That the Portugueze peasantry deserved this character, is what all persons who were well acquainted with Portugal would testify; and it is fully acknowledged even by those writers who speak with least reserve of what may be called the established corruption of the government, in all its branches, of the aristocracy, and of the priests, monks, and friars. The author of the Sketches' says of the peasantry, that their distinguishing characteristics are industry, patience under privations, intrepidity and courage; and that they only stand in need of a government which would call forth, in a greater degree, their natural good qualities:

'I would not advocate so warmly, or, in fact,' he says, 'at all, some other classes of Portugueze; for whatever measure of corruption, in every respect, this world can contain, is to be found to superfluity in those orders. . . . The farther removed from the city and its sophistications, the more does the real character of the Portugueze peasantry appear in its proper light; and certainly there are no people who realise more nearly than themselves the description which poets have so often imagined of rural virtue and pastoral simplicity. If a stranger appears among them, they make him, quite unsolicited, a tender of every thing he may stand in need of for his refreshment. There does the sportsman pursue his prey,' (it is a sportsman who writes,) through vineyards full of delicious grapes, and melon fields covered with that fruit, without other barriers to protect them than mutual confidence. No boards, with appalling inscriptions of steel traps and spring guns, annoy the sight, and disgrace the national character of generosity, by holding out to you, in terrorem, the prospect of immediate death, if you climb over a hedge to pick up your game, It is with no such apprehensive selfishness that the Portugueze countryman guards his property. I never coasted along a melon field in my life, but the proprietor, if within sight, would come forward and solicit my making choice of the ripest and best fruit, without the least feeling of interestedness; nay, he would have felt indignant if a remuneration had even been proffered.'

These people (and they constituted the great body of the nation) were contented with their condition, before the war; though they had cause enough for discontent, had there been any persons whose patriotic calling it was to teach them that they ought to be discontented. Their condition was the same from year to year, and from generation to generation. Such as their lot was, it had been that of their ancestors before them, and would, they expected, be that of their descendants after them; they had, therefore, neither regrets nor craving for worldly prosperity. Where they were born, there they grew from infancy to manhood, from manhood to old age; there they saw their children to the third and fourth generation, under the same roof; and there they were gathered to their fathers. This was the ordinary course of a peasant's life; and in this he was contented and happy,

VOL. XLI. NO. LXXXI.

'Pleased

'Pleased that his coffin should stand in as humble a room as his cradle.' WM. TAYLOR.

The exceptions to this were, when parents, from a vow made in sickness or in affliction, or under a more settled principle of superstitious devotion, or from the only kind of ambition which ever entered into a peasant's views, destined one of their sons for the frock; or if a youth, when he came to years of choice, took that course himself, thinking a friar's life easier than a husbandman's, or for the sake of escaping the military service. That service was a grievance, which at one time occasioned emigration to an alarming extent. Other grievances they felt only at times, and then as arising from the corruption or tyranny of the immediate agents, not as the evils of the government itself. The government, they always believed, would have redressed their wrongs, if it were but acquainted with them; but so confirmed was the habit of patient and submissive loyalty in the Portugueze peasantry, that they never imputed as a fault to the government the abominable system which rendered it impossible for the grievances of the subject to reach the ear of the sovereign,-the maladministration of the laws, the malversation which prevailed in every department, and the total neglect of all its duties. The stability of their condition rendered them thus contented; they were not affected by the state of foreign markets, by the opening or closing of distant ports, by commercial panics, by experiments in legislation made in conformity with the heories of men whose peculiar talent it is always to make what is bad worse, and never to leave what is well alone; nor by any of those fluctuations which occasion so much misery in these kingdoms. The benignity of their climate, in which it is a pleasure to exist and breathe, seemed to have communicated itself to their disposition, and undoubtedly influenced it in no inconsiderable degree; it had neither relaxed, nor rendered them idle, and therefore dissolute; but it affected them with a sense of well-being, through the bounty of Providence; their heritage had fallen to them in a goodly land, upon which the heavens smiled, and where the earth had not been cursed for their sake. And though no government could be more unlike that patriarchal one to which its sycophants likened it, there was in the people just such a feeling of filial, confiding obedience as is supposed in such a state. The Portugueze were proud to think that their king was as absolute as king could be; they appeared to believe that his power could only be exercised for their good, and therefore could not be limited without injury to themselves.

This was the bright side of the picture; the colours are not overcharged, nor was the favourable character confined to the

