front and appointed a ministry of known reactionary principles. The announcement was followed on the 7th of April by the assembling of a mob, among whose members were professional men, public employees, and even soldiers and deputies. Pedro's proclamation was torn from the messengers' hands and trampled under foot beneath the windows of his palace. The troops were all on the popular side. A committee crowded its way into the Emperor's presence, but he would yield nothing to compulsion, saying with dignity: "I will do everything for the people, but nothing by the people." The news of the desertion of the very troops guarding his person he received with equanimity, but the populace showed equal stubbornness. Throughout the night the crowd stuck to their posts, and about two o'clock in the morning he suddenly drew up to a table and, without consulting any one, wrote out an unconditional abdication in favour of his infant son. The ministers of France and Great Britain had remained with him during this night of anxiety, and when the morning came they were reluctant to accept his abdication as final. All the foreign diplomats except the representatives of the United States and Colombia followed him on board the British warship, where he took refuge. They wished to give him their moral support in case a counter-revolution were attempted. The most potent cause for Pedro's loss of popularity was that he was a Portuguese. He offended the self-love of a jealous people in a hundred ways by favouring his Portuguese friends. Almost as fatal was his treatment of his blameless wife. One mistress after another succeeded to his favours, and he acknowledged and ennobled his illegitimate children. Most of his concubines did not hold him long, but the last, who was said to be of English descent, acquired a complete ascendancy over him. He publicly installed her as his mistress; created her a marchioness; forced the Empress to accept her as a lady-in-waiting and submit to ride in the same carriage with her. The court attended in a body the baptism of her child, and some of his love letters to her are indescribable. They could have been written only by a degenerate. In the fall of 1826 the poor Empress was _enceinte_ with her seventh child in nine years, and while in this condition Pedro brutally abused her. She never recovered and died in the most fearful agony. Pedro was absent looking after the war in the Plate, but the marchioness had the heartless effrontery to demand admittance to the sick-room, and Pedro on his return dismissed the ministers who had dared to approve the action of the official who refused to let his mistress gloat over the tortured deathbed of his wife.