friend; and, finding the bore who compares
everything to Constantinople reading Napier's
Peninsular War.

I hasten out again, and push for the public
gardens. Suddenly, at the door of a small
theatre, a dirty touter catches me by the arm
"Come in," he says, "gentlemens, and see
Monsieur Robinson play the fool. O, he play
the fool vary well—Robinson!" Resisting this
pathetic appeal, I push on to the gardens;
and, after some zig-zagging, get there. It
is a large square, enclosed garden, walled
in by iron palisading; against which the
wistful, dull, apathetic crowd flatten their
large noses. You do not pay as you go in, but
as you go out. I enter a long walk, with
flower-borders on either side, thorny with
aloes, and pass down between rows of feeble
Vauxhall lamps, and lines of flaccid pimento
trees, studded with innumerable berries, that
look like pale red coral. At the end there
are some tent booths, as dull as a wet
Greenwich fair used to be; and, beyond
this, a sort of summer-house stage, with
our foot-lights, and a band playing
underneath to a dozen rows of patient,
untenanted chairs. On the stage sit two
painted singers, who talk across the lamps,
twiddle their fans, laugh, and play graceful
little tricks, as the company begin to
assemble. This is composed of grave
city-looking men, pompous, dull officers, and a few
ladies; who seem to feel no interest in
anything, and none of whom ever laugh even at
the comic songs. The performance
commences. It consists of tinselly French ballads,
full of l'amour, glorie, and l'honneur; and
ends with a caricature representation of
an English traveller in Paris: which drove
a commercial traveller, who sat next to me,
to declare that he should certainly come
the night following with Smith of
Birmingham, Brown of Sheffield, and a few
other commercial gentlemen, to storm the
orchestra and thrash the buffoon,—a patriotic
resolve, which I, most anxious for his
discomfiture, warmly encouraged. The fun
of this representation consisted entirely
in the mime's keeping his arms rigidly
close to his side, wearing immense
shirt-collars, rolling his eyes, and answering to
everything " Yaase, yaase." The Englishman
eventually volunteers a dance at the Mabile,
and exits with a flabby hornpipe, entirely
misunderstood, and turned into a wretched
ballet pas seul. I must say, in justice to the
Portuguese, that nobody laughed; but I do
not think their common people ever do laugh.
I afterwards met with young Portuguese of
a high class, who gambolled, grimaced, and
chattered like monkeys; loud, impudent, and
ceaselessly; but I have no reason to hope
that the mere street Portuguese ever laughs
on any provocation whatever.

Lisbon, allowing for the dulness of its
amusements, and the phlegm of its poor, is
full of pictures, whichever way you look;
whether far away from the great unfinished
palace of the Necessidades, or from the long
chain of stilted aqueducts that, near the
windmill hill, give a Roman character to the
environs. In the direction of Cintra—green
amid a brown, scorched-up desert—or from
the fortified hills opposite, you look across
the blue field of the bay at the great
archbishop's water-side palace, and the yellow
dome of the Estrella. Beyond the hill of
Buenos Ayres, higher up the bay, is a region
of wild myrtle heaths, olive-fields and
vine-yards. The yellow arsenal and the citadel
are before you. This is the Old Lisbon of
Vasco di Gama, Cabral, the discoverer of
Brazil, Don Sebastian, and Albuquerque,
From hence sallied the fleet that discovered
the Azores, and first rounded the dreaded
Cape. The shade of Camoens paces by the
Tagus side, Saint Vincent sleeps soundly in
that hill church. This is the city of that
dreadful earthquake, too, which in seventeen
hundred and fifty-five, in our quiet Horace
Walpole days, swallowed at one gulp forty
thousand people, and I don't know how
many millions of treasure. Since the beginning
of time, Death, the Insatiable, had never
such a sudden rich sop thrown into his black
jaws, and that not by battle, massacre, or
conflagration.

Let us pace up and down by these trees
that face the Custom-house, which, daubed
with yellow ochre, is tapestried with oriental
looking flowers; not caring to stop opposite that
hard, handsome-looking official surrounded by
military boatmen, who is white with rage at
the French gentleman, tearing up a whole
box of cigars, rather than pay duty on
them, crushing them to dust with his feet;
or rather—for there is a fuss here of landing
travellers, and we shall be disturbed—let us
cross Black Horse Square, where Don Jose
the First, the patron of the terrible
iron-handed Pombal, the enemy of the nobles,
rides and dominates in bronze, and get to the
quieter Largo di Pelerhino, or square by the
arsenal; where the curious corporation pillar
is, that looks like a cable; being made of
twisted strands of marble. Where that skeleton
armillary sphere now stands, on the top of
the open-work column, was once a
garotte-scaffold, with rings and chains, where
noblemen were periodically strangled. A little
lower, there, in the Praca dos Romulares, in
the time of Dom Miguel, five traitors were
burnt, and their ashes thrown into the Tagus.

Look up here, too, below the Black Horse
Square, now tenanted by boatmen waiting
for hire, sentinels, and booted hackney coachmen,
just above where the three streets Santa
Anna, Augusta, and Prata meet! You see
the arches and tottering ruins of the Carmo,
one of the relics of that dreadful earthquake.

Lisbon had had several previous shocks;
but, being uninspired forgot them, and did not
consider them to be warnings, or even threats.