There is still existing at Seville a family by the name of Colon, the lineal descendants of the great Columbus. They live in penury, wretchedness, and obscurity. The ingratitude shewn to their illustrious ancestor by his mercenary sovereign has been continued through succeeding ages. The posthumous glory of their great progenitor is of little advantage to his descendants; the commiseration of a few individuals is the only benefit which they receive. The fate of Columbus and his posterity presents to the mind a melancholy picture of the baseness of human nature, and throws a stigma on the Spanish name that no age or glory hereafter acquired can ever oblit

erate.

Besides the cathedral and other churches, there are eighty four convents in Seville, many of which are well deserving a traveller's attention from the beauty of their architecture, as well as from the excellent paintings which they contain. I had neither time nor inclination to visit half of these, though I went to a great number. The largest of all the convents is the Franciscan, which has cells for about two hundred monks. The pencil of Murillo shine every where preeminent. The convent of Capuchins contains some of his best productions. This convent is without the walls. It has a passage under ground nearly half a mile in length, communicating with a convent of Augustins.

As we were walking through the gloomy vaults and subterranean avenues of these receptacles of superstition, the admirable descriptions of Mrs. Radcliffe frequently occurred to my recollection. I had not, however, the felicity of meeting in my rambles with any pale faced spectres, or ill-looking hobgoblins. I am rather inclined to imagine it a libel on those gentry to suppose they have no other occupation than to play hide and go seek among these dark abodes. I will nevertheless candidly confess, that had I been there alone, I am not sure whether I should not have conjured up as many ghosts and devils as were seen by Tam O Shanter dancing cotillions in the Kirk.

PORTUGUEZE LITERATURE.

From the London Quarterly Review,

Continued from page 388.

To the shame of all these poets it must be remarked, that while they were commending one another, and lavishing praise

upon every rhymer of rank, they never mentioned Camoens. Noble and opulent themselves, they reserved their praises for those who were noble and opulent also. Camoens was infinitely their superior by nature, but he was miserably poor, and they who felt their own inferiority, affected to neglect or to despise him whom they envied. They would not degrade themselves by commending genius in distress, and genius did not deign to notice them. There is neither occasion nor room here to enter into an examination of the merits of Camoens. Mickle has ornamented the Lusiad with a richness of description which is not to be found in the original, and Lord Strangford has given a character of licentiousness to his minor poems, of which the author is entirely innocent. That improvement of poetical language which in our country has with equal ignorance and absurdity been ascribed to Waller and to Pope, Camoens effected in Portugueze, nothing before him was so good, nothing after him has been better. It would require a separate dissertation to appreciate rightly this celebrated poet. So much of the English Lusiad belongs to the translator, that an edition in which all the variations should be pointed out, is greatly to be desired.

Heroick poetry was in fashion during that age as in this, with the poets rather than with the publick, and the presses of Spain and Portugul have teemed from that time almost to the present with epick poems. The Portugueze heroes have not the same cause of complaint as those who lived before Agamemnon; their exploits were no sooner atchieved than they were celebrated, not merely in sonnets and complimentary odes, but at as much length as the wrath of Achilles. The poets of no other country have had a history so fertile of heroick themes. They have sung the founder of their state Count Henrique, and their first king Affonso Henriques, their deliverance from Castille by the policy of Joam I. the chivalrous valour of Nunalvares Pereira, and the patriotism of the people; their victories in Africa, and the extinction of their power by Sebastian's utter overthrow; the discovery of India, the conquests of Goa and of Malacca, the two sieges of Diu, and the adventures of the first settler in Bahia. Their latest adequate subject is the Braganzan revolution; but that no publick event might go without due commemoration, an epick poem was written upon the marriage of Catharine of Portugal with Charles II. and his consequent conversion to popery; and another in our own days upon rebuilding

Lisbon after the earthquake. In the age of fable they found Ulysses for a national hero, in ancient history the great Viriatus, whose memory it well becomes them to love and cherish. Some of these are servile imitations of Tasso, others are written without any model, but unfortunately by writers who were unequal to what they had undertaken. Many passages of striking beauty are to be found in these long works, and instances of extraordinary absurdity, and whimsical taste are still more frequent. There is scarely one among them which would not supply materials for an amusing analysis, and specimens sufficient to rescue the author from contempt, and reprieve him from oblivion.

The octave stanza is the usual metre of these poems. Later criticks have reprobated it as the worst form for narrative; they affirm that it tempts the poet to make use of vain circumiocutions, and to stuff his measure with redundant phrases and idle epithets; this he must do to eke out his meaning to the requisite length; and at other times he must cramp and crowd his thoughts by the necessity of pausing at regular distances. These objections are deduced from want of skill in the poet, rather than from any defect inherent in the stanza. Jeronymo Cortereal wrote in the verso solto: epithets have never been strung together with more profuse tautology than by this writer both in his Naufragio de Sepulveda, and his Segundo Cerco de Diu. The couplet has been tried in imaginary imitation of the French or English, but it is altogether a different metre from either, and the principle upon which it has been recommended is that it admits a greater variety of pauses than the octave stanza. Francisco de Pina e de Mello uses it with the occasional license of a quatrain, or of a rhymeless line in his Conquista de Goa, and in what he calls his Epick-Polemick Poem, the Triumpho da Religiam. Of these forms of heroick rhyme it may safely be asserted that a good poet would write well in any, and a bad one in none. The verso solto is a feeble measure; it might perhaps be advantageously used in dramatick writing, but sufficient trials have been made in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, to prove that it is incapable of the strength and dignity of our heroick blank verse.

