cular Flight of Unfortunates has long since fled again, and
vanished; and new have come and fled. In this convulsed revolutionary
epoch, which already lasts above sixty years, what tragic flights of
such have we not seen arrive on the one safe coast which is open to
them, as they get successively vanquished, and chased into exile to
avoid worse! Swarm after swarm, of ever-new complexion, from Spain as
from other countries, is thrown off, in those ever-recurring paroxysms;
and will continue to be thrown off. As there could be (suggests
Linnaeus) a "flower-clock," measuring the hours of the day, and the
months of the year, by the kinds of flowers that go to sleep and awaken,
that blow into beauty and fade into dust: so in the great Revolutionary
Horologe, one might mark the years and epochs by the successive kinds of
exiles that walk London streets, and, in grim silent manner, demand
pity from us and reflections from us.--This then extant group of Spanish
Exiles was the Trocadero swarm, thrown off in 1823, in the Riego and
Quirogas quarrel. These were they whom Charles Tenth had, by sheer
force, driven from their constitutionalisms and their Trocadero
fortresses,--Charles Tenth, who himself was soon driven out, manifoldly
by sheer force; and had to head his own swarm of fugitives; and has now
himself quite vanished, and given place to others. For there is no end
of them; propelling and propelled!--

Of these poor Spanish Exiles, now vegetating about Somers Town, and
painfully beating the pavement in Euston Square, the acknowledged chief
was General Torrijos, a man of high qualities and fortunes, still in
the vigor of his years, and in these desperate circumstances refusing to
despair; with whom Sterling had, at this time, become intimate.

CHAPTER X. TORRIJOS.

Torrijos, who had now in 1829 been here some four or five years, having
come over in 1824, had from the first enjoyed a superior reception
in England. Possessing not only a language to speak, which few of the
others did, but manifold experiences courtly, military, diplomatic,
with fine natural faculties, and high Spanish manners tempered into
cosmopolitan, he had been welcomed in various circles of society;
and found, perhaps he alone of those Spaniards, a certain human
companionship among persons of some standing in this country. With the
elder Sterlings, among others, he had made acquaintance; became familiar
in the social circle at South Place, and was muc