Page:Letters from the Battle-fields of Paraguay (1870).djvu/74



44 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY.

treated at first, but they imprudently, and perhaps purposely disappointed the Dictator, who, in exchange for his produce, wanted arms and arms only. They fell into disfavour, they prudently left the country, and, arrived in England, they wrote popular books about Paraguay. Hatred made them photograph their foe and produce a manner of biography amusing as that of Boswell. The latter was a fautor of the great master of the English language, the " Majestic Teacher of Moral and Religious Wisdom ; "whereas the brothers, while holding up Dr. Francia as a vulgar tyrant to the execration of a civilized and commercial world, invested him with more than usual nobility and grandeur, with the faults of his age and race, and with virtues and merits all his own. Mr. Carlyle {Foreign Quarterly, No. 62, July, 1843), guided only by the light of intelligent despotism, easily under- stood through the running shrieks of constitutionalisms and other humbugs, that Francia was a "true man in a bewildered Guacho (Gaucho) world."

Yet we must be grateful for the popular and respectable volumes of the unsage brothers. We see the Dictator pacing about his ground-floor verandah in a dressing-gown of flowered cotton, deeply pondering, whilst he daintily takes his pinch of " Princeza,"" or smokes his cigarette-like cigar, made for him by the sister who acts as his Ama de Haves (housekeeper) . We hear him thunder forth the bruto, the barbaro, and the favourite " bribonazo " (blundering rascal). We behold him leading his cavalry charges with boyish glee, and we catch him handing out the three economical ball cartridges, with which, more Austriaco, crimi- nals were shot. His outburst against the English importer — so naively quoted, and so telling against the quoter — and his proverb "pan pan y vino vino," light up many a dark page of hysterical Anglomania. He appears as a lawyer strictly honest, as a statesman single-minded, as a patriot