against the despotism of the restored Ferdinand,
a Spaniard for leader; but the Mexicans
distrusted him for his birth's sake, and he too
was at last taken and shot. That was in
November, eighteen hundred and seventeen, and
the viceroy, whose name then was Apodaca,
wrote to Spain (after the manner of the pacifying
news we now read in the Moniteur) that
Mexico was faithful to the Spanish crown, which
need not send another soldier to his aid. And
the viceroy proceeded to entrust to Colonel
Iturbide, a Creole, the duty of proclaiming at
the head of the troops the re-establishment of
the absolute authority of the king.

Iturbide had begun a selfish career as a
brilliant soldier, by joining in efforts to
overturn the rule of Spain; then he had gone in
private anger to the Spanish side, and beaten
the Mexicans in battles, besides winning the
clergy with professions of resolve to expiate the
excesses of his former life by a rigid course of
penance and mortification. Therefore the viceroy
trusted him as a safe instrument of Spanish
despotism. But the use he made of the eight
hundred men entrusted to him was to win them
to his design, then issue at the little town of
Iguala, in February, eighteen 'twenty-one, a
scheme of independence, called the Plan of
Iguala. This was carefully devised to bid for the
union of parties who had common interests
against Spain, with the three guarantees of
abolition of caste, Mexican independence, and the
establishment of the Roman Catholic religion.
The crown was to be offered to the King of
Spain, and, on his refusal, to some other member
of the reigning family. Exactly six months after
its date, on the twenty-fourth of August,
eighteen 'twenty-one, a new Spanish viceroy,
O'Donoju, meeting Iturbide at Cordova, there
accepted for Spain the terms of the Plan
of Iguala, and the revolution was
accomplished.

Iturbide became president of a regency of
five. The Spanish Cortes scouted the treaty of
Cordova, and in the following May, Iturbide
attained his object, and was declared by his
army Emperor of Mexico, as Augustine the
First.

He reigned ten months, gave himself imperial
airs, and was about to remove his friend, General
Santa Anna, from the government of Vera Cruz,
when Santa Anna turned upon him, and
proclaimed a republic by what was called the Act
of Casa-Mata, in which two other generals took
part with him. Iturbide, deserted by his
followers, abdicated, and was furnished with a
vessel to take him to Leghorn and a yearly
pension of five thousand pounds. But he was
to die if he set foot again in Mexico. He did
return, in character of a Pole, was discovered,
and then it fell to his turn to be shot.

To tell of all that happened after the
demoralising age of Spanish despotism between
the time of Iturbide or Augustine the First,
emperor of Mexico, who set himself over his
country's liberties, and that of Maximilian the
Second, a foreigner set again by foreigners over
the liberties of Mexico, and the first man since
Iturbide who has ventured to sit in state upon
Mexican thorns, would be a long story.
Something of it, however, we may take another day
for telling. The old Aztec king, we have seen,
had a probationary time, during which, if he
slept, his guards pricked his legs and arms with
the thorns of the metl, or maguay, which are
like pins, to rouse him to a sense of his position.
But the Mexican thorns which now prick any
despotic would-be ruler of that land are not like
pins, they are like swords. During the interval
between the two emperors, confusion has come
of the struggle of the chief clergy and other
privileged men to keep their fueros, or
exemptions from responsibility before common
tribunals, and the other rights that, ingrained in
the old social system, had survived the revolution.
It was a law introduced by Juarez, and
named after him, by which the equal rights of
all citizens was established. But a stout battle
followed, in which, for reasons we have seen,
the parish priests were on the side of the people,
and the higher dignitaries of the church—in a
land long church-ridden and still very
superstitious—were the heads of the antagonism.
When the popular cause had been betrayed by
a former leader, Benito Juarez became the chief
representative of the Mexican cause.  He was
true to it, before the interference of the French,
through years of trial. He had broken at last
the power of the antagonists of liberty, was by
the great body of the Mexicans, whom he had
trained in some degree to political knowledge,
accepted as a president who naturally
represented the republic, and was moving quietly in
the direction of peace and the removal of old
obstacles to trade. The obstructive party that
had suffered at home the extraction of its fangs,
then sent for a new set of teeth from Paris.
We know what followed upon that; and what is
yet to come, the past, as it has here been told,
will perhaps help us to guess.

OUR AUNTS.

WHAT would become of half of us if we had
no aunts? I don't know precisely what would
have become of a score of persons upon whom
my mind's eye now rests; but generally, I am
sure that but for their aunts they would have
been in the race of life, by this time, nowhere.
They would have fallen out of the course long
ago and gone to the deuce, or died in ditches,
as their other relatives metaphorically predicted
of them.

It is mercifully ordered in the great scheme
of existence that nearly every person should
have an aunt who is willing to grow into an
old maid, and to sacrifice her life to the good of
others—those others being generally her nephews
and nieces. Aunts are the fairy good
godmothers of society, the supplementary mothers
who are often more kind and indulgent to the
children, than their parents are. There is not
a single person anywhere who is not familiar