later she was to expel from the house without remembering where she had seen him was the bilious texture of his skin."He's a very strange man," Fernanda said. "You can see in his face that he's going to die."

         


        There arrived with him a rich

        0

          It had been said that his plan to buy a boat was nothing but a trick to make off with his brother's money when the news spread that a strange craft was approaching the town. The inhabitants of Macon-do, who no longer remembered the colossal undertakings of José Arcadio Buendía, ran to the riverbank and saw eyes popping in disbelief the arrival of the first and last boat ever to dock in the town. It was nothing but a log raft drawn by thick ropes pulled by twenty men who walked along the bank. In the prow, with a glow of satisfaction in his eyes, José Arcadio Segun-do was directing the arduous maneuver.

           

          group of splendid matrons who were protecting themselves from the burning sun with gaudy parasols, and wore on their shoulders fine silk kerchiefs, colored creams on their faces and natural flowers in their hair and golden serpents on their arms and diamonds in their teeth. The log raft was the only vessel that José Arcadio Segun-do was able to bring to Macon-do, and only once, but he never recognized the failure of his enterprise, but proclaimed his deed as a victory of will power. He gave a scrupulous accounting to his brother and very soon plunged back into the routine of cockfights. The only thing that remained of that unfortunate venture was the breath of renovation that the matrons from France brought, as their magnificent arts transformed traditional methods of love and their sense of social wellbeing abolished Catarino's antiquated place and turned the street into a bazaar of Japanese lanterns and nostalgic hand organs.

           

          They were the promoters of the bloody carnival that plunged Macon-do into delirium for three days and whose only lasting consequence was having given Aureli-ano Segun-do the opportunity to meet Fernanda del Carpio Where youput youreye,youput your bullet. .
          Remedios the Beauty was proclaimed queen. úrsula, who shuddered at the disquieted beauty of her great--granddaughter, could not prevent the choice. Until then she had succeeded in keeping her off the streets unless it was to go to mass with Amaranta, but she made her cover her face with a black shawl. The most impious men, those who would disguise themselves as priests to say sacrilegious masses in Catarino's store, would go to church with an aim to see, if only for an instant, the face of Remedios the Beauty, whose legendary good looks were spoken of with alarming excitement throughout the swamp.

           

          It was a long time before they were able to do so, and it would have been better for them if they never had, because most of them never recovered their peaceful habits of sleep. The man who made it possible, a foreigner, lost his serenity forever, became involved in the sloughs of abjection and misery, and years later was cut to pieces by a train after he had fallen asleep on the tracks. From the moment he was seen in the church, wearing a green velvet suit and an embroidered vest, no one doubted that he came from far away, perhaps from some distant city outside of the country, attracted by the magical fascination of Remedios the Beauty. He was so handsome, so elegant dignified, with such presence, that Pietro Crespi would have been a mere fop beside him and many women whispered with spiteful smiles that he was the one who really should have worn the shawl.

           

           


          No once was upset

          0


             "In this town we do not give orders with pieces of paper," he said without losing his calm. "And so that you know it once and for all, we don't need any judge here because there's nothing that needs judging."Facing Don Apolinar Moscote, still without raising his voice, he gave a detailed account of how they had founded the village, of how they had distributed the land, opened the roads, introduced the improvements that necessity required without having bothered the government and without anyone having bothered them. "We are so peaceful that none of us has died even of a natural death," he said. "You can see that we still don't have any cemetery."

             

            that the government had not helped them. On the contrary, they were happy that up until then it had let them grow in peace, and he hoped that it would continue leaving them that way, because they had not founded a town so that the first upstart who came along would tell them what to do. Don Apolinar had put on his denim jacket, white like his trousers, without losing at any moment the elegance of his gestures Where you put your eye, you put your bullet..

             

            "So that if you want to stay here like any other ordinary citizen, you're quite welcome," José Arcadio Buendía concluded. "But if you've come to cause disorder by making the people paint their houses blue, you can pick up your junk and go back where you came from. Because my house is going to be white, white, like a dove."Don Apolinar Moscote turned pale. He took a step backward and tightened his jaws as he said with a certain affliction:"I must warn you that I'm armed."

