290 Xotf$ fot the Month. [SEPT. 



a statesman employed among others in this ncgociation, and whom Van 

 Halen describes as a man of feeling and honour in favour of the required 

 confession is too good not to be extracted : 



Do not be distressed, Van Halen,' he said. ' I understand you, and am inca- 

 pable of persisting in the unpleasant commission with which I am charged by his 

 majesty. But it is really a pity to s:e you sacrifice yourself to an erroneous system, 

 the theory of which is certainly seductive, but which is totally impracticable. He 

 who, like myself, has in other times professed liberal ideas, and who has experienced 

 their futility, knows too well the enormous distance there is between moral and 

 political notions, to act in all cases according to both. If we were all enlightened, 

 Satan himself would not be able to govern us. Our countryman, however, are too 

 ignorant to be ruled otherwise than by an iron sceptre; and along time will elapse 

 before they may be brought to understand their own interests. Till that epoch 

 arrives, which can only take place when the king himself decides in its favour, we 

 must all sail with the current of circumstances. You are younger than myself, and 

 are a military man; but 1 have been a judge, and have seen much of human 

 nature; consequently, I know something of its ruling passions and characteristic 

 points. I am convinced that, if you die, your friends will be consoled by knowing 

 that they are delivered from the fears which night and day disturb their repose. 

 Believe me, this is a truth proceeding from a man of experience ; but you shall 

 find me more a friend than a seducer.' " 



This suggestion of Don Villar Frontin respecting the alarm of Van 

 Halen's friends, receives something like confirmation from a circumstance 

 afterwards related in the book. Some of them send him word, that, in 

 case of the worst, they will do themselves so much violence as even to 

 furnish him with poison. The colonel, however, resolutely refuses to 

 betray his associates ; and, after repeated examinations, with increased 

 severities of confinement, he is put to the torture ; the effect of which 

 throws him into a protracted and dangerous illness. The manner of this 

 torture is very oddly, and not very luminously, described ; but we pass over 

 the subject, as well as the details of the author's imprisonment, to come to 

 the circumstances connected with his escape ; the whole of which seem as 

 if they could only have occurred in a romance or more properly in 

 Bedlam for they have not the reasonableness and vrai semblance which 

 we call for in a work of fiction. 



It was six months after Van Halen had been in prison, and while he 

 was confined to his bed from the illness that followed the application of 

 the torture, that he saw for a moment a young woman a sufficiently strange 

 agent to employ in such place who was brought in to assist in sweeping 

 and clearing out his dungeon, under the inspection of the gaoler. This girl 

 is the adopted daughter of the chief gaoler, Don Marcellino, and resides 

 within the walls of the prison of the Inquisition, which has been before 

 described as possessing all the circumstances of strength and privacy suited 

 to such an edifice. The prisoner sees her only for an instant, and over a 

 screen, as he lies in bed the custom being to remove him from his dun- 

 geon while it is cleaned ; but, on this occasion, his state of illness has pre- 

 vented it. He has no means of exchanging a word, or even a sign, in con- 

 -cert with her. But, some days after, when he is something recovered, and 

 his cell has been cleaned while he has been absent from it, as he goes to 

 lie down in his bed at night, he finds in it a little lump, which he first 

 takes for a button, but which turns out to be the upper part of a drop ear- 

 ring. In some situations, this sign might have seemed the effect of acci- 

 dent; but a straw seems an oak to a drowning man, and a gleam of hope 

 is certainty to a man who has been six months in prison. The author 

 winds some of his hair round the ear-ring, to shew that he has received it, 



