nd Trinidad, lands next morning in Port of Spain, the
chief city of that "splendid colony," as Governor Irving, its worst
ruler, truly calls it in his farewell message to the Legislature.
Regarding Port of Spain in particular, Mr. Froude is positively
exuberant in the display of the peculiar qualities that distinguish
him, and which we have already admitted. Ecstatic praise and
groundless detraction go hand in hand, bewildering to any one not
possessed of the key to the mystery of the art of blowing hot and cold,
which Mr. Froude so startlingly exemplifies. As it is our purpose to
make what he says concerning this Colony the crucial test of his
veracity as a writer of travels, [54] and also of the value of his
judgments respecting men and things, we shall first invite the reader's
attention to the following extracts, with our discussion thereof:--

"On landing we found ourselves in a large foreign-looking town, Port of
Spain having been built by French and Spaniards according to their
national tendencies, and especially with a view to the temperature,
which is that of a forcing house, and rarely falls below 80 deg.. The
streets are broad, and are planted with trees for shade, each house
where room permits having a garden of its own, with palms and mangoes
and coffee-plants and creepers. Of sanitary arrangements there seemed
to be none. There is abundance of rain, and the gutters which run down
by the footway are flushed almost every day. But they are all open.
Dirt of every kind lies about freely, to be washed into them or left to
putrify as fate shall direct" (p. 64).

Lower down, on the same page, our author, luxuriating in his contempt
for exactitude when the character of other folk only is at stake,
continues:--"The town has between thirty and forty thousand people
living in it, and the [55] rain and Johnny crows between them keep off
pestilence." On page 65 we have the following astounding statement
with respect to one of the trees in the garden in front of the house in
which Mr. Froude was sojourning:--"At the gate stood as sentinel a
cabbage palm a hundred feet high."

The above quotations, in which we have elected to be content with
indicating by typographical differences the points on which attention
should be mostly directed, will suffice, with any one knowing Trinidad,
as examples of Mr. Froude's trustworthiness. But as these are only on
matters of mere detail, involving no question of principle, th