The simplicity of this part of our entertainment was made up by the profusion and splendour of our dessert, which exceeded in variety of fruits and sweetmeats any one of which I had ever partaken. As to the wines, they were admirable, the tribute of every part of the Portuguese dominions offered up at this holy shrine. The Port Company, who are just soliciting the renewal of their charter, had contributed the choicest produce of their happiest vintages, and as I happened to commend its peculiar excellence, my hospitable entertainer, whose good-humour seemed to acquire every instant a livelier glow, insisted upon my accepting several pipes of it, which were punctually sent me the next morning. The Archbishop became quite jovial, and supposing I was not more insensible to the joys of convivial potations than many of my countrymen, plied me as often and as waggishly as if I had been one of his imaginary archbishops, or Lord Tyrawley himself, returned from those cold precincts where no dinners are given or bottle circulated.
The lay-brother was such a fountain of anecdote, the Archbishop in such glee, and Marialva in such jubilation at being admitted to this confidential party, that it is impossible to say how long it would have lasted, had not the hour of her Majesty’s evening excursion approached, and the Archbishop been called to accompany her. As Master of the Horse, the Marquis could not dispense with his attendance, so I was left under the guidance of the lay-brother, who, leading me through another labyrinth of passages, opened a kind of wicket door, and let me out with as little ceremony as he would have turned a goose adrift on a common.
LETTER XXVIII.
Explore the Cintra Mountains.—Convent of Nossa Senhora da Penha.—Moorish Ruins.—The Cork Convent.—The Rock of Lisbon.—Marine Scenery.—Susceptible imagination of the Ancients exemplified.
Sept. 19th, 1787.
NEVER did I behold so fine a day, or a sky of such lovely azure. The M—— were with me by half-past six, and we rode over wild hills, which command a great extent of apparently desert country; for the villages, if there are any, are concealed in ravines and hollows.
Intending to explore the Cintra mountains from one extremity to the other of the range, we placed relays at different stations. Our first object was the Convent of Nossa Senhora da Penha, the little romantic pile of white buildings I had seen glittering from afar when I first sailed by the coast of Lisbon. From this pyramidical elevation the view is boundless: you look immediately down upon an immense expanse of sea, the vast, unlimited Atlantic. A long series of detached clouds of a dazzling whiteness, suspended low over the waves, had a magic effect, and in pagan times might have appeared, without any great stretch of fancy, the cars of marine divinities just risen from the bosom of their element.
There was nothing very interesting in the objects immediately around us. The Moorish remains in the neighbourhood of the convent are scarcely worth notice, and indeed seem never to have made part of any considerable edifice. They were probably built up with the dilapidations of a Roman temple, whose constructors had perhaps in their turn availed themselves of the fragments of a Punic or Tyrian fane raised on this high place, and blackened with the smoke of some horrible sacrifice.
Amidst the crevices of the mouldering walls, and particularly in the vault of a cistern, which seems to have served both as a reservoir and a bath, I noticed some capillaries and polypodiums of infinite delicacy; and on a little flat space before the convent a numerous tribe of pinks, gentians, and other alpine plants, fanned and invigorated by the pure mountain air. These refreshing breezes, impregnated with the perfume of innumerable aromatic herbs and flowers, seemed to infuse new life into my veins, and, with it, an almost irresistible impulse to fall down and worship in this vast temple of Nature the source and cause of existence.
As we had a very extensive ride in contemplation, I could not remain half so long as I wished on this aërial and secluded summit. Descending by a tolerably easy road, which wound amongst the rocks in many an irregular curve, we followed for several miles a narrow tract over the brow of savage and desolate eminences, to the Cork convent, which answered exactly, at the first glance we caught of it, the picture one represents to one’s self of the settlement of Robinson Crusoe. Before the entrance, formed of two ledges of ponderous rock, extends a smooth level of greensward, browsed by cattle, whose tinkling bells filled me with recollections of early days passed amongst wild and alpine scenery. The Hermitage, its cells, chapel, and refectory, are all scooped out of the native marble, and lined with the bark of the cork-tree. Several of the passages about it are not only roofed, but floored with the same material, extremely soft and pleasant to the feet. The shrubberies and garden plats, dispersed amongst the mossy rocks which lie about in the wildest confusion, are delightful, and I took great pleasure in exploring their nooks and corners, following the course of a transparent, gurgling rill, which is conducted through a rustic water-shoot, between bushes of lavender and rosemary of the tenderest green.