11 SEPTEMBER 1847, Page 1

Spain has at last witnessed its long threatened Ministerial crisis;

and has been the scene of one of the most curious hoaxes ever practised on a public man. Narvaez had been sent for in a hurry, professedly in the Queen's name, to form a Ministry. His ad- vent was the occasion of many conjectural rumours : some thought Inm the emissary of France, sent to complete an intrigue which Was to oust Queen Isabella and place the Dutchess of Mont- jrnsier on the throne ; others presumed, from the supposed sanc- tion of the Queen, that there was a secret understanding between Narvaez and Serrano, and that Narvaez, a convert to Liberalism, was to make some unexpected coup d'etat on that new side ; but at all events some signal result was to follow. He came, he drew up the plan of a Ministry, he submitted it to the Queen : she re- jected it, saying—so goes the story—that it contained too many of her "enemies" Narvaez asked why her Majesty had sent for

him? She replied that she had not sent for him, and that he might go back to Paris when he liked. The indignant soldier of fortune now found that he had been drawn into an ambush by the confident ardour of his own friends—they had actually hoaxed him : he resigned not only his attempt to form a Ministry, but also it is said, his embassy. Meanwhile, Sefior Salamanca, a kind of jobber in state finance, who finds office as necessary to his own affairs as he is to her Majesty's exchequer, continues in the Government, and has par- tially formed a Cabinet. It comprises men of no note; and those more influential persons who have been invited to join it hang back. The probability therefore is, that the Ministerial crisis is but provisionally settled. Spain has, however, for the time escaped from the threatened Ministry of reaction in favour of arbitrary government and French intrigue. And the new Cabi- net has begun with a liberality so marked and vigorous, in the issue of its amnesty and the recall of Espartero, as to raise hopes higher than those which its composition alone might have inspired.