But Portuguese society, as I happen to know very well, from long and varied experience, is extremely agreeable in many places; and certainly the natives of the old country are exceedingly hospitable to strangers. There are several clubs, at the balls of one of which, the Foreign Assembly-rooms, all the rank and fashion of the capital are to be seen, to the number of several hundreds. I had the gratification of being introduced at the Lisbon Club. The house had been formerly, like so many similar institutions in London, a nobleman’s palace. Although not on so grand a scale, it possesses superior accommodation to most places of the kind amongst us; and if the Portuguese keep no Soyer, Francatelli, or Ude, with a batterie de cuisine corresponding in magnitude and diversity to the celebrity of these professors of the finest art—that of giving a good dinner—they have a social party of an evening,[27] when a piquant and substantial tea is provided for those who wish to sacrifice to the ‘Chinese nymph of tears, Bohea.’ The original taste of the Portuguese, who were the first to introduce the beverage to Europe, long before Mr. Pepys drank his ‘cup of China drink,’ [1661,] still survives, as well as the taste for coffee, the berry of Mocha being a favourite among the offspring of the victims of the Arabs. Chocolate, also, is a very popular beverage, and is consumed in considerable quantities at breakfast and supper, the two principal meals among the majority of Portuguese. The upper classes dress like those of other European capitals, but the lower order of females still retain the cloak and hood peculiar to this part of the Peninsula. There is not, however, so much difference now between the costume of the population and that of other cities, as the cowls, sandals, and rope belts of the friars, are no longer to be seen; for, as is well known, all the religious orders (not those of nuns) were suppressed in 1835. There is a strong partiality for gaudy colours and trinkets; but that is passing away.
Though, generally speaking, the female population of Portugal are not of very prepossessing appearance, especially the humbler classes, whose naturally swarthy complexion is embrowned by exposure to the sun, there are few capitals in Europe where more perfect specimens of beauty are to be seen than in Lisbon: and what enhances the effect their somewhat unexpected presence produces is, that they are almost invariably blondes, therein differing from most of their Iberian sisterhood on the other side of the Douro, especially those of Cadiz, of whom the noble lord, already quoted, says that they are the Lancashire Witches of Spain. But the other noble lord, whom we have also quoted—and we certainly can corroborate all he says, from our individual experience in Brazil, of the classes he speaks of—observes: ‘If I could divest myself of every national partiality, and suppose myself an inhabitant of the other hemisphere, and were asked in what country society had attained its most polished form, I should say in Portugal. This perfection of manner is, perhaps, most appreciated by an Englishman: Portuguese politeness is delightful, because it is by no means purely artificial, but flows, in a great measure, from a national kindness of feeling. The restless feeling, so often perceptible in English society, hardly exists in Portugal; there is little prepared wit in Portuguese society, and no one talks for the mere purpose of producing an effect, but simply because his natural taste leads him to take an active part in conversation. Dandyism is unknown among their men, and coquetry, so common among Spanish women, is little in vogue among the fair Portuguese. They do not possess, to the same extent, the hasty passions and romantic feelings of their beautiful neighbours; but they are softer, more tractable, and equally affectionate. Even when they err, the aberrations of a married Portuguese never spring from fashion or caprice, seldom from vanity, and, however culpable, are always the result of real preference. Certainly, with some exceptions, the women are not highly educated; they feel little interest, on general subjects, and, consequently, have little general conversation. A stranger may, at first, draw an unfavourable inference as to their natural powers, because he has few subjects in common with them; but, when once received into their circles, and acquainted with their friends, he becomes delighted with their liveliness, wit, and ready perception of character.’ I quote this passage, believing from all I heard and observed in Lisbon, that it is an accurate summary of the Portuguese character there; that it is nearly equally applicable, in a great degree, to Portuguese society in Madeira; and, knowing that it is so, in respect to Portuguese society in Brazil.
The places of amusement consist of five theatres, including the opera-house, where, as the London and Parisian dilettanti well know, many excellent singers make their début: the getting up the scenery, &c., are inferior to few establishments of the kind anywhere, and the prices are very moderate. It is called San Carlos, and it is scarcely inferior in any respect, either in its architectural extent or the liberality of its appointments, to its more famous Neapolitan namesake. Madame Castellan—herself, I believe, a fellow-countrywoman of Inez de Castro, whose portrait she greatly resembles—has been the principal lyric artiste during the past season. There is also a building for bull-fights, which, though perhaps as much a national sport as in Spain, is not pursued with the same passionate ardour, nor with the same skill, as is displayed by professors of the tauro-machiac art in the sister country.