mere

6

mere peasantry. At a distance from the capital, I know not any nation,' says General Mackinnon, where there appears to be more purity of morals than in Portugal. They have in this country a peculiar virtue, from the kindness with which they treat servants, many of whom, attached to the same family from one generation to another, acquire by their savings small properties, which in time enable them to rise and become independent.' In one house where he was entertained there were not less than forty servants, with their children, residing there. The name, indeed, for servant in that language, seems originally to have implied one bred in the family-a child of the house. To this cause it may in part be owing that nothing like that distance between master and servant, which is observed here, was maintained in Portugal; in its stead, there was a familiarity on both sides, altogether inconsistent with our manners and with the constitution of our society. In this respect the habit of old times continued even where the hereditary feeling had ceased to exist; and there was also the less creditable, though not less efficient, cause, that the fidalgos, as to the intellectual part of their education, were not elevated above their domestics. The heir-apparent of a titled family would have deemed it a degradation to receive an academical education; consequently there was not one fidalgo titular who had been educated at Coimbra, unless he had been a second son, and succeeded to the family honours upon an elder brother's death. Pombal would have remedied this, and have raised the nation to the standard of French civilization under a government as despotic as the then French monarchy; but no sooner was he displaced, than the privilege of remaining illiterate was reasserted by this thoroughly degenerate order. This was an evil which, in its consequences, directly affected the state in its weightiest concern; for the presidents of the tribunals were usually chosen from this class of men, who would have been deemed to have dishonoured themselves if they had gone through any regular course of study in their youth; and of these presidents the council of state was formed! The council was established when the French revolution first seriously alarmed the Portugueze government. Instead of looking for talents, and opening a channel for them to make their way for the public good, they instituted a council consisting of men who, as one of their own countrymen describes them, were bred up in a contemptuous dislike for study; incapable, for lack of education, to understand the interests of their own country or of any other; and wanting energy both of body and mind for the application and arduous labour which their office required-of body as well as of mind,-for physical degeneracy had visibly been produced

by long-continued moral deterioration. What could this miserable and long misguided government do? Affairs of state were prescriptively in the hands of this class; and there were literally no means by which a man of ability and information could make himself known, and open for himself a way into public life. Every book of modern times, which treated of morals, politics, or legislation, or touched upon them, if it was of any merit or reputation, was prohibited. A Portugueze could not acquire the knowledge indispensable for a statesman, even such as statesmen are in this brazen age, without breaking the laws of his country, and putting himself in danger of the Inquisition; for it was only to be obtained by reading, in secret, books which it was a crime to possess. But if stolen water be sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant, can it be supposed that men would not hunger and thirst for the prohibited bread of knowledge, and the forbidden waters of instruction? This prohibitory system was more effectual against good books than bad ones for one copy of Montesquieu, twenty of the Systême de la Nature, or the Pucelle, would be imported; the worse such books were, the more likely they were to be prized by those who had contracted either a taste or a desire for them, and the greater was the temptation to introduce them, because they bore, in consequence, a higher price. There was also a worse consequence; the prohibition stamped the book with an imaginary value; its authority became, as it were, canonical to those who could not obtain it without difficulty, nor read it but in secret and with some degree of danger, that danger operating as a provocative to many as a deterrent, perhaps, to none. 16917 d: mit

saw

Thus, at the beginning of the French Revolution, there were a set of men, who had sucked in poison from the vilest French books, and who were confirmed in the atheism, or at least in the hatred of Christianity, which they there learnt, by all that they, of religion in their own country, all that they knew of it, and all that they were allowed to read upon the subject, if they had been disposed to seek for information which might remove their doubts and stablish their faith. There had been a French party in Por tugal from the time of the Succession War; a new one arose now, which adhered to the French side, upon different but no better grounds and, little as was the intelligence which it could obtain of passing events in France, followed, nevertheless, implicitly all the mutations of the Revolution. They saw and lamented, at the beginning of their career, ingenuously, the evils of their own government, and the grievances of the people; but perceiving how hopeless it was to look, even, still more so to labour, for any reformation, and becoming wise in their generation as they advanced

in years, they usually contented themselves, when they could, by years, they users of becoming members of the corrupt and nefarious system, which, as they could not amend, they deemed it wise to share in. The more fortunate of these men were thus from time to time drafted into the service of the state; and then their only anxiety was that the fabric of government, with all its abuses, might last, as the phrase is, their time. Many who missed of such promotion, or were on their way to it, amused themselves with freemasonry, of which they are said by one of their countrymen (an adept himself in the mysteries of this cryptic science) to have known nothing; it served them for a secret bond of union, and for that reason freemasonry was supposed by the government and by the Inquisition to comprise whatever is impious in speculative opinions, and dangerous in political ones. Certainly, it was a distinctive mark among themselves of those who would have overthrown the existing despotism, temporal and spiritual, if they could'; a desire in which every Portugueze who loved his country must have partaken, had there appeared a reasonable hope of erecting anything better in their stead. Having no such hope, such of the Portugueze as were blessed by nature with gentle hearts and peaceable dispositions, as well as thoughtful and inquiring minds, involved themselves in no clandestine associations, but followed quietly their own pursuits; and while they mourned over the degradation of their country, became more attached to it by patriotic feeling, from the melancholy pride with which they called to mind its former greatness.

In this state Portugal was surprised by the first French invasion. The royal family took flight to Brazil, escaping just in time; the treacherous invaders were received without resistance, in obedience to the Prince Regent's last directions; and if there had been as little loyalty and as little love of their country in the people as was manifested by the privileged orders, Portugal must have become whatever Buonaparte had pleased to make it-a tributary kingdom, or a province of his military empire. "Here in England it is commonly believed that men who have what is called a large stake in the country, may, because of that stake, be relied on, if not for sound judgment, for safe intentions at all times, and for patriotic conduct in arduous ones. What has happened in other countries during this revolutionary age, has shown that no reliance can be more fallacious. The men on whom a government may surely depend, in its hour of need, are not those who have the largest properties to lose, because the desire of preserving that property may as easily influence them on the one side as the other. During the Great Rebellion in our own country, although more principle was found on both parts than

has