At the foot of her fair hills she occupies, with a splendid and uniform length of architecture, the margin of the sea, and is even better seen through the light fretwork of masts and rigging, upon which sailors of all nations and in all costumes busily twine their pliant forms, adding to her inanimate beauties an interesting display of wealth and commerce. The city is backed by hills, clothed with the most various and luxuriant vegetation; some are crowned by forts and covered with the brightest verdure, which Flora has enamelled with a lavish hand; others hang umbrageous woods or many-coloured thickets over their wild precipices. Upon the slopes of these hills, rising above each other in theatric pride and architectural magnificence, grand slashes of palace, convent, and church are nested in this beautiful bed of vegetable profusion.
On the other hand, the Italian mountains, which may be called the other bank of this azure river, display every imaginable charm to snatch his eyes from a successful rival. “Beautiful! thrice beautiful! incomparable Messina!” he exclaims. “Never did mine eyes behold, nor my imagination form, a scene whose laughing charms surpassed, or even equalled, thine.”
After this he looks upon Lisbon, towering upon her hills, a vast mass of splendid structures. All is building; a house-seller’s shop, a proud and pompous city stretching her sceptre over the red waves of the hasty Tagus.
“Queen of the river with the golden waves,” says the courteous traveller, “thy magnificent appearance excites my admiration. Permit me to tread upon thy spacious marts, to enter thy palaces, to contemplate and wonder at thy riches.”
He pushes for the shore, where disappointment awaits him, conducts him over all parts of the city, serves him at dinner and prepares his bed, reconducts him to his ship, and with him ascends the side, from whence he will no longer delight in those beauties which he knows to be deceptive.
The streets of Lisbon are generally good, and many of them fine; there are no mean houses, and the greater part are handsome and uniform in height and size. There are but few squares, and those are not remarkable.
The quays are very fine, and some noble streets give upon them through magnificent gates, particularly the Rua Aurta, or Street of the Jewellers and Gold-workers. This street, quite straight, broad, and handsomely built, begins at the principal square and issues through a superb gate upon the quay, where a colossal equestrian statue gives it an imposing termination.
But the shops of this street, though abounding in precious stones and precious metal, are extremely mean and exactly alike, each containing a little working equipage for the jeweller (at which he sits), and the window displays a few clumsy glazed boxes, in which his precious commodities are stored.
But as these shops, though mean, are the best, the buyer, being pressed for the want of a commodity, is obliged to hunt for it. The art of alluring money from the pocket of the passenger by a rich and astonishing display of merchandise which he does not want, carried to its height in London, seems in Lisbon to be totally unknown.
The private houses are, some of them, superbly built and richly furnished, but scarcely any of them are commodious, and there is nothing that can be called the environs of a capital.