whose retention by Great Britain he ascribes a frightful catalogue of evils, including sundry European wars, fifty-five millions sterling unprofitably sunk, and the undying hatred of Spain towards this country—bringing no less a witness than Napoleon to the truth of this last assertion. The fifty-five millions are “suggested as a rough guess” at the actual outlay; and besides them, we are assured, hundreds of millions have been spent on wars entailed by our possession of Gibraltar. All this is too vaguely put, seriously to challenge argument or refutation; and as to the “undying hatred,” why, the anti-English party in Spain may occasionally bluster about the hole in the national honour, and so forth; but the great majority of the nation never bestow a thought upon the matter, and the smuggling portion of the community—no uninfluential class—find Gibraltar exceedingly convenient for their contraband traffic. But Mr Urquhart’s statements on this head are very loose, and some of them very fallacious; and he attains the climax of absurdity and misrepresentation when he says, that “the fiscal regulations of Spain, which sustain this (contraband) traffic, would long since have fallen but for its (Gibraltar’s) retention by England. We therefore lose the legitimate trade of all Spain, for the smuggling profits (which go to the Spaniards) at this port.” The sort of jingle of plausibility in these sentences will impose only upon persons profoundly ignorant of the subject. The assertion is made in the teeth of notorious facts, and is opposed alike to truth and to common sense. The more difficult, dangerous, and expensive smuggling could be rendered, the less would be its injurious effect on the Spanish revenue, and the less likely would be a reduction of duties. The smuggling facilities afforded by Gibraltar, by the Portuguese frontier and the Pyrenean line, (Mr Urquhart, it has been seen, wholly ignores the two latter channels, and lays the high-duty system entirely at the door of Gibraltar,) have, by limiting the custom-house receipts to the merest trifle, contributed, more than any other cause, to fix the attention of the Spanish government on the advantage to be derived from reductions in their monstrous tariff—reductions which the last four months have beheld carried out, although as yet but to an exceedingly limited extent. This subject, however, has of late been so fully discussed in our pages that we shall not here pursue it further, particularly as it is evident that Mr Urquhart has still to become acquainted with its rudiments. It were more amusing, although scarcely more profitable, to dwell upon a subsequent chapter, where, reverting to Gibraltar, the honourable gentleman tilts at its late governor, and raises the Russian bugbear—a goblin which he would doubtless always manage to evoke, in whatsoever part of the world he chanced to find himself. In portentous italics he tells us as how “a Russian steam-vessel of war was admitted to the quay