It may not be superfluous to caution the young or casual reader not to confound this town with one somewhat similarly pronounced, Baylen, in Spain—a spot that sounds in French ears pretty much as Cintra does in ours. And for much the same reason—the blundering incapacity of those charged with the conduct of the transactions that took place, almost simultaneously, in the same year, and within a month of each other; except that the former, having had priority of occurrence, rendered the latter more inexcusable. It was in July, 1808, that 14,000 French, commanded by Dupont and Wedel, being defeated by 25,000 Spaniards under Pena and Compigny, Dupont’s entire division of 8,000 men laid down their arms—the beginning of the French disasters in Spain, as lending courage to the whole native population to pursue that system of resistance which in the end, aided and directed by British valour and science, rendered nugatory all the efforts of the invader permanently to subdue the country. Of Belem, the recent military celebrity is not great, the two chief incidents in its history being its capture by the French, the year before the occurrence just named; and, secondly, its capture under the troops of Don Pedro, in 1833. What lends its real historic, or at least archæologic interest to the place, is its propinquity to the remains of some of the finest Moorish architecture in the world, the Alhambra itself scarcely excepted; and these alone ought to suffice to render a trip fashionable among our ennuyéd tourists, to whom almost all the remainder of Europe is nearly as well known as the beach at Brighton or the Westmoreland lakes. Notwithstanding the charm to British ears of the words Busaco, Vimiera, Badajos, Braga, Torres Vedras, and the Douro, Portugal is a terrâ incognita to the pic-nicish and Pickwickian tribe, and altogether exempt from the remonstrance of the blazé bard—
And is there then no earthly place,
Where we can rest, in dream Elysian,
Without some curst, round English face,
Popping up near, to break the vision?
’Mid northern lakes, ’mid southern vines,
Unholy cits we’re doom’d to meet;
Nor highest Alps nor Apennines
Are sacred from Threadneedle Street!
If up the Simplon’s path we wind,