ple have of throwing their slops and rubbish (even in respectable houses) from the windows; but this ceremony does not commence (you will hear enough of it from our friends-along with execrations about bad soap, and muslin towels, with wide frills to them) -it seldom becomes very general until ten, or, perhaps, eleven o'clock, when scarcely any Portuguese (unless in carriages) are abroad. A stranger should go forth, as the first bat gets on the wing! Just after the bell has done ringing for vespers-as the stars begin to peep gently through the clear red of the horizon, and the ladies' eyes to glance curiously from the cross lattices of their windows! Then plant yourself in one of the several squares which run along the edge of the Tagus, (as our temple gardens lie upon the bank of the Thames,) and you have the fresh, cool, sea breeze (no suggestion even of mud,) fanning you on one side, while, on the other, terrace above terrace, as children build their palaces of cards, the whole city, like one vast edifice, rises on your view.

I stood at a point like this, on the night before last, when the town was generally illuminated, for the birthday, I believe, of the Prince of the Brazils.

You never saw anything at all like the scene, unless, perhaps, it was a scene in a fairy pantomime at a theatre! The illumination consisted, not of coloured lamps, or of lamps laid into devices, as the fashion is in England; but principally of candles, disposed in great abundance (through houses five or six stories high) in every window, from top to bottom. This arrangement, if followed universally, would be lively even in level streets; but imagine a pile of blazing lanterns three miles wide, and three times as high as St Paul's Church yourself standing at the foot of ittaken in as part only of a prospect !— Suppose the rock of Clifton, seen at night from the shore opposite the Hot Wells, and stuck over (the face of it) with lamps and torches down to the very water's edge! And even see this at Clifton, and you see nothing; for the river at Clifton is nothing! If you could have watched the progress of the view here-its gradual developement from the beginning! The flashing up, one after another, of the lights on the different quarters of the town, as the dusk of the evening deepened into

darkness! the bright glare of the lamps and tapers upon the white of yellow houses; relieved, but not saddened, by the free mixture of green, (the favourite colour here for shutters and window-blinds,) or varying into a thousand different tints, with every successive gust of wind, upon the trees in the courts and gardens of the city, which are seen as fully here from below, (lying on the belly of the hill,) as those of London would be (in bird's eye view) from an eminence! And then, in the midst of all this array of tapers, and lamps, and torches, to see the moon suddenly bursting out, and throwing her cold white light across the flickering, yellow blaze of the candles-dazzling with a reflection from glass windows in one place

breaking the rocks, and convents, and churches, into strange irregular shadow in another! And all this delicious scene of fairy splendour and confusion-these lighted palaces, and these gardens, and statues, and running fountains-the whole of this gay tissue of bizarrerie and brilliancy, running, from such a height, that the lights of the topmost buildings seemed to mix with the very stars, right down to the river's edge, and reflected in the waters of the Tagus! All this, Robert-conceive it!-But no, you cannot conceive it! without any of the English accompaniment (by patent) to a féte. With very little riot; very little accident; still less of quarrel; and no intoxication at all! Ah, think how ebullient the shoemakers of London would have been on such a night! And what computations of damage, and holdings to bail, and bindings over to prosecute-what settlings of broken windows, and compounding for bloody noses, would have occupied the police magistrates for three days after? Ah! nous autres Anglois! Never tell me, sir, of the Irishman who flung himself out of the tree for joy; if he had been an Englishman, he would have shewn his satisfaction by throwing out his next-door neighbour !

But to my tale.-As you move along the banks of the river, not upon a continued quay, but through a succession of squares, or open areas, having stairs (each) down to the water; the guitar, touched well or ill, is twangling on every side. The boatmen and waterbearers sing (here) instead of molest

ing those who pass. Their music is not eminent; but it is better than their abuse would be; besides that, one does, now and then, hear a reasonable bass, chaunting those interminable Rondos-the melodies simple and sweet, but everlastingly repeated -which live all along the Spanish coast, and up the shores of the Mediterranean. These squares too, or largos, for their own merits, are worth looking at in an evening; for they then exhibit specimens from every class of the Lisbon population; and, amongst other curiosities, vast swarms of beggars-who have their peculiarities as well as richer people.

