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SOUTH AMERICAN SKETCHES: No. I. 
Facunvo QuiroGa, Governor of La Rioja, one of the interior Provinces 
of La Plata. 
Sourn America, though any thing but an exhausted subject of 
literary treatment, in the present day, has hitherto proved a marvellously 
dry and dull one, chiefly by reason (as it strikes us) of the peculiar 
views and motives which have attracted and actuated the various travel- 
lers who have been tempted to write upon it. Those persons have, for the 
most part, visited South America with trading views exclusively ; and, 
though views of this nature are sufficiently interesting to the individual 
pursuing them, and are not without a corresponding importance to the 
commercial departments of our community, they seldom include matters 
likely to afford scope for much readable writing, however well-informed 
the writer may be on the subject of which he treats, or however well- 
skilled in turning that subject to the best account. Nevertheless, to 
turn his subject to some account or other in the way of a written book, 
seems to have been a contemplated item in the calculation of every one 
who has lately visited this most interesting country. The consequence is, 
that we have more books on South American matters than can find 
readers, and more readers (few as there are) than can find either the 
entertainment or the instruction that they seek. 
The writer of the Sketches now about to be laid before the reader 
feels himself in an altogether different position, in the above respects, 
from almost every other of those South American travellers who have 
preceded him in presenting their observations to the world ; and, if for 
no other reason, for this simple one alone—that he visited the country 
expressly in search of mingled amusement and general knowledge, and 
entirely freed from those peculiar views which have a tendency to fix 
the attention to one class of information exclusively, while they not only 
take away the inclination, but greatly abridge the ability, of successfully 
appropriating or applying any other. Moreover, his desultory wander- 
ings were undertaken after a settled residence of many years in one part 
of the country, cut off from all intercourse with European society, and 
consequently perfectly familiar with the habits, feelings, manners, and, 
above all, the language of the people, and enabled to assume (as, in fact, 
he did assume) the dress and appearance of the natives themselves. 
These relative advantages over other travellers in South America were, 
perhaps, farther increased by the writer’s disposition to search out and 
appropriate the singular and the romantic in all that presented itself to 
his notice, in a country where the romantic and the singular abound 
more than in any other on the face of the globe. 
These, then, are the claims to attention which the writer of the follow- 
ing Sketches conceives himself to possess ; and he is not without hope 
that they will be looked upon as some set-off against that literary inex- 
perience of which he is far from being unconscious, and which, there- 
fore, he has no wish either to deny or conceal. 
Perhaps the English reader cannot be more promptly initiated into the 
manners, customs, and modes of feeling, which prevail in a particular 
and important district of La Plata, than by a brief biographical notice of 
one of the most extraordinary individuals of the present time—the facts 
