eedings.

"I will not pretend to be a judge of what is due to the honour of
England, but I know what is due to my own."

The effect of this note was that Lord Malmesbury threw the
responsibility on Mr. Scarlett, his representative in Tuscany, and
annulled his proceedings. He then sent out Sir Henry Bulwer to endeavour
to arrange the affair, or to withdraw the embassy from Florence. A sort
of apology was given by the court of Florence for the outrage, and a
responsibility was assumed by it for the future, in case of injury to
British subjects--as if the law of nations had not already secured
it. No redress or punishment for the outrage ever followed Sir Henry's
mission. He might, for all its purposes, have as well remained in
England. The Mathers refused to the last the money compensation, and to
this hour, in this infamous matter, the guilty officer has never met his
just punishment, nor public honour been satisfied. It is known that had
the course been pursued which the father and sons adopted, and justice
been satisfied, any personal compensation was to have gone chiefly to
the public hospital of Florence, and for other public institutions of
that refined capital, in which those Englishmen had received so much
kindness and sympathy when it was personally dangerous to yield it, in
the presence of their barbarous Croat invaders. Mr. Erskine Mather
is now a scientific British officer, and bears amidst the ranks of
England's defenders the visible scar of the wound so treacherously and
wantonly inflicted upon him because he was an Englishman: a remembrance
to every Englishman of how little he may rely upon the defence of
his own honour, or the honour of his country in his person, while the
diplomacy of England is in the hands of men who sympathise with foreign
despotism, or find luxurious and lucrative appointments at foreign
courts under the ostensible duty of watching over the interests of their
country.

The remaining features of English affairs, in relation to foreign
nations, were of too little interest to require notice in these pages.

DEATHS OF EMINENT PERSONS DURING THE YEAR 1851.

No one who knows England can wonder that her annual obituary presents
such long lists of great names, when it is remembered how widespread is
her empire, and how varied her enterprise. It is only possible to select
a few of the remarkable persons for notice, whose departure from this
life in 1851 excited the attention and reg