picturesque palace of Miramare, furnishing it with magnificence and taste, and there devoting much of his time to scientific, artistic, and literary labors. Several works are witnesses of his industry; namely, Sketches of Travel, Voyages to Brazil, Aphorisms, Marine Objects, Austrian Navy. Two volumes of his poetical compositions were likewise published.
The question to be now elucidated is how the plan of a monarchy for Mexico came to be considered, together with the grounds for its authors' convictions that it could be carried out, firmly and permanently setting up a throne. When we consider the wars for national independence which culminated in Iturbide's defection from the royal cause, the throne raised for him, and from which he was hurled in a few months, the efforts made to restore him to that throne terminating with the catastrophe at Padilla, we should feel that Mexico's monarchy was a myth but for the fact of its ending with a bloody episode, which proved that the republic could not forgive even the liberator for having dared to wear a crown. The occurrences which filled the country with sorrow for all time to come, the subsequent persecution of the liberator's friends, and of the Spaniards, who were suspected of plotting to restore the Spanish king's domination over Mexico,[1] ought clearly to demonstrate what were the feelings of the masses, and of the thinking class, on the matter of the form of government. Afterward, amid the direst calamities of civil commotion, through a long period of years, there never was any indication that the Mexican people desired a monarchy.[2] There was nothing to make the generation living forty years after the expulsion of that system, when
- ↑ See Hist. Mex., vol. iv., this series.
- ↑ There was no reason why they should. The Mexicans, the few that visited Spain only excepted, had never known their monarchs. They had merely seen the viceroys, who ruled according to their own judgment, respecting the manners and customs transmitted from remote times. The monarchy left on Mexican soil neither the interests of a secular nobility, nor even a moral interest.
