The Sun.
London, England, 1846-08-19 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

FO REIGN QUARTERLY RE V 1 E IV.
The article entitled "Portugal and its late Rulers," in
the July number of the Foreign Quarterly, will be read
with much interest at the
press
true, and particular account" ef the career of f
the
nt time. It is a "ull,
Brothers Cabral, and we quite colour in opinion with
the writer, that •
" Western Europe has offered no parallel in recent times
for the bare-faced effrontry with which official:peculation and
venality have been practised during the last four years in
Portugal, where it was not one individual alone of a ministry,
but the majority of its n:embers, who made either stock-
jobbing, or contract selling, or patronage vending, the great
business of their public lives ; and notwithstanding the noto-
riety of such practices, carried on year after year, they en-
joyed the favour of the court up to the latest moment, to an
extent unequalled by any former administration."
The government of the Cabrals
"Sprang out of a rebellion planned by a disgraced employe,
the elder Cabral (Joze Bernado da Silva Cabral) in 1842,
and executed by the younger brother, Antonio da Costa
Cabral (then Minister of Justice), who set the novel exam-
ple of abandoning his portfolio, to upset the Government of
which he was a member."
The elder brother Joza da Silva was originally an
official in the Court of Relacoa of Oporto, and to which
post he had been appointed during the constitutional
regency, while at the same time his.younger brother
Costa Cabral was appointed to a magisterial situation
in Penella. On the return of Don Miguel, Silva Cabral
became one of his most zealous partisans, and proclaimed
him as absolute King at Nellus, whilst Costa Cabral
remained a Pedroist and emigrated to Belgium.
Silva Cabral, at the fall of Don Miguel, passed over to
the winning side, and persuaded Don Pedro that all
through the reign of Don Miguel he had been secretly
attached to the Queen's cause. Don Pedro conferred on
him a magisterial office in Oporto, and here be exer-
cised his ingenuity in arresting Miguelites, and seizing
their property for the State. A mysterious loss of much
of this property in its way from the coffers of the
Miguelites to the Treasury brought Silva Cabral into
bad odour, and he was dismissed from the office he held
in Oporto. He was, however, soon after appointed to
the office of Corregidor of the district of Roio, in the
neighbourhood of Lisbon, and here he imprisoned a
priest named Da Silva, and seized all his property, which
was of great value. In consequenee of the severities
exercised upon him, the unfortunate priest died. An in -
vestigation took place. The witnesses declared it was
their profound conviction " that the imprisonment
of the deceased priest had been concerted in order to ad-
mit of those robberies being made, which were abetted
by the Corregidor," and the judges to whom the matter
was referred, decided against the Corregidor; and this is
the man who was recently appointed by the Queen of
Portugal, Minister of Justice and Religion. Costa
Cabral, on his return to Portugal, was appointed to a
judicial situation in the Azores, and was elected as De-
puty for St. Michael's to the Cortes. He distinguished
himself by the violence of his ultra democratical opinions,
and contributed largely to bringing about the revolution
of 1836. In the clubs he was constantly denouncing for
assassination all those who opposed his views, and was
called, and seemed proud to be called, the Murat of Lis-
bon. Silva Carvalho had procured him his ap-
pointment to the Azores, and of course Silva Carvalho
was the object of his unceasing attacks. By Count
Bomfin he had been brought into the Ministry, and, of
course, he immediately commenced a series of intrigues
against him, which ended in the downfall of his ministry.
His influence over the King Consort became very great
in fact, the King was governed by his German favourite
Dietz and by Costa Cabral ; and, at length, while still
Cabinet Minister, he left Lisbon, and put himself at the
head of an armed force to destroy the government of
which he was a member, and to restore the charter of
Don Pedro, which he himself had helped to set aside in
1836. He succeeded, and for four years he and his
brother were ministers. "In that period he suspended
the Constitution three times, and cau,ed the Queen to
affix her signature thirteen times to ordinances in vio-
lation of the written charter, which is the fundamental
law of the state." When he came into power he was
pennyless ; when he was expelled from Portugal, the
other day, by an indignant people, he was possessed of
large estates, large sums in the public securities, of a
castle at Thomar, and a palace in Lisbon,
the produce of the most barefaced peculation; and yet no
Minister ever received such support from the Court as
Cabral ; and it is to force him upon the unwilling Por-
tuguese people that the Spanish Government is at this
moment concentrating its forces on the Portuguese fron-
tier; and to support him that the Spanish Minister at
Lisbon, Gonzales Bravo, contrary to the law of nations,
interfered in the internal concerns of the State to which
he was accredited. This, however, may be accounted
for, by the fact, that Cabral is in league with
Dietz, the German favourite of the Portuguese
King, and that Dietz, if not an agent of France,
is certainly one of the warmest of the upholders
of French- influence and of French interference in
the affairs of the Peninsula. The article on the French
political preachers of the sixteenth century is worthy
of study. The writer clearly shows that the ob-
ject of the Guises and the League was to esta-
blish a sacerdotal democracy, and that the preachers
openly enforced the duty of assasssinating all
those opposed to them, as a " holy, heroic, praise-
r worthy deed, which would assure Paradise to the per-
petrator ' • and one of the Garin declared, in a sermon,
that the family of Jacques Clement, the assassin of
Henry lIL, ought to be ennobled. The massacre of St.
Bartholomew was constantly held up as an example
worthy to be followed ; and, even after the League
was suppiessed by the firmness and wisdom of Henry
IV., Boucher, one of these preachers, declaimed bitterly
against the edict of Nantes, and published a treatise in
defence of the attempt at regicide, made by Jean Cha-
tel, in 1595. The writer thus concludes :-
6utt'lLiust worthytu. Tsui le nofotseribiorugsetcounteomjlualtiiotnhaetveunurinfuort::
fathers were watching with painful anxiety every phase of
this, to them, fearfully tragic story. Their faith and peace
were equally at stake. Spanish money was as actively em-
ployed against Elizabeth as against Henri 111. or Henri IV.
The knife of the assassin had doubtless been more than once
prepared for her. Hundreds of cunning Jesuits and wily
preachers, educated expressly for the purpose, were sent into
this country in disguise, and were busily engaged in sowing,
in private the same seditious principles. A Ligua was prepared'
for England, if it had succeeded in France. Let us not, then,
judge too rashly the statesmen, who, in condemning Mary
of Scotland, thought that the death of an ambitious woman,
a Guise by her mother's blood, a ready instrument in the
hands of her family, was necessary for the safety of their
country. The designs in which she partook were those of the
Spaniard, the pope, and the house of Lorraine; and when
she manifested her zeal for the establishment of the Catholic
church and the overthrow of heretics, it was to be done by
means such as those employed on the continent by Spain,
and the pope, and the Guises. It, is thus that, at certain
periods, to understand our own history, it is necessary that
we should have something more than a superficial knowledge'
of that of the surrounding nations."
In addition to these articles, we have an admirable
review of " Stoke's Discoveries in Australia," an inte-
resting " Biography of Herder," a stirring account of
the attempt of Burlamacchi at Lucca, in the year 1546,
to originate a movement for the nationalisation of Italy ;
a learned review of the " Oxford Graduates ;" recently
published work on Modern Painters, and several amus-
ing notices of recent American publications.