proxy. And although this article, which was extensively copied by the press of England and the Continent, elicited an angry contradiction from a hanger-on of Count Montemolin, yet many persons, of those most versed in the intricacies of Spanish intrigue, were convinced that its statements were founded on fact, and that the Count was in reality secreted in London at the very time he was supposed to be travelling towards the Pyrenees. And some of his own partisans, who credited the reality of the journey, declared their conviction from the first to have been, that he would be betrayed before he got through France, since by that means only could certain individuals, who dared not refuse to accompany him, hope to return to the flesh-pots and security of their London home, and to avoid encountering the perils and hardships of mountain warfare. The abortive journey or clumsy hoax, whichever it was, gave the finishing stroke to the Catalonian insurrection. Cabrera, seeing plainly that nothing was to be hoped from the feeble and pusillanimous junta of advisers who swayed and bewildered Count Montemolin by their intrigues and dissensions, found it necessary, after sending repeated and indignant letters and messages to London, to abandon a contest which it was impossible for him to maintain single-handed, and from which many subordinate chiefs, and a large portion of his troops, had already seceded. His little army fell to pieces, and he himself fell into the hands of the French authorities, by whom, after a brief detention, he was allowed to go at large. The game was now good for General Concha and his fifty thousand men. The scattering and hunting down of the broken bands of insurgents was exactly the sort of amusement they liked; a fine pretext for magnificent bulletins, and the easiest possible way of gaining praise, honours, and decorations. Before summer came, Catalonia was quiet. The most vigorous effort made by the Carlists since the Convention of Bergara; the one offering the best chances of success, and on which the very last resources of the party, (even, it is said, to a few jewels and pictures of price--the last relics of princely splendour,) had been expended; the effort, in short, of whose happy issue such sanguine expectations were entertained, that some of the leading adherents of the cause declared that, "if they failed this time, they deserved never to succeed," had terminated in complete abortion. On the sierras of Spain not a Carlist cockade was to be seen; in the coffers of the party not a dollar remained. Many of its most valued members, disgusted by the weakness of their prince, and by the baseness of his councillors, withdrew from its ranks, and made their peace with the existing government. And now the most steadfast well-wishers of Count Montemolin are compelled to admit, that few contingencies are less probable than his installation on the Spanish throne.