It is probably known to all that New Granada is the most northern of the republics of South America; or it should rather be said that it is the state nearest to the isthmus, of which indeed it comprehends a considerable portion; the territory of the Gulf of Darien and the district of Panamá all being within the limits of New Granada.

It was, however, but the other day that New Granada formed only a part of the republic of Columbia, the republic of which Bolivar was the hero. As the inhabitants of Central America found it necessary to break up their state into different republics, so also did the people of Columbia. The heroes and patriots of Caracas and Quito could not consent to be governed from Bogotá; and therefore three states were formed out of one. They are New Granada, with its capital of Bogotá; Venezuela, with its capital of Caracas, lying exactly to the east of New Granada; and Ecuador—the state, that is, of Equator—lying to the south of New Granada, having its seaport at Guayaquil on the Pacific, with Quito, its chief city, exactly on the line.

The district of Columbia was one of the grandest appanages of the Spanish throne when the appanages of the Spanish throne were grand indeed. The town and port of Cartagena, on the Atlantic, were admirably fortified, as was also Panamá on the Pacific. Its interior cities were populous, flourishing, and, for that age, fairly civilized. Now the whole country has received the boon of Utopian freedom; and the mind loses itself in contemplating to what lowest pitch of human degradation the people will gradually fall.

Civilization here is retrograding. Men are becoming more ignorant than their fathers, are learning to read less, to know less, to have fewer aspirations of a high order; to care less for truth and justice, to have more and more of the contentment of a brute,—that contentment which comes from a full belly and untaxed sinews; or even from an empty belly, so long as the sinews be left idle.

To what this will tend a prophet in these days can hardly see; or rather none less than a prophet can pretend to see. That those lands which the Spaniards have occupied, and to a great extent made Spanish, should have no higher destiny than that which they have already accomplished, I can hardly bring myself to think. That their unlimited fertility and magnificent rivers should be given for nothing; that their power of producing all that man wants should be intended for no use, I cannot believe. At present, however, it would seem that Providence has abandoned it. It is making no progress. Land that was cultivated is receding from cultivation; cities that were populous are falling into ruins; and men are going back into animals, under the influence of unlimited liberty and universal suffrage.

In 1851 emancipation from slavery was finally established in New Granada; and so far, doubtless, a good deed was done. But it was established at the same time that every man, emancipated slave or other, let him be an industrial occupier of land, or idle occupier of nothing, should have an equal vote in electing presidents and members of the Federal Congress, and members of the Congress of the different states; that, in short, all men should be equal for all state purposes. And the result, as may be supposed, is not gratifying. As far as I am able to judge, a negro has not generally those gifts of God which enable one man to exercise rule and masterdom over his fellow-men. I myself should object strongly to be represented, say in the city of London, by any black man that I ever saw. "The unfortunate nigger gone masterless," whom Carlyle so tenderly commiserates, has not strong ideas of the duties even of self-government, much less of the government of others. Universal suffrage in such hands can hardly lead to good results. Let him at any rate have first saved some sixty pounds in a savings-bank, or made himself undoubted owner—an easy thing in New Granada—of a forty-shilling freehold!

Not that pure-blooded negroes are common through the whole of New Granada. At Panamá and the adjacent districts they are so; but in the other parts of the republic they are, I believe, few in number. At Santa Martha, where I first landed, I saw few, if any. And yet the trace of the negroes, the woolly hair and flat nose, were common enough, mixed always with Indian blood, and of course to a great extent with Spanish blood also.

This Santa Martha is a wretched village—a city it is there called—at which we, with intense cruelty, maintain a British Consul, and a British post-office. There is a cathedral there of the old Spanish order, with the choir removed from the altar down towards the western door; and there is, I was informed, a bishop. But neither bishop nor cathedral were in any way remarkable. There is there a governor of the province, some small tradesman, who seemed to exercise very few governing functions. It may almost be said that no trade exists in the place, which seemed indeed to be nearly dead. A few black or nearly black children run about the streets in a state almost of nudity; and there are shops, from the extremities of which, as I was told, crinoline and hats laden with bugles may be extracted.

"Every one of my predecessors here died of fever," said the Consul to me, in a tone of triumph. What could a man say to him on so terribly mortal a subject? "And my wife has been down in fever thirteen times!" Heavens, what a life! That is, as long as it is life.

