that such a form of government be established in Mexico as shall at once heal her own dissensions, and guarantee her against the further encroachments of her neighbours; and we should invite other European nations to join with us in informing the populace of the United States, that they cannot be indulged in the gratification of those predatory interests, which the public opinion of the age happily denies to the most compact despotisms and the most powerful empires. ANTONIO PEREZ. As often as we revisit the fair city of Brussels, an irresistible attraction leads us from the heights crowned with its modern palaces, down among the localities of the valley beneath, the seat and scene of so many of the old glories of the capital of the Netherlands. On these occasions our steps unconsciously deviate a little from the direct line of descent, turning off on the left hand towards the Hotel d'Aremberg. But it is not to saunter through the elegant interior of this princely mansion, and linger over exquisite pictures and rare Etruscan vases, that we then approach it. Our musing eye sees not the actual walls shining with intolerable whiteness in the fierce summer-sun, but the towers of an ancient edifice, long ago demolished by the pitiless Alva, which once, as the Hotel de Cuylembourg, covered the same site. Beneath its roof the Protestant Confederates, in 1566, drew up their memorable "Request" to Margaret of Parma; and at one of its windows these "Beggars," being dismissed with such contumelious scorn from the presence of the Regent, nobly converted the stigma into a war-cry; and, with the wallet of the "Gueux" slung across their shoulders, drank out of wooden porringers a benison on the cause of the emancipation of the United Provinces. So prompted to think of these stirring times, we are carried by the steep declivity of a few streets to that magnificent Town Hall, where, only eleven years before the occurrences in the Hotel Cuylembourg, Charles V. had resigned into the hands of his son Philip the sovereignty of an extensive and flourishing empire. All that could be achieved by the energy of a mind confident of its own force and clearness--by a strong will wielding enormous resources of power--by prudence listening to, and able to balance, cautious experience, and fearless impetuosity--and by consummate skill in the art of government, had been laboriously and successfully achieved by Charles. To Philip he transferred the most fertile, delightful, opulent, and industrious countries of Europe--Spain and the Netherlands, Milan and Naples. His African possessions included Tunis and Oran, the Cape Verd and Canary islands. The Moluccas, the Philippine and Sunda islands heaped his storehouses with the spices, and fruits, and prolific vegetable riches of the Indian Ocean; while from the New World, the mines of Mexico, Chili, and Potosi poured into his treasury their tributary floods of gold. His mighty fleet was still an invincible armada; and his army,