We stood into the Bay of Gibraltar and approached the harbour firing a gun and hoisting a signal for a boat:  one accordingly came off—­a man-of-war’s boat—­but refused to have any communication with us on account of the quarantine, so we can send no letters ashore, and after some pourparlers, Mr. L——­, instead of joining his regiment, must remain on board.  We learned an unpleasant piece of news.  There has been a tumult at Bristol and some rioters shot, it is said fifty or sixty.  I would flatter myself that this is rather good news, since it seems to be no part of a formed insurrection, but an accidental scuffle in which the mob have had the worst, and which, like Tranent, Manchester, and Bonnymoor, have always had the effect of quieting the people and alarming men of property.[487] The Whigs will find it impossible to permit men to be plundered by a few blackguards called by them the people, and education and property probably will recover an ascendency which they have only lost by faintheartedness.

We backed out of the Bay by means of a current to the eastward, which always runs thence, admiring in our retreat the lighting up the windows in the town and the various barracks or country seats visible on the rock.  Far as we are from home, the general lighting up of the windows in the evening reminds us we are still in merry old England, where in reverse of its ancient law of the curfew, almost every individual, however humble his station, takes as of right a part of the evening for enlarging the scope of his industry or of his little pleasures.  He trims his lamp to finish at leisure some part of his task, which seems in such circumstances almost voluntary, while his wife prepares the little meal which is to be its legitimate reward.  But this happy privilege of English freemen has ceased.  One happiness it is, they will soon learn their error.

November 15.—­I had so much to say about Gibraltar that I omitted all mention of the Strait, and more distant shores of Spain and Barbary, which form the extreme of our present horizon; they are highly interesting.  A chain of distant mountains sweep round Gibraltar, bold peaked, well defined, and deeply indented; the most distinguishable points occasionally garnished with an old watch-tower to afford protection against a corsair.  The mountains seemed like those of the first formation, liker, in other words, to the Highlands than those of the South of Scotland.  The chains of hills in Barbary are of the same character, but more lofty and much more distant, being, I conceive, a part of the celebrated ridge of Atlas.

Gibraltar is one of the pillars of Hercules, Ceuta on the Moorish side is well known to be the other; to the westward of a small fortress garrisoned by the Spaniards is the Hill of Apes, the corresponding pillar to Gibraltar.  There is an extravagant tradition that there was once a passage under the sea from the one fortress to the other, and that an adventurous governor, who puzzled his way to Ceuta and back again, left his gold watch as a prize to him who had the courage to go to seek it.