I rode some four or five miles into the country to visit the house in which Bolivar died. It is a deserted little country villa or chateau, called San Pedro, standing in a farm-yard, and now containing no other furniture than a marble bust of the Dictator, with a few wretchedly coloured French prints with cracked glass plates. The bust is not a bad one, and seems to have a solemn and sad meaning in its melancholy face, standing there in its solitary niche in the very room in which the would-be liberator died.

For Bolivar had grand ideas of freedom, though doubtless he had grand ideas also of personal power and pre-eminence; as has been the case with most of those who have moved or professed to move in the vanguard of liberty. To free mankind from all injurious thraldom is the aspiration of such men; but who ever thought that obedience to himself was a thraldom that could be injurious?

And here in this house, on the 17th December, 1830, Bolivar died, broken-hearted, owing his shelter to charity, and relieved in his last wants by the hands of strangers to his country. When the breath was out of him and he was well dead, so that on such a matter he himself could probably have no strong wish in any direction, they took away his body, of course with all honour, to the district that gave him birth, and that could afford to be proud of him now that he was dead;—into Venezuela and reburied him at Caracas. But dying poverty and funeral honours have been the fate of great men in other countries besides Columbia.

"And why did you come to visit such a region as this?" asked Bolivar, when dying, of a Frenchman to whom in his last days he was indebted for much. "For freedom," said the Frenchman. "For freedom!" said Bolivar. "Then let me tell you that you have missed your mark altogether; you could hardly have turned in a worse direction."

Our ride from Santa Martha to the house had been altogether between bushes, among which we saw but small signs of cultivation. Round the house I saw none. On my return I learnt that the place was the property of a rich man who possessed a large estate in its vicinity. "But will nothing grow there?" I asked. "Grow there! yes; anything would grow there. Some years since the whole district was covered with sugar-canes." But since the emancipation in 1851 it had become impossible to procure labour; men could not be got to work; and so bush had grown up, and the earth gave none of her increase; except indeed where half-caste Indians squatted here and there, and made provision grounds.

I then went on to Cartagena. This is a much better town than Santa Martha, though even this is in its decadence. It was once a flourishing city, great in commerce and strong in war. It was taken by the English, not however without signal reverses on our part, and by the special valour—so the story goes—of certain sailors who dragged a single gun to the summit of a high abrupt hill called the "Papa," which commands the town. If the thermometer stood in those days as high at Cartagena as it does now, pretty nearly through the whole of the year, those sailors ought to have had the Victoria cross. But these deeds were done long years ago, in the time of Drake and his followers; and Victoria crosses were then chiefly kept for the officers.

The harbour at Cartagena is singularly circumstanced. There are two entrances to it, one some ten miles from the city and the other close to it. This nearer aperture was blocked up by the Spaniards, who sank ships across the mouth; and it has never been used or usable since. The present entrance is very strongly fortified. The fortifications are still there, bristling down to the water\'s edge; or they would bristle, were it not that all the guns have been sold for the value of the brass metal.

Cartagena was hotter even than Santa Martha; but the place is by no means so desolate and death-like. The shops there are open to the streets, as shops are in other towns. Men and women may occasionally be seen about the square; and there is a trade,—in poultry if in nothing else.

There is a cathedral here also, and I presume a bishop. The former is built after the Spanish fashion, and boasts a so-called handsome, large, marble pulpit. That it is large and marble, I confess; but I venture to question its claims to the other epithet. There are pictures also in the cathedral; of spirits in a state of torture certainly; and if I rightly remember of beatified spirits also. But in such pictures the agonies of the damned always excite more attention and a keener remembrance than the ecstasies of the blest. I cannot say that the artist had come up either to the spirit of Fra Angelico, or to the strength of Orcagna.

At Cartagena I encountered a family of native ladies and gentlemen, who were journeying from Bogotá to Peru. Looking at the map, one would say that the route from Bogotá to Buena-ventura on the Pacific was both easy and short. The distance as the crow flies—the condor I should perhaps more properly say—would not be much over two hundred miles. And yet this family, of whom one was an old woman, had come down to Cartagena, having been twenty days on the road, having from thence a long sea journey to the isthmus, thence the passage over it to Panamá, and then the journey down the Pacific! The fact of course is that there are no means of transit in the country except on certain tracks, very few in number; and that even on these all motion is very difficult. Bogotá is about three hundred and seventy miles from Cartagena, and the journey can hardly be made in less than fourteen days.

From Cartagena I went on to the isthmus; the Isthmus of Panamá, as it is called by all the world, though the American town of Aspinwall will gradually become the name best ............