Mendicancy is an interesting excrescence on the face of every civilized society; but the systematic conduct of it in Lisbon, renders it there more than usually amusing. We have two sets of beggars regularly in action-the day collectors, and those of evening; who have their exclusive hours for operation; their exclusive modes of obtaining charity; and who never, I believe, infringe upon the rights or copyholds of each other. The beggars of the day are the old monsters-like those of England or Ireland. Men or women, indiscriminately, working upon the ruder principles of the science -that is, taking care to be clamorous enough in their outcry, and sufficient ly filthy in their aspect; by which means they insure a livelihood if they are moderately offensive, with the chance of a fortune where they are so lucky as to be unbearable. But the adventurers of evening consist entirely of females. Blind women, generally young, but always perfectly neat and clean, (loss of sight being an infirmity, from whatever cause, very common in this country,) and children from about four to eight years of age, picked out for this calling according to the degree of their personal beauty, and dressed to the greatest possible advantage, without any show of poverty at all. These night practitioners start altogether upon later lights than those of day,-to interest (a laudable improvement,) instead of disgusting you out of your money. The blind women are commonly led about by some female of creditable appearance; one sister very frequently, in this way, accompanying another. Many of them are handsome, and these, I suspect, do well. A man can hardly see a fine

girl, of nineteen or twenty years of age, with all circumstances of beauty and desireableness about her,completely destroyed by such a visitation as blindness, without feeling disposed to do something in her favour. As for the little girls of five years old, (with their red shoes and broad sashes,) they are not the children, I understand, of persons immediately in distress; but the lower orders, very constantly, where they have an interesting child, are content to make a living by this disgraceful exhibition of her. This is very disgusting, but it succeeds wonderfully; and, critically speaking, it ought to do so. Girls, upon every principle of mendicity, should make incomparably better beggars (for instance) than old men. I have been conquered myself, in London, a hundred times, by the sight of half-starved twins, though I knew perfectly they were none of the woman's that carried them; and have gi ven a shilling to a match-girl of fourteen,-cant, and rags, and dirt, and all, when I should certainly have cried upon the beadle, if I had been waylaid by her great-grandmother.

About this hour, too, of the eve ning, (that is from seven to nine o'clock,) the coffeehouses of the city are all full, and flourishing with custom. The Cazas de Caffé, or Coffeehouses, distinguished from the Cazas de Pasto, or Taverns-(in England there is no such distinction; but here, the "coffeehouse" gives only breakfast, tea, and wine, the affair of dinner belonging to the "eating-house" exclusively,)-the Cazas de Caffe are upheld at considerable cost. In some establishments, they have rooms fitted up alla Campestre. The walls painted in landscape; the ceiling in cloud; and the windowframes and supporters, wreathed with artificial leaves and flowers. In others, the attraction is to serve entirely on plate,-one house does this with very great splendour indeed,-giving coffee (every appurtenance of silver) to a hundred and fifty people in the same apartment. All the houses of this description are appointed with smartness, and even taste-marble tables— abundant lights-showy china, glass, and such concomitants;-and the restauration which you get is good in its kind; and herein certainly they differ widely enough from the Cazas de Pasto, or dining-houses, which are

bad, because the city has furnished no trade for such institutions. The people here are not diners-out. They eat at all times but sparingly; seldom in company, and almost never at any house of public entertainment. So little, indeed, is the business of hotelkeeping understood or appreciated by the Portuguese, that three-fourths of the table d'hote, which supplies the demand now produced by the war, is furnished by resident Frenchmen, or English speculators.

But the appearance of the well frequented coffeehouses is lively here at night. When they are liberally lighted, and their tables all well covered, and crowded with soldiers of twenty different nations, clad in a hundred different variety of uniform. In one party, for instance, you have the English Guards, with their flaming scarlet coats and gold! and the English light dragoons, in their rich deep blue and silver! and the riflemen in their sombre green! and the heavy horse, with their long swords, huge boots, and strange cocked hats! In another circle are the Peninsular troops, in their gaudy uniforms of blue and yellow; and the Spaniards, in dresses still more glittering and fantastical; and the Lisbon Police Guards, the "crack" regiments of all Portugal; and the Lisbon volunteers! looking almost as soldierlike as the "City Light Horse" do when they are in Gray's Inn Lane. And, besides these, there are the Scots-the "Forty-twa" men! in their kilts and tartans! and the German Hussars-Hessians, Saxons, and Hanoverians-with their long pipes, and furred pelisses! and the Duke of Brunswick's" Black Cavalry," in their graceful half-mourning jackets! The general melange varied still farther by a pretty free adoption of the long blue frock-which is fashionable because the General wears it, and convenient because it makes a cornet and a colonel look alike. The whole constituting an array sufficiently brilliant of lace, and silk, and fur, and feather, cold steel, and embroidery; and involving a twist of languages still more intricate even than the jumble of costume; for, besides the divisions of our mother British into English, Scotch, and Irish accents, the Portuguese and Spaniards speaking their own languages; and half the general company talking French, some of the foreign corps in our ser

vice, as the "Chasseurs Britanniques" -the "Guides"-and some regiments of " the Legion"-contain officers, I believe, as well as privates, from every civilized country in the world.

But, leaving the Coffeehouses and the river, you cross the Caiz do Soudré, and make your way, in a straight line, towards the centre of the city. To your right lies the New Town, or streets built since the great earthquake in 1756; the great object with the projector of which seems to have been, to make them as unlike the pre-existing ones as possible.