In the bright morning of their literature the Portugueze had one distinguished dramatist, by name Gil Vicente. Lope de Vega and Quevedo are said to have imitated his style of satire, and it is also said that Erasmus learnt Portugueze for the sake

of reading his works, which he affirmed approached more nearly to the manner of Plautus than any author had yet done before him. Emanuel and Joam III. with their families often witnessed the representation of his plays ;-they were privately performed, and one of his daughters, who was lady of the bedchamber to the Infanta D. Maria, acted in them. This daughter herself wrote comedies, and compiled grammars of the English and Dutch languages. A shocking anecdote is related of Gil Vicente :-growing envious of the dramatick talents which his eldest son had displayed, he sent him to India, to get rid of him, and there the youth was slain. It is remarkable that these plays have never been re-published, though they are highly esteemed, and exceedingly rare.

But notwithstanding this beginning, which was perhaps more promising than in any other country, the drama has not flourished in Portugal. The richness of the Spanish theatre has probably occasioned the poverty of the Portugueze. During the Castillian usurpation it was a wise part of the usurper's policy to render the language of the country unfashionable, and encourage the Portugueze authors to write in Spanish. There had been writers unwise enough to do this even before the fall of Sebastian, Spanish poems are to be found among the works of Sa de Miranda, Ferreira, and Camoens himself. Fortunately however for their countrymen, Barros and Moraes and Camoens had already modelled, and enriched, and perfected their language, and given them a national literature, which pride, as well as patriotism that never lost its hope, stimulated them to preserve. But many were led astray, and, wanting either feeling or foresight, Castillianized themselves during the reign of the Philips. During this time, which was the flourishing age of the Spanish drama, Spanish plays were represented at Lisbon, as English ones are now at Edinburg. They were not in the dialect of the country, but they were sufficiently understood by all the audience. After the Braganzan revolution, as the influence of bigotry became greater, the theatre was discouraged, and, in later days, to the disgrace and degradation of national literature, the opera has supplanted it as a fashionable amusement.

Of the Portugueze, who wrote in Spanish, Manoel de Faria e Sousa is the most celebrated; a man of great learning and considerable genius, yet of such execrable taste that his writings are rather a reproach than an honour to the language. Besides his criticisms, and the great historical works by which he is best

known, he published nine volumes of poems. It is an extraordinary fact, that no complete set is known to exist. The least imperfect, which contained only five of the nine volumes, was in possession of D. Fr. Manoel de Cenaculo Villas Boas, bishop of Beja. We say was in his possession, because we know not whether that truly excellent and venerable prelate be still living, nor whether his library has escaped the dreadful ravages which the French committed in that part of Alentejo, when the Portugueze first revolted against Junot and his army of ruffians.

Faria e Sousa had no lack of patriotism; he wrote in Spanish partly because he thought it more grandiloquous and therefore more suited to his own ambitious style, and partly because he expected to be more generally read. There are other writers of his age who may justly be stigmatized as literary renegados. When the Braganzan revolution took place, the literary taste of all Europe had been corrupted, and from that time, till the middle of the last century, Portugal produced no poets worthy of being ranked with those of the age of Sebastian. Even when the absurdities of a conceited and bombastick style were exploded, this degradation of language which bad writers, and especially bad poets, every where occasion, was felt and acknowledged, and the Portugueze had still farther debased it by the vile fashion of laying aside sterling old words for new ones of French derivation, and of barbarizing their own nobler tongue by introducing French idioms. The first modern poet who distinguished himself by the purity of his language, was Pedro Antonio Correa Garcam, a member of the Arcadian Society. Another member of this society, the Desembargador, Antonio Diniz da Cruz e Silva, stands unrivalled in the latter

ages of Portugueze poetry. His Pindarick odes were pub

lished in 1801, after the author's death, under his Arcadian name, Elpino Nonacriense. His dithyrambicks, some of which are very spirited, still remain unprinted. The poem which has made him most popular, is a mock-heroick, consisting of eight cantos, in verso solto, and entitled the Hyssopaida. Joze Carlos de Lara, Dean of Elvas, used, for the sake of ingratiating himself with his bishop, to attend him in person with the hyssop, at the door of the chapter-house, whenever he officiated: after awhile some quarrel arose between them, and he then discontinued this act of supererogatory respect; but he had practised it so long that the bishop, and his party in the chapter, insisted upon it as a right, and commanded him to continue it