Mallo’s day of prosperity was but short. His vanity, coxcombry and folly, displeased the King, and alarmed the Queen. But in the first ardour of her attachments, she generally had the weakness of committing her feelings to writing; and Mallo possessed a collection of her letters. Wishing to rid herself of that absurd, vain fop, and yet dreading an exposure, she employed Godoy in the recovery of her written tokens. Mallo’s house was surrounded with soldiers in the dead of night; and he was forced to yield the precious manuscripts into the hands of his rival. The latter, however, was too well aware of their value to deliver them to the writer; and he is said to keep them as a powerful charm, if not to secure his mistress’s affection, at least to subdue her fits of fickleness and jealousy. Mallo was soon banished and forgotten. The two ministers, Saavedra and Jovellanos, had been rusticated to their native provinces; the first, on account of ill health; the second, from the Queen’s unconquerable dislike. Urquijo, who seems to have been unable either to gain the King’s esteem, or fully to return the Queen’s affection, could keep his post no longer than while the latter’s ever ready fondness for Godoy, was not awakened by the presence of its object. The absence of the favourite, it is generally believed, might have been prolonged, by good policy, and management of the King on the part of Urquijo, if his rashness and conceit of himself had ever allowed him to suspect that any influence whatever, was equal to that of his talents and person. Instead of strongly opposing a memorial of the Prince of the Peace, asking permission to kiss their majesties’ hands upon the birth of a daughter, borne to him by the Princess his wife, Urquijo imagined the Queen so firmly attached to himself, that he conceived no danger from this transient visit of his offended rival. Godoy made his appearance at Court; and from that moment Urquijo’s ruin became inevitable. His hatred of the Court of Rome had induced the latter to encourage the translation of a Portuguese work, against the extortions of the Italian _Dataria_, in cases of dispensations for marriage within the prohibited degrees. Thinking the public mind sufficiently prepared by that work, he published a royal mandate to the Spanish bishops, urging them to resume their ancient rights of dispensation. This step had armed against its author the greater part of the clergy; and the Prince of the Peace found it easy to alarm the King’s conscience by means of the Pope’s nuncio, Cardinal _Casoni_, who made him believe that his minister had betrayed him into a measure which trespassed upon the rights of the Roman Pontiff. I believe that Godoy’s growing dislike of the Inquisition spared Urquijo the horrors of a dungeon within its precincts. He had not, however, sufficient generosity to content himself with the banishment of his enemy to Guipuzcoa. An order for his imprisonment in a fortress followed him thither in