I also attended a sitting of the two Chambers, which appeared to be conducted with great decorum, but, at the same time, without that listlessness or buzzy-fussiness which pervades our own Senate when a bore or a nobody happens to be on his legs. The accommodation for members is at least as good as ours. To be sure, it could not possibly be much worse, if we may judge from those most qualified to form an opinion—the members themselves; for, what with the perpetual complaints about pestilent smells, hot blasts, freezing draughts, blinding light, and sightless darkness, one would imagine that the British Senate-house was constructed to serve as a ‘frightful example’ of deleterious architecture. The wonder is, that any M.P. has the face to approach a life-insurance office, at the beginning of a session, without being prepared with a ‘doubly hazardous’ premium on his ‘policy,’ knowing that he is going to talk, or listen to the talk, of politics for some six months; and, certainly, the looks of many of our law-makers can be consolatory to none but coffin-makers and residuary legatees. Not so with the Portuguese Conscript Fathers, nearly all of whom seemed as hale as new moidores out of the mint, both as to stamina, complexion, and sensibility. The enormous building where they meet (the old convent of San Bento) contains all the needful official and red-tape-ical departments. In the Upper Chamber, the Patriarch occupied the chair, in habiliments not unlike those of the Bishop of Oxford, when enrobed in his costume of Chancellor of the Order of the Garter; and it was curious to see an epitome of our own admixture of the ecclesiastical with the temporal system of legislation, in the House of Lords, carried out in this Portuguese conjunction of spiritual with lay law-makers.
In vain you look in the Tagus for that forest of shipping which should fringe the watery highway to, and ought to constitute the leading feature in, so fine a port—the capital of a country the once nautical genius of whose people is expressed in the only poem in any language that makes adventures on the deep its theme. A few stray vessels here and there, with river and fishing boats, and those singular latine sails, that so strike the stranger,[28] some steamers and Government vessels, were all that could now be seen on the bosom of the river, so famed amongst the ancients for its golden attributes, not because of its auriferous sands,[29] but because of the affluent tide of its teeming commerce—that port whence, in after ages, though now ages long ago, went forth those expeditions which brought much of Asia into comparative contiguity with Europe, and discovered, and long held so much of, the finest portion of the New World. For a wonder, not a ‘speck of power’ of that nation, whose commerce rose as Lusitania’s fell, not an English man-of-war, ubiquitous in every water, and very often present, and too long at a time, in most unnecessary numbers, in these waters in particular, was to be seen, though Admiral Corry’s squadron, containing many of the finest and latest built men-of-war in our navy, including the ‘Duke of Wellington,’ and now with Napier in the Baltic, has since been there. Their absence, however gratifying to financial economists and advocates of non-intervention in politics, helped to complete the triste and dreary air of the empty mart and shipless bay. The cause of this poverty of trade must be obvious to all, even to enlightened Portuguese. The Government, blind to all experience elsewhere, deaf to the supplications of common sense and even self-interest, draw a kind of cordon round the little trade they still possess, and encumber it with such a net-work of preposterous restrictions, as actually to squeeze the life-blood out of it, or, rather, altogether arrest its circulation, which is the same thing in the end, as regards the vitality of commerce. The evil extends to every ramification of industrial pursuit; and one half of the population live upon a system that seems to have been invented to exclude, instead of encouraging business to come to their shores. Hence, it need hardly be said, that smuggling is the most profitable trade going; and a large and rapidly increasing business in that line is carried on, along the frontier in particular.
If Colonel Sibthorpe, Mr. Newdegate, and the remainder of that Spartan band of fifty-nine, who followed the phantom of Protection into the lobby of the House of Commons a couple of years ago, finding that the sun of England has indeed for ever set, as they so often anticipated, desire to bask in the beams of unmitigated monopoly, by all means let them hie hither forthwith; and they will behold one realm, at least, that carries out their views to the utmost possible extent. By way of apparently bolstering up native industry, Portugal fosters a few stray manufacturing establishments, and farms out monopolies of certain articles (tobacco and soap for instance) to parties who, in the rigorous exercise of their privileges, put another and most effectual drag-chain on the march of commerce. The fruits of such policy are but too apparent; for even the neighbouring state of Spain, so long the synonyme of every fiscal fatuity, but now awaking to a true sense of what it owes to her glorious maritime associations, and to her present and perspective well-being, is taking away a large portion of Portuguese traffic, by judiciously reducing her tariff, promoting railway enterprise, and gradually adopting those liberal views, without whose practical recognition now every country must lapse into almost primeval barbarism. Undoubtedly an extenuation of the imbecility of Portugal is her complete dependence and reliance on her colonies so long, for while she enjoyed a monopoly of them she flourished at their expense. Now things are reversed, and Portugal cannot bring herself to adopt the only remedy, free-trade and unrestricted commerce, in its largest and fullest extent. These would soon fill her ports with shipping, raise rents, augment revenue, and place her in a position worthy of the countrymen of Cabral, and of the prestige which he and so many of his cotemporaries and followers so long secured her. That she has an aptitude for commerce is well known; for, though it was long deemed degrading, and even criminal, in high caste Portuguese, to meddle in commercial matters, or to intermarry or associate with those who did, there is scarcely any ’Change in the world at the present day that does not number a Lisbon or Oporto merchant among its ablest members.