In the Old City, though a mile's distance, you scarcely find six inches of level ground; in the New, the level is uniform, and so perfect, that even quicksilver might lie still upon it. In the Old City you seldom or never find two houses (together) alike; in the New, there is a mathematical sameness quite fatiguing to the eye. In scveral streets (of the New Town,) perhaps three quarters of a mile long, and consisting of buildings six stories high, there is not a house that, if if you happen to forget its number, you could pick out again by any distinctive mark. And, to confuse one's senses too the more, each of these streets is filled with shops belonging to some single trade. All the goldsmiths live in one. In another, all the inhabitants are mercers: So that if you do happen (as a stranger) to hit your own residence instead of going to next door, you may really esteem yourself a person especially by Providence protected.

This "New Town" certainly seems, throughout, to have been built in the very ultru fury of architectural reform. Before, there had been no foot-pavements in Lisbon; here, they raised them three feet above the horse-way. Before, there were no posts in the streets; here they seem to have left posts in the way by mistake. But, passing leftwards towards the more lofty and picturesque sojourns of the old city-the quarter of St Francisco de Cidade, first rising from the flat-above that, the streets of Boavista, and Bellavista—still higher, the Calcada and Convent do Estrella,— and, a-top of all, the Bairro, or parish of Buenos Ayres, you trace the course of the earthquake in 1756, indicated, nevertheless, (a curious consideration) by real improvements of the place.

classes, an object of deep reverence and admiration. Those who know nothing, and wish to know nothing of its merits, from the bottom of their souls, nevertheless worship every stone of it. We want something, for pictorial effect, of the old costume though matters, in that respect, stand better than they do in England. We have not yet got, here, to booted clerks, in stiff cravats, publishing their Sunday freedom and their Cockney ignorance within walls built seven centuries before they were imagined; nor to footmen and idle boys squabbling round the church doors in service time, with half-drunken beadles, in mountebank gowns and gingerbread laced hats. And then, if we are imperfect in the antique dressing, the old feeling we have entire! The dark grey turrets that frown upon you here, do seem to be the real turrets of history and of romance. When you see them, you see them surrounded by beings whose existence you can suppose coeval with such objects. They do carry the mind back to those days, unhap pily gone by, when the world was held to be for the few, and not for the many; when there was something like career open to the aspiring and the fearless; when the man who had a hand could grasp a lance; the man who had a head put on a cowl ;-when there always was prospect, where there existed power; and where the very struggle of ambition was, of itself, a course of pleasure! There is nothing in the tone of the circumstances about you to break in upon this illusion. The people, in their opinions as in their habits, are full a century behind our countrymen. They are rude, submissive, ignorant-and have no desire to become wiser. Explain to them that these heavy piles, the very deformities of what they bow before, were raised out of the blood and the misery of millions, they would answer-that the "millions" are gone; and that it would have been so had the thing been otherwise. And sooth is, the immediate effects of this acquiescent feeling, are favourable to the comfort of the lower classes, rather than opposed to it. While they have no political freedom, and, by consequence, no security, they enjoy advantages, in prac tice, which would fail them under a bolder system. Heaven knows, it is a blessing where, convinced of happiness

in the next world, people can afford to overlook little inconveniences in this! The peasant who defers here, as a matter of course, to his lord, with the honour which might belong to a rivalry, loses some of the molestation; and the footman, who kneels without rebuke, by the side of the noble now at church, would have to take a lower post, if it were to occur to him that he was as good a man as his master.

But the gaiety of the town, in all quarters here, on the night of the Illumination, formed a striking contrast to its appearance at a late hour on ordinary occasions. There were equestrians, parading away at their high caracole pace! The horses in full action, and yet not getting over a mile of ground in an hour! Just touched constantly with the spur, and held up with a bit that admits of no disputing; and moving between a caper, and a sort of riding horse amble, all the way-raising the foot to a particular height, and then setting it down again exactly in the place from which it was taken up. A pleasant style of riding, however; and performed in a saddle padded like an easy-chair-not on a machine like our English miracle, which seems to have been originally built with every view (expressly) to people's slipping off from it-that object being subsequently facilitated by the high polish to which our servants rub its surface, and by the stirrups artfully contrived to give a man as little support as possible; unless, indeed, he should happen to be thrown, when they usually hold him fast enough.-I think, about two hundred different schemes have been tried, within my recollection, to prevent the possibility of a man's being dragged in his stirrup—the obvious one-that of making the stirrup a shoe, (so that the foot cannot by any physical possibility entangle in it,) having, of course, been disregarded. Indeed, when I spoke to Sir Thomas B once about the harness generally, and suggested the better purchase of the shoe strrup, with the general inexpediency of putting a glossy substance, like a regulation saddle, in contact with smooth leather pantaloons, where the object was to secure adhesion; his objection to my idea of a rough covering, altogether, was that, with such an equipment, "anybody" would be able to ride! But see the magical effects of reputation! The