Great and small things,
      Sick or well, at sea or shore;
          While we’re quaffing,
          Let’s have laughing—­
      Who the devil cares for more?—­
    Some good wine! and who would lack it,
    Ev’n on board the Lisbon Packet?

“BYRON.”

On the second of July the packet sailed from Falmouth, and, after a favourable passage of four days and a half, the voyagers reached Lisbon, and took up their abode in that city.[118]

The following letters, from Lord Byron to his friend Mr. Hodgson, though written in his most light and schoolboy strain, will give some idea of the first impressions that his residence in Lisbon made upon him.  Such letters, too, contrasted with the noble stanzas on Portugal in “Childe Harold,” will show how various were the moods of his versatile mind, and what different aspects it could take when in repose or on the wing.

LETTER 37.

TO MR. HODGSON.

“Lisbon, July 16. 1809.

“Thus far have we pursued our route, and seen all sorts of marvellous sights, palaces, convents, &c.;—­which, being to be heard in my friend Hobhouse’s forthcoming Book of Travels, I shall not anticipate by smuggling any account whatsoever to you in a private and clandestine manner.  I must just observe, that the village of Cintra in Estremadura is the most beautiful, perhaps, in the world.

“I am very happy here, because I loves oranges, and talk bad Latin to the monks, who understand it, as it is like their own,—­and I goes into society (with my pocket-pistols), and I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhoea and bites from the musquitoes.  But what of that?  Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.

“When the Portuguese are pertinacious, I say, ’Carracho!’—­the great oath of the grandees, that very well supplies the place of ’Damme,’—­and, when dissatisfied with my neighbour, I pronounce him ‘Ambra di merdo.’  With these two phrases, and a third, ‘Avra bouro,’ which signifieth ‘Get an ass,’ I am universally understood to be a person of degree and a master of languages.  How merrily we lives that travellers be!—­if we had food and raiment.  But in sober sadness, any thing is better than England, and I am infinitely amused with my pilgrimage as far as it has gone.

“To-morrow we start to ride post near 400 miles as far as Gibraltar, where we embark for Melita and Byzantium.  A letter to Malta will find me, or to be forwarded, if I am absent.  Pray embrace the Drury and Dwyer, and all the Ephesians you encounter.  I am writing with Butler’s donative pencil, which makes my bad hand worse.  Excuse illegibility.

“Hodgson! send me the news, and the deaths and defeats and capital crimes and the misfortunes of one’s friends; and let us hear of literary matters, and the controversies and the criticisms.  All this will be pleasant—­’Suave mari magno,’ &c.  Talking of that, I have been sea-sick, and sick of the sea.