A stay of two days is a short time to enable a stranger to appreciate fully the merits of a large place like Lisbon; but the defects in her national fiscal system as here manifested, at the very fountain head of the intelligence and influence of the empire, and its mischievous tendency in retarding prosperity, are unmistakeable. The handwriting on the wall requires no interpreter; it points out approaching decay, unless Portugal alters her system before it is too late, and determines to go with the stream of events and the destinies of the world. The real hope for the country still points in the direction of Brazil; not only because of the peculiar weight of example in that quarter, where prosperity has progressively and unvaryingly followed every step in the path of commercial and political enlightenment—every assimilation to the existing English system of mercantile polity—but from the circumstance of the affluence of Brazil healthily reacting upon, and wakening up the energies of the old country to join pari passu in the march with her vigorous progeny. In a trading, especially in a passenger-trading sense, the connection between the two is still important, and is every day becoming more so, through Anglo-Brazilian enterprise, (of which the Liverpool Company I have the honour to belong to affords the most prominent instance yet), and is likely to be vastly improved by the establishment of direct steam navigation, chiefly carried on by native and South American capital. The principal promoter of this is Mr. Moser, well known for enterprise of a like kind in the navigation of the Minho, from which river to the Guadiana a screw steamer now plies.
Most of the bourgeoisie of Brazil were either born in Portugal or are descendants of Portuguese. Shop-keeping is a business these Peninsulars fully understand, especially those from Oporto; particularly in everything pertaining to trinkets, articles of jewellery, and goldsmith’s-work, the Portuguese being therein cunning workmen, though for the most part, regarded as indifferent carpenters, shoemakers, and the like, at least by British employers. After realizing money abroad, they naturally find their way to Portugal; where, if even for a season, they enjoy themselves as only children of the South or of the tropics can when they have the means; or spend the remainder of their days where their fathers lived and died before them. They will soon have the invaluable advantage of the steamers of no less than three companies calling at Lisbon, including the ‘Luso-Brazileira,’ which is also composed of Portuguese and Brazilian shareholders. These, let us hope, will prove the immediate harbingers of that good time which can alone be brought about by the multiplication of such instruments of a national good; for it must be obvious to every one who knows Portugal, or the Portuguese abroad, that what is wanted is abundance of communication by steam, both by sea and land, railways, and free-trade, or some approximation to it. With these she may resume her position amongst the nations, and share with her oldest ally, England, the benefits arising from a mutually advantageous intercourse.
Respecting the Royal Family, during my stay at Lisbon, when there was, of course, every apparent prospect of a long, if not a very tranquil and happy reign for the late Queen, I learnt that they kept themselves as retired and quiet as their exalted station would permit, appearing little in public, but understood to be busy in those plots and intrigues, suspicion of which on the part both of the people and the upper classes, deprived her Majesty of much of that popularity which her many excellent qualities were calculated personally to secure her. What may be the course that her husband, the Regent, will pursue, or that may be pursued by her son when he attains his legal majority in 1858, it is of course impossible to foresee. His young Majesty is now in the course of making a tour through Europe, chiefly with a view, it is said, of finding a partner for his throne; and rumour points to one of the house of Coburg to which his father belongs, viz., a daughter of the King of the Belgians. This alliance, though otherwise eligible in itself, is deemed by some politicians likely to aggravate the troubles of the country, by making it a hot-bed of extraneous intrigue, in addition to the domestic Miguelite plottings that appear chronic in Portugal.
There are, as already mentioned, several royal palaces, but few of them completely finished, or ever likely to be so, owing to the limited state of the civil list and the reluctance of the Cortes to grant supplies for such purposes. The Palace of Ajúda is a truly regal building, whose external magnificence at least, fills every one with regret that it should so far resemble so many others, of vast pretensions and undoubted beauty, as to remain incompleted, and in consequence, unoccupied. Visitors to the Court are generally located in a pretty marine palace, with a terrace and garden facing the river, at Belem, the town of which name contains about 5,000 inhabitants. In its vicinage is the burial-place of many of the earlier Portuguese monarchs; it possesses also, in addition to the castle and custom-house already mentioned, and a singular-looking fortress, some other public institutions of note, including a high-school, a convent, and the largest iron-foundry in Portugal, together with a noble church, built to commemorate the memorable departure of Vasco de Gama on his great voyage, as so beautifully alluded to by the national poet.