Thus ended—­as Earth’s best men have too often ended—­the good Don Alonzo Chacon.  His only monument in the island is one, after all, ‘aere perennius;’ namely, that most beautiful flowering shrub which bears his name; Warsewiczia, some call it; others, Calycophyllum:  but the botanists of the island continue loyally the name of Chaconia to those blazing crimson spikes which every Christmas-tide renew throughout the wild forests, of which he would have made a civilised garden, the memory of the last and best of the Spanish Governors.

So Trinidad became English; and Picton ruled it, for a while, with a rod of iron.

I shall not be foolish enough to enter here into the merits or demerits of the Picton case, which once made such a noise in England.  His enemies’ side of the story will be found in M’Callum’s Travels in Trinidad; his friends’ side in Robinson’s Life of Picton, two books, each of which will seem, I think, to him who will read them alternately, rather less wise than the other.  But those who may choose to read the two books must remember that questions of this sort have not two sides merely, but more; being not superficies, but solids; and that the most important side is that on which the question stands, namely, its bottom; which is just the side which neither party liked to be turned up, because under it (at least in the West Indies) all the beetles and cockroaches, centipedes and scorpions, are nestled away out of sight:  and there, as long since decayed, they, or their exuviae and dead bodies, may remain.  The good people of Trinidad have long since agreed to let bygones be bygones; and it speaks well for the common-sense and good feeling of the islanders, as well as for the mildness and justice of British rule, that in two generations such a community as that of modern Trinidad should have formed itself out of materials so discordant.  That British rule has been a solid blessing to Trinidad, all honest folk know well.  Even in Picton’s time, the population increased, in six years, from 17,700 to 28,400; in 1851 it was 69,600; and it is now far larger.

But Trinidad has gained, by becoming English, more than mere numbers.  Had it continued Spanish, it would probably be, like Cuba, a slave-holding and slave-trading island, now wealthy, luxurious, profligate; and Port of Spain would be such another wen upon the face of God’s earth as that magnificent abomination, the city of Havanna.  Or, as an almost more ugly alternative, it might have played its part in that great triumph of Bliss by Act of Parliament, which set mankind to rights for ever, when Mr. Canning did the universe the honour of ’calling the new world into existence to redress the balance of the old.’  It might have been—­probably would have been—­conquered by a band of ‘sympathisers’ from the neighbouring Republic of Venezuela, and have been ’called into existence’ by the massacre of the respectable