Some of our readers must still remember the remarkable speech which the Marquis de Valdegamas pronounced in the Spanish Cortes, January 4, 1849--a speech that produced a marked effect in France, and indeed throughout all Europe, not to add America--in which he renounced all liberal ideas and tendencies, denounced constitutionalism and parliamentary governments, and demanded the dictatorship. It had great effect in preparing even the friends of liberty, frightened by the excesses of the so-called liberals, red republicans, socialists, and revolutionists, if not to favor, at least to accept the _coup d'état_, and the re-establishment of the Imperial _régime_ in France; and it, no doubt, helped to push the reaction that was about to commence against the revolutionary movements of 1848, to a dangerous extreme, and to favor, by another sort of reaction, that recrudescence of infidelity that has since followed throughout nearly all Europe. It is hardly less difficult to restrain reactionary movements within just limits than it is the movements that provoke them. The new American Cyclopedia says Donoso Cortes published his Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism in French. That is a mistake. He wrote and published it in Spanish, at Madrid, in 1851. The French work published at Paris, the same year, was a translation, and very inferior to the original. A presentation copy by the distinguished author of the original Spanish edition of 1851 to the late Mr. Calderon de la Barca--so long resident Spanish minister at Washington, and who was his life-long personal and political friend--is now in my possession, and is the very copy from which Mrs. Goddard, now the noble wife of Rear Admiral Dahlgren, made the translation cited at the head of this article. Mr. Calderon--a good judge--pronounced the work in Spanish by far the most eloquent work that he ever read in any language; and I can say, though that may not be much, that it far surpasses in the highest and truest order of eloquence any work in any language that I am acquainted with. In it one meets all the power and majesty, grace and unction of the old Castilian tongue, that noblest of modern languages, and in which Cicero might have surprised himself.