waves, and with want of room and air; banished for ever from their country, relations, and friends; uncertain to what clime they were driven; finding with difficulty one that would receive them, and that one in a state of war, and the most unwholesome spot in Europe;--what a state of lamentation and hopeless misery! What, too, must the parents and friends of those unhappy men have felt? Could no middle term be found? What a horrible post is that of a minister, when the benefit or policy of the State calls for such sacrifices! No doubt was entertained but that the Court of Madrid had discovered that the Jesuits had been the incendiaries of the late insurrection there; and its ministers seemed to have learnt and imbibed the deep secrecy and resolute vigour of the Count D’Ocyras, the prime minister of Portugal, the profoundest and most desperate politician of the age. From M. de Mello, the Portuguese minister in England,[3] I received this account of the springs that first gave birth to that revolution. When D’Ocyras became all-powerful at Lisbon, he found the Portuguese settlements in America, that bordered on the French, extremely neglected. Apprehending a rupture with France from that quarter, he sent his own brother to examine the Portuguese possessions. At the same period Ferdinand’s Queen, who held the reins of the Spanish monarchy during the incapacity of her husband, had made a treaty with Portugal for an exchange of lands, in which Spain would have been gainer; intending to involve the Court of Lisbon in a quarrel with the Jesuits of Paraguay, part of which country was to be ceded to the Portuguese. The event happened as she had foreseen: the Jesuits refused the exchange; and imputing the machination to D’Ocyras, endeavoured to excite the confessors of both Kings and Queens to attempt the ruin of that minister.[4] This step drew upon them the wrath of that vindictive man, who, possessing all the spirit of intrigue which seemed to have deserted the fathers, never stopped till he had accomplished the destruction of the order. Had D’Ocyras[5] been a Jesuit instead of a statesman, the Jesuits might have subsisted till the Roman Church itself shall fall like other structures of human invention. So true it is, what I have more than once remarked in these pages, that great benefits are seldom conferred on mankind by good men. It is when the interests and passions of ambition, villany, and desperation clash, that some general advantage is struck out.