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PORTUGAL.

(Abridged chiefly from the Rev. Mr. Kinsey’s “Portugal Illustrated.")

Spaniards and Portuguese.—­“Strip a Spaniard of all his virtues, and you make a good Portuguese of him,” says the Spanish proverb.  I have heard it said more truly, “Add hypocrisy to a Spaniard’s vices, and you have the Portuguese character.”  These nations blaspheme God by calling each other natural enemies.  Their feelings are mutually hostile; but the Spaniards despise the Portuguese, and the Portuguese hate the Spaniards.—­Southey.

Portugal.—­Situated by the side of a country just five times its size, Portugal, but for the advantageous position of its coast, the good faith of England, and the weakness of its hostile neighbour, impassable roads, and numerous strong places, would long since have returned to the primitive condition of an Iberian province; but its separate existence as a nation has been preserved to it by the strength of the British alliance being brought into a glorious co-operation with all its own internal means of defence.—­Kinsey.

Column of Disgrace.—­About the middle of the last century, the Duke of Aviero was detected in a conspiracy with the Jesuits in Portugal, and accordingly executed.  His house, at Belem, was levelled to the ground at the time of the Duke’s decapitation, and on the site was erected a column of disgrace, which still remains, though some shops have been erected beside it to hide the inscription; a just symbol of the conduct of the nation on this subject, for what they cannot alter they strive to conceal.

Over the proscenium of the opera-house at Lisbon is a large clock placed rather in advance, whose dexter supporter is old Time with his scythe, and the sinister, one of the Muses playing on a lyre.

A Lisbon Dandy.—­A small, squat, puffy figure incased within a large pack-saddle, upon the back of a lean, high-boned, straw-fed, cream-coloured nag, with an enormously flowing tail, whose length and breadth would appear to be each night guarded from discolouration by careful involution above the hocks.  Taken, from his gridiron spurs and long pointed boots, up his broad, blue-striped pantaloons, a la Cossaque, to the thrice-folded piece of white linen on which he is seated in cool repose; thence by his cable chain, bearing seals as large as a warming-pan, and a key like an anchor; then a little higher to the figured waistcoat of early British manufacture, and the sack-shapened coat, up to the narrow brim sugar-loaf hat on his head,—­where can be found his equal?  Nor does he want a nose as big as the gnomon of a dial-plate; and two flanks of impenetrable, deep, black brushwood, extending under either ear, and almost concealing the countenance, to complete the singular contour of his features.