Chacon heard that his honour was cleared at last, and so gave up the
ghost.

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