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and new toad-stools sprouting up out of the rotten ones, to rot in their turn. Three or four of Walter Scott's novels have been recently translated, and are well done, and there is a respectable imitation of the "Penny Magazine" called the "Panorama," as well as a monthly Journal of the Lisbon Society of Medical Science. French is generally read by the educated class: in bookshops and catalogues are many modern French works, and the ordinary French classics, Corneille, Racine, Molière, Le Sage, &c.; also a large proportion of translations into Portuguese of the works of Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as of many obscure French novelists. Tom Paine's works and Faublas I have seen in some windows. I am told by English residents here that Voltaire's writings are to be met with very generally in Lisbon libraries, and that they were, together with those of Rousseau, much read twenty years ago, but that the taste for them is happily on the wane translations are to be bought now for a trifle. If the persiflage of Voltaire, and the wild, visionary theories of Rousseau have been performing here their purposes of "withering and annihilating all whereon majesty and worship for the present rest," they have had to work

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upon different materials than those on whom they were first directed. It was proved to have been comparatively easy to act upon the mobility and excitability of the "light children" of France, and to convert them into an unbelieving people; but there is in Portuguese indolence a "vis inertiæ" which must require great and continued force to overcome.

It is said that the general wish of the people is to be quiet, they are tired of constant change. Great complaints are made that trade declines, and that a country to which nature has been so bountiful is poverty-stricken, until it has become one of the most insignificant among European nations. This people, who once by their fortitude and perseverance "completed for the world the greatest discovery that navigation has yet to boast of," the discovery of India, are reduced so low that their commercial prosperity in their own opinion seems to hang on the monopoly of that horrid traffic which all other civilized powers have abandoned.

The want of native writers is one of the signs of the Portuguese times, showing a deficiency in that stirring activity of mind which enables the British, Americans, French, and Germans, to

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maintain their position. For, to be great as a commercial nation, (the present kind of greatness,) requires of course in the mass of the people the same qualities that enable a single individual among them to excel his fellows,-not virtue, even in the old Roman sense, much less in the Christian,— but activity of mind, indomitable perseverance, prudence, and a strict regard to (conventional) honesty. Is it strange, then, that the Portuguese, who seem to possess few or none of these business-doing or moral qualities, are left behind in the present race for wealth among the nations?

There is a pretty theory of Rousseau's to explain the industry of the inhabitants of climates to which nature has not been bountiful, "comme si la nature voulait ainsi égaliser les choses, en donnant aux esprits la fertilité qu'elle refuse à la terre." But the Portuguese, can hardly appropriate this excuse.

CHAPTER XV.

The real thing which calls forth the sympathies and harrows up the soul, is to see a number of boisterous artisans baiting a bull or a bear; not a savage hare, or carnivorous stag, but a poor, innocent, timid bull; not pursued by magistrates, and deputy-lieutenants, and men of education, but by those who must necessarily seek their relaxation in noise and tumultuous merriment, by men whose feelings are blunted, and whose understanding is wholly devoid of refinement.

REV. SYDNEY SMITH.

Lisbon.-Bull-fight.

I HAVE seen the Lisbon bull-fight; as ludicrous a mixture of the comical and tragic, as can well be conceived. A description of the ordinary butchery of horses and bulls in a common Spanish bull-ring would be irksome and inexcusable, after the pictures in prose and verse which every one has read and remembered; but I do not at

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present recollect to have seen any minute account of the comicalities which, for the amusement of the Lisbon population, as well as for that of the midshipmen, lieutenants, and other officers of her Britannic Majesty's navy, now afloat on the Tagus, are performed once a-week at this season of the year in the outskirts of the city.

The ring where the sports are exhibited is in a hexagonal or octagonal building of wood open to the sky. Rough seats rise on every side,-after the fashion of a Richardson's show,-and above the benches on the western or shady side are boxes for the Queen and the exclusives. The one shilling gallery sits opposite, in the sun, yelling and hiding its head under umbrellas and shady coignes of vantage; the horsemen and bull-fighters enter through an opening on the same side; the bulls through a door on the north; and under the boxes are the shady seats answering to the pit. Here I sat amidst light-hearted "middies" of our own service, grave pursers, and elderly seamen full of shrewd humour and broad oaths. Portuguese women there was more than a sprinkling, ladies but a few, and the Queen was absent. Soldiers with bayonets, in the place of the blue policeman, kept order, and put down disturbances

VOL. II.

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