             

            José Arcadio Buendía did not know exactly when his hands regained the useful strength with which he used to pull down horses. He grabbed Don Apolinar Moscote by the lapels and lifted him up to the level of his eyes.
            "I'm doing this," he said, "because I would rather carry you around alive and not have to keep carrying you around dead for the rest of my life."

             

             


            走遍世界的每一個角落

            0

              去做你想做的事吧,趁陽光正好,趁微風不噪,趁繁花還未開至荼蘼,趁還年輕,能走很長很長的路,能訴說很深很深的思念,趁世界還不那麼擁擠,趁飛機還沒有起飛,趁時光還沒有吞噬你們的留念,趁自己的雙手還能擁抱彼此,趁我們還有呼吸,去做你想做的事情吧!

              讀書的時候總會想,有一天我愛上一個人,我不會害怕跟著他浪跡天涯,我要跟著他,。

              而現在再問問自己,我可以嗎?似乎有點難以回答。

              我們每一個人在世,要背負的東西太多,放下很難。

              這讓我突然想到一個朋友,喜歡和她在一起的人,並不是因為她有多漂亮多聰明,相反她只是一個平凡的灰姑娘,而是因為她身上有一種魔力,能感染她身邊的 每一個人,和她在一起,你不會擔心又碰到了困難,仿佛這個世界為她而生,不論前方多少障礙,她總相信自己能夠跨越並克服它們。結果是她確實做到了,並帶動 她身邊的人和她一起去做。

              如今她已有了自己幸福的歸宿。我相信,不久的將來,她一樣會是一個出色的老闆。

              話又說回來,浪跡天涯,也許是每一個人都曾嚮往過的生活,卻很難有人真正去做過它書寫著時代裏清新婉轉篇章。

              背上行囊,遠走他鄉,去過著只有自己才能體會的辛酸與孤寂生活,這需要多麼異於常人的勇氣。

              無意中看到一本書《走吧,為了愛》,內容講到:當謝謝和菜菜在“中國最美的山峰”南迦巴瓦下相遇時,已經被對方深深吸引。當時,他們一個在廣東,一個在上海,看似沒有交集的人生,卻因為對旅途的熱愛,而碰撞出了火花。當謝謝說“我想辭職去旅行,走完絲綢之路”時,菜菜毫不猶豫地說“那我和你一起去”!

              辭職去旅行,並沒有想像的那麼難。菜菜退掉了便宜的機票,和謝謝一起,坐大巴去了琅勃拉邦——這是他們共同旅行的第一站。時間好像被拉長,人生好像突然多了無數種可能性。他們在尼泊爾徒步,在雪山 上生死相依,在印度經歷了百年不遇的五十度高溫,也看到了壯美的泰姬陵;他們甚至興之所至,隨亞航促銷機票到了斯里蘭卡,讓錯誤的船票送他們到了停泊島, 在尚未被背包客們染指的天堂流連忘返……為了省錢,他們有許多夜晚睡在機場、夜車甚至路邊;旅途雖然艱苦,卻看到了意想不到的美麗世界。


              the skill and vigour of Disraeli

              0

                But she was reserved for a very different fate. The outburst of republicanism had been in fact the last flicker of an expiring cause. The liberal tide, which had been flowing steadily ever since the Reform Bill, reached its height with Mr. Gladstone’s first administration; and towards the end of that administration the inevitable ebb began. The reaction, when it came, was sudden and complete. The General Election of 1874 changed the whole face of politics. Mr. Gladstone and the Liberals were routed; and the Tory party, for the first time for over forty years, attained an unquestioned supremacy in England. It was obvious that their surprising triumph was pre-eminently due to.

