afford time and patience and knowledge and preliminary scepticism for a close examination of them. In short,

'C'est notre crédulité qui fait leur science.'

In conclusion I will repeat in very plain terms what is after all the most important axiom in connection with wine. It is that such a red wine as port, grown in the centre of the geographical zone which is the habitat of the vine plant, and under favouring influences of soil and aspect, is so full of all the finest vinous attributes, and therefore, unfortunately, of all the elements of decay, that it requires a fuller antiseptic treatment than other and poorer wines. I have shown how the ancients, skilful oenologists, indirectly alcoholized their wines though they knew not the art of distillation. Falernian was, I am absolutely sure, as fully alcoholized as the strongest port wine. Modern port wine makers alcoholize their wine directly, and no impartial man can deny that the result is an excellent result. If it be alleged that they put too much spirit into their wine, they reply very convincingly that spirit is six times dearer than wine, and that it is clearly to their interest to use as little as will keep the wine sound.

Whether port contain much or little spirit-I am myself in favour of the least that is possible—it has one signal advantage over all other red wines of its high vinous quality: it is safe, it will travel, and it is long-lived. A man may invest in it with the confidence with which he buys into the three per cents. If a man buys a cask of fine burgundy in England and bottles it, the odds are, so far as my experience goes, considerably against the wine's remaining sound

in

for two years. He may as well lay out his money Turkish or Egyptian stock. If a man makes a similar investment in good clarèt, the odds are certainly greatly in favour of the wine's keeping and of its improving, at least up to a certain date; but if a man invests in port wine, it is not a question of odds at all. Let him buy a pipe, or a hogshead, or a quarter cask of port wine at a fair price through a respectable wine merchant and the element of chance is eliminated. It is an absolute certainty that the wine will not only keep sound but will improve in value every year of its life. Not only is his capital safe but the wine will pay him interest.

If I am asked what is a fair price, I must answer that, not being a wine merchant, it does not become me to say.

R

CHAPTER VII.

A PORTUGUESE TROY.

NATURE, whose mastery of hand in decorating the scenes, flies, and slips of her own great airy theatre, has been the theme of scenery-loving travellers' admiration from all times, is, it must be confessed, not seldom a very poor landscape painter.

The tourist who passes over the river Tagus at Lisbon may, if he pleases, get a striking illustration of this fact. The ferry-steamer from that city crosses in less than an hour the broad estuary of the Tagus, and lands its passengers at Barreiro, amid black and muddy beach waves whence the paddles of the boat churn up fearful exhalations. Barreiro is the terminus of the railway which runs eastward to Evora and Beja-famous cities in Roman and in Moorish times, and now still goodly resorts of men— and southward to Setubal.

As I was making this little voyage on my way to Setubal, and as the steamer neared the southern shores of the Tagus, I heard the words 'How fine!' break, as it were, involuntarily from the lips of an English traveller standing by my side among the crowd on board. I regarded first the view and then the very intelligent-looking person who had ad

mired it.

'Pray,' I asked, 'do you mean this view here in front of us over the shore flats, with the green fields and white and red houses in the distance?'

'Not at all,' said the intelligent person; I mean the one to our right, where those beautifully coloured red and yellow hills rise from the river edge, and the stone-pines, growing along the hill-crest, cut the blue sky; and see how the waves ripple and foam upon the sandy beach. Lovely