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GENERAL LOPEZ, THE CUBAN PATRIOT. WITHIN the past year and a-half the name of General Lopez, of Cuba, has been familiar to the press and people of the United States, as the projector and chief of a revolutionary movement contemplated in that island, which was to have broken out in the summer of 1848, but which was frustrated by discovery on the part of the government. Many arrests were suddenly made, and he himself, after being informed that his principal friends had been arrested, (to the number of two hundred, as the account was first brought to him, though it proved afterwards to have been greatly exaggerated,) had time to escape on board a vessel bound for Bristol, R. I. (Rhode Island, not Round Island;) feeling himself reluctantly compelled to take that step to save his friends from being shot, a fate which would certainly have awaited them within three days if he had at that moment, with premature suddenness, raised the standard of the revolution.

Having obtained from the friends of General Lopez some interesting particulars of his life and career, we propose to employ them as materials for a brief biographical sketch, which will serve to make better known to our readers the brilliant career and noble character of a man whose name is probably destined at no distant day to occupy no small space in the history of our times,-so far at least as that history has to deal with the political condition and changes of the American side of the Atlantic.

General Narciso Lopez is now a little over fifty years of age, having been born in Venezuela, in the year 1798 or '9. His father was a wealthy landed proprietor, owning large estates on the llanos or plains, swarming with cattle, horses, &c. His mother, who is still living, is one of those women of rare elevation of moral dignity combined with mental strength, whose children, imbued with that noblest inheritance of nature, are stamped from the outset as born for command. General Lopez was their only son that lived beyond childhood, though of daughters his parents had some fourteen or fifteen; and, according to the habitual life of the llanos, passed almost from the cradle to the saddle, or rather, we may

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perhaps say, to the back of a wild horse without any saddle,-a training well calculated to lay the foundation of that character and habit of fearless hardihood, energy and resolution, which has been illustrated by his subsequent military career.

Though so successful as a soldier, and though that success was achieved only by the display of extraordinary capacity as well as courage, it is singular that General Lopez has never been fond of the military profession and life. He did not enter it from choice, but simply as a resource of desperation, under circumstances forced upon him, at the age of fifteen, by the civil war then desolating all the Spanish South American provinces. His father had been stripped of nearly all his property, or had seen it rendered wholly unproductive, through the operation of that cause, and with such means as he was able to realize had entered into commercial life at Caraccas, assisted by his son, who, boy as he was, was able to bear the burden of a large share of its responsibilities. At the town of Valencia, in the interior, he had the charge of a branch of his father's main establishment at Caraccas, at the period of the sanguinary, and for the time decisive, battle of La Puerta, in 1814, in which Bolivar, at the head of the insurgent troops, was defeated by the Spanish army under General Boves. Bolivar, though routed, sent orders to the garrison of Valencia to maintain the place, which was done with heroism to the last moment, so long as resistance was possible; the inhabitants, who knew that massacre and plunder would immediately ensue on the entrance of the victorious army, uniting in the defense with the few soldiers of the garrison. The town being an open one, this consisted simply in defending the approaches to the "plaza" or square, into which were hastily collected all the property and effects which it was considered most important to protect. The house of Lopez's father happened to be situated at one corner of the square, and the boy took an active part in the defense at that point, and before long found himself recognised by those collected at that point, soldiers and citizens, without suspecting it himself, as their leader de facto. His father, however, who was in Valencia at the time, but a man of different mould from the boy who then made his maiden trial in arms, took no part in it. The resistance was prolonged three weeks, but no relief came from Bolivar, who meanwhile abandoned indeed all that part of the country which he had thus compromised, and made his way along the coast towards Barcelona. The inhabitants of Valencia felt bitterly resentful at this treatment by the Patriot leader, who had sacrificed them for the escape of the routed fragments of his own force, by directing them to make a resistance only justifiable on the idea of his coming to their relief; while it could not fail to provoke even a redoubled degree of the usual ferocity with which, in that terrible civil struggle, the conquering party was in the habit of treating any town falling into their possession. Massacre of the men was the general rule-a rule often enough made to include a proportion of women and children. After the surrender of the place, Lopez was separated from his father, being turned off as a child, while his father was herded with the men, supposed, in spite of the capitulation, to be reserved for massacre that night. The boy himself, indeed, escaped that fate very narrowly. With some other companions he had joined a couple of negroes, slaves of his family, among a great number more who had huddled together in one spot for safety, that class not being usually included in the massacres of such occasions; but during the

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