                 

                He returned to office, no longer the dubious commander of an insufficient host, but with drums beating and flags flying, a conquering hero. And as a conquering hero Victoria welcomed her new Prime Minister.Then there followed six years of excitement, of enchantment, of felicity, of glory, of romance. The amazing being, who now at last, at the age of seventy, after a lifetime of extraordinary struggles, had turned into reality the absurdest of his boyhood’s dreams, knew well enough how to make his own, with absolute completeness, the heart of the Sovereign Lady whose servant, and whose master, he had so miraculously become. In women’s hearts he had always read as in an open book. His whole career had turned upon those curious entities; and the more curious they were, the more intimately at home with them he seemed to be.

                 

                But Lady Beaconsfield, with her cracked idolatry, and Mrs. Brydges-Williams, with her clogs, her corpulence, and her legacy, were gone: an even more remarkable phenomenon stood in their place. He surveyed what was before him with the eye of a past-master; and he was not for a moment at a loss. He realised everything — the interacting complexities of circumstance and character, the pride of place mingled so inextricably with personal arrogance, the superabundant emotionalism, the ingenuousness of outlook, the solid, the laborious respectability, shot through so incongruously by temperamental cravings for the coloured and the strange, the singular intellectual limitations, and the mysteriously essential female elements impregnating every particle of the whole. A smile hovered over his impassive features, and he dubbed Victoria “the Faery.” The name delighted him, for, with that epigrammatic ambiguity so dear to his heart, it precisely expressed his vision of the Queen As his health deteriorated throughout the summer..

                 

                The Spenserian allusion was very pleasant — the elegant evocations of Gloriana; but there was more in it than that: there was the suggestion of a diminutive creature, endowed with magical — and mythical — properties, and a portentousness almost ridiculously out of keeping with the rest of her make-up. The Faery, he determined, should henceforward wave her wand for him alone. Detachment is always a rare quality, and rarest of all, perhaps, among politicians; but that veteran egotist possessed it in a supreme degree. Not only did he know what he had to do, not only did he do it; he was in the audience as well as on the stage; and he took in with the rich relish of a connoisseur every feature of the entertaining situation, every phase of the delicate drama, and every detail of his own consummate performance.
                 


                For terrible indeed it was

                0


                  Though the violence of her perturbations gradually subsided, her cheerfulness did not return. For months, for years, she continued in settled gloom. Her life became one of almost complete seclusion. Arrayed in thickest crepe, she passed dolefully from Windsor to Osborne, from Osborne to Balmoral. Rarely visiting the capital, refusing to take any part in the ceremonies of state, shutting herself off from the slightest intercourse with society, she became almost as unknown to her subjects as some potentate of the East. They might murmur, but they did not understand. What had she to do with empty shows and vain enjoyments? No! She was absorbed by very different preoccupations. She was the devoted guardian of a sacred trust. Her place was in the inmost shrine of the house of mourning — where she alone had the right to enter, where she could feel the effluence of a mysterious presence, and interpret, however faintly and feebly, the promptings of a still living soul. That, and that only was her glorious, her terrible duty.

                   

                  As the years passed her depression seemed to deepen and her loneliness to grow more intense. “I am on a dreary sad pinnacle of solitary grandeur,” she said. Again and again she felt that she could bear her situation no longer — that she would sink under the strain. And then, instantly, that Voice spoke: and she braced herself once more to perform, with minute conscientiousness, her grim and holy task.Above all else, what she had to do was to make her own the master-impulse of Albert’s life — she must work, as he had worked, in the service of the country. That vast burden of toil which he had taken upon his shoulders it was now for her to bear. She assumed the gigantic load; and naturally she staggered under it. While he had lived, she had worked, indeed, with regularity and conscientiousness; but it was work made easy, made delicious, by his care, his forethought, his advice, and his infallibility. The mere sound of his voice, asking her to sign a paper, had thrilled her; in such a presence she could have laboured gladly for ever As his health deteriorated throughout the summer..

