ent at Oajaca.--He
captures the Spanish Armada.--And is made General of Division.

We left Santa Anna at Vera Cruz, having just completed the first of
those politico-military insurrections which fill up the history of his
times. He had added the city of Vera Cruz to the national cause, by a
timely insurrection. Iturbide had rewarded him for this important
service by bestowing upon him the ribbon of the order of Guadalupe,
making him second in command at Vera Cruz. The chief command of the
department was bestowed upon an old insurrectionary leader, who was
known by the assumed name of Guadalupe Victoria. He was a good-natured,
honest, inefficient old man, whose great merit consisted in having
lived for two years in a dense forest, far beyond the habitations of
men. While thus hiding himself from a host of pursuers, he acquired
that habit, supposed to be peculiar to wild beasts, of passing several
days without food, and then eating inordinate quantities--a habit which
he found impossible to change in after-life, when he had become
President of Mexico. The story of this man's sojourn among wild beasts
had been told all over Mexico, and had given him a great popularity,
which he brought to the support of the national cause.

In 1822 the Mexican nation was still in its swaddling clothes. Its
birth had hardly cost a pang; but its infancy, its childhood, and its
youth, were to be attended with a series of convulsions, the fruits of
the vicious seeds sown in the conception of the new State. By the
_pronunciamiento_ of a part of a regiment of the King's Creole
troops the connection between Spain and Mexico was severed forever, and
the colonel of these troops became the Emperor of Mexico. In this
revolution the nation acquiesced, and thus discovered to the soldiery
their unlimited power when their arms are turned against their own
government. From that time onward Mexico, like every other country
where the Spanish language is spoken, became the victim of her own
soldiery. This liberation of Mexico was by no means the result of the
outburst of national patriotism, but the consequence of the utter
incapacity of Spain longer to hold the reins of her colonial
governments. She indeed sent out a new vice-king to Mexico after the
breaking out of the insurrection; but the best that he could do was to
sanction what had been done by a treaty at Cordova, in which it was
stipulated that Iturbide and the new viceroy, O'Donoghue, should be