ike a
wounded lioness. Poor woman! What has been your fate? The glossy tresses
of which you were so proud in your scenes of insanity, those tresses
that brought down the house when your talent might have failed to do so,
are now frosted with the snow of years. Your husband has forsaken you.
After a long career of success, he has buried his fame under the
orange-groves of the Alhambra. There he directs, according to his own
statement, (but I can scarce credit it,) the phantom of a Conservatory
for singing. I am convinced he has too much taste to break in upon the
poetical silence of the old Moorish palace with _portamenti_, trills,
and scales, and I flatter myself that the plaintive song of the
nightingales of the Generalife and the soft murmur of the Fountain of
the Lions are the only concerts that echo gives to the breeze that
gently sighs at night from the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. Alas!
poor woman, your locks are silvered, and Brignoli--has grown fat! "_Sic
transit gloria mundi!_"

DIPLOMACY OF THE REVOLUTION.

When a European speaks about the American Revolution, he speaks of it as
the work of Washington and Franklin. These two names embody for his mind
all the phases of the contest, and explain its result. The military
genius of Washington, going hand in hand with the civil genius of
Franklin, fills the foreground of his picture. He has heard of other
names, and may remember some of them; but these are the only ones which
have taken their place in his memory at the side of the great names of
European history.

In part this is owing to the importance which all Europeans attach to
the French alliance as one of the chief causes of our success. For then,
as now, France held a place among the great powers of the world which
gave importance to all her movements. With direct access to two of the
principal theatres of European strife and easy access to the third, she
never raised her arm without drawing immediate attention. If less
powerful than England on the ocean, she was more powerful there than any
other nation; and even England's superiority was often, and sometimes
successfully, contested. The adoption by such a power of the cause of a
people so obscure as the people of the "Thirteen Colonies" then were
was, in the opinion of European statesmen, decisive of its success. The
fact of our actual poverty was known to all; few, if any, knew that we
possessed exhaustless sources of wealth. Our weakness wa