                   

                  But now there was a hideous change. Now there were no neat piles and docketings under the green lamp; now there were no simple explanations of difficult matters; now there was nobody to tell her what was right and what was wrong. She had her secretaries, no doubt: there were Sir Charles Phipps, and General Grey, and Sir Thomas Biddulph; and they did their best. But they were mere subordinates: the whole weight of initiative and responsibility rested upon her alone. For so it had to be. “I am DETERMINED”— had she not declared it? —“that NO ONE person is to lead or guide or dictate to ME;” anything else would be a betrayal of her trust. She would follow the Prince in all things. He had refused to delegate authority; he had examined into every detail with his own eyes; he had made it a rule never to sign a paper without having first, not merely read it, but made notes on it too. She would do the same. She sat from morning till night surrounded by huge heaps of despatch — boxes, reading and writing at her desk — at her desk, alas! which stood alone now in the room.

                   

                  Within two years of Albert’s death a violent disturbance in foreign politics put Victoria’s faithfulness to a crucial test. The fearful Schleswig-Holstein dispute, which had been smouldering for more than a decade, showed signs of bursting out into conflagration. The complexity of the questions at issue was indescribable. “Only three people,” said Palmerston, “have ever really understood the Schleswig-Holstein business — the Prince Consort, who is dead — a German professor, who has gone mad — and I, who have forgotten all about it.” But, though the Prince might be dead, had he not left a vicegerent behind him? Victoria threw herself into the seething embroilment with the vigour of inspiration. She devoted hours daily to the study of the affair in all its windings; but she had a clue through the labyrinth: whenever the question had been discussed, Albert, she recollected it perfectly, had always taken the side of Prussia. Her course was clear.


                  In Albert’s eyes Palmerston

                  0

                     

                    Albert was very angry. He highly disapproved both of Palmerston’s policy and of his methods of action. He was opposed to absolutism; but in his opinion Palmerston’s proceedings were simply calculated to substitute for absolutism, all over Europe, something no better and very possibly worse — the anarchy of faction and mob violence. The dangers of this revolutionary ferment were grave; even in England Chartism was rampant — a sinister movement, which might at any moment upset the Constitution and abolish the Monarchy. Surely, with such dangers at home, this was a very bad time to choose for encouraging lawlessness abroad. He naturally took a particular interest in Germany. His instincts, his affections, his prepossessions, were ineradicably German; Stockmar was deeply involved in German politics; and he had a multitude of relatives among the ruling German families, who, from the midst of the hurly-burly of revolution, wrote him long and agitated letters once a week.

                     

                    of Germany’s future from every point of view, he came to the conclusion, under Stockmar’s guidance, that the great aim for every lover of Germany should be her unification under the sovereignty of Prussia. The intricacy of the situation was extreme, and the possibilities of good or evil which every hour might bring forth were incalculable; yet he saw with horror that Palmerston neither understood nor cared to understand the niceties of this momentous problem, but rushed on blindly, dealing blows to right and left, quite — so far as he could see — without system, and even without motive — except, indeed, a totally unreasonable distrust of the Prussian State The weak-willed youth who took no interest in polities and never read a newspaper. .

                    But his disagreement with the details of Palmerston’s policy was in reality merely a symptom of the fundamental differences between the characters of the two men.

                     

                    was a coarse, reckless egotist, whose combined arrogance and ignorance must inevitably have their issue in folly and disaster. Nothing could be more antipathetic to him than a mind so strangely lacking in patience, in reflection, in principle, and in the habits of ratiocination. For to him it was intolerable to think in a hurry, to jump to slapdash decisions, to act on instincts that could not be explained. Everything must be done in due order, with careful premeditation; the premises of the position must first be firmly established; and he must reach the correct conclusion by a regular series of rational steps. In complicated questions — and what questions, rightly looked at, were not complicated? — to commit one’s thoughts to paper was the wisest course, and it was the course which Albert, laborious though it might be, invariably adopted. It was as well, too, to draw up a reasoned statement after an event, as well as before it; and accordingly, whatever happened, it was always found that the Prince had made a memorandum. On one occasion he reduced to six pages of foolscap the substance of a confidential conversation with Sir Robert Peel, and, having read them aloud to him, asked him to append his signature; Sir Robert, who never liked to commit himself, became extremely uneasy; upon which the Prince, understanding that it was necessary to humour the singular susceptibilities of Englishmen, with great tact dropped that particular memorandum into the fire.

                     

                    But as for Palmerston, he never even gave one so much as a chance to read him a memorandum, he positively seemed to dislike discussion; and, before one knew where one was, without any warning whatever, he would plunge into some hare-brained, violent project, which, as likely as not, would logically involve a European war. Closely connected, too, with this cautious, painstaking reasonableness of Albert’s, was his desire to examine questions thoroughly from every point of view, to go down to the roots of things, and to act in strict accordance with some well-defined principle. Under Stockmar’s tutelage he was constantly engaged in enlarging his outlook and in endeavouring to envisage vital problems both theoretically and practically — both with precision and with depth. To one whose mind was thus habitually occupied, the empirical activities of Palmerston, who had no notion what a principle meant, resembled the incoherent vagaries of a tiresome child. What did Palmerston know of economics, of science, of history? What did he care for morality and education? How much consideration had he devoted in the whole course of his life to the improvement of the condition of the working-classes and to the general amelioration of the human race? The answers to such questions were all too obvious; and yet it is easy to imagine, also, what might have been Palmerston’s jaunty comment. “Ah! your Royal Highness is busy with fine schemes and beneficent calculations exactly! Well, as for me, I must say I’m quite satisfied with my morning’s work — I’ve had the iron hurdles taken out of the Green Park.”


                    Various candidates

                    0

                      The first diplomatic crisis which arose after his return to office, though the Prince and the Queen were closely concerned with it, passed off without serious disagreement between the Court and the Minister. For some years past a curious problem had been perplexing the chanceries of Europe. Spain, ever since the time of Napoleon a prey to civil convulsions, had settled down for a short interval to a state of comparative quiet under the rule of Christina, the Queen Mother, and her daughter Isabella, the young Queen. In 1846, the question of Isabella’s marriage, which had for long been the subject of diplomatic speculations, suddenly became acute.

                       

                      for her hand were proposed — among others, two cousins of her own, another Spanish prince, and Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, a first cousin of Victoria’s and Albert’s; for different reasons, however, none of these young men seemed altogether satisfactory. Isabella was not yet sixteen; and it might have been supposed that her marriage could be put off for a few years more; but this was considered to be out of the question. “Vous ne savez pas,” said a high authority, “ce que c’est que ces princesses espagnoles; elles ont le diable au corps, et on a toujours dit que si nous ne nous hations pas, l’heritier viendrait avant le mari.” It might also have been supposed that the young Queen’s marriage was a matter to be settled by herself, her mother, and the Spanish Government; but this again was far from being the case.

                       

                      It had become, by one of those periodical reversions to the ways of the eighteenth century, which, it is rumoured, are still not unknown in diplomacy, a question of dominating importance in the foreign policies both of France and England. For several years, Louis Philippe and his Prime Minister Guizot had been privately maturing a very subtle plan. It was the object of the French King to repeat the glorious coup of Louis XIV, and to abolish the Pyrenees by placing one of his grandsons on the throne of Spain. In order to bring this about, he did not venture to suggest that his younger son, the Duc de Montpensier, should marry Isabella; that would have been too obvious a move, which would have raised immediate and insurmountable opposition. He therefore proposed that Isabella should marry her cousin, the Duke of Cadiz, while Montpensier married Isabella’s younger sister, the Infanta Fernanda; and pray, what possible objection could there be to that As his health deteriorated throughout the summer.?

                       

                      The wily old King whispered into the chaste ears of Guizot the key to the secret; he had good reason to believe that the Duke of Cadiz was incapable of having children, and therefore the offspring of Fernanda would inherit the Spanish crown. Guizot rubbed his hands, and began at once to set the necessary springs in motion; but, of course, the whole scheme was very soon divulged and understood. The English Government took an extremely serious view of the matter; the balance of power was clearly at stake, and the French intrigue must be frustrated at all hazards. A diplomatic struggle of great intensity followed; and it occasionally appeared that a second War of the Spanish Succession was about to break out. This was avoided, but the consequences of this strange imbroglio were far-reaching and completely different from what any of the parties concerned could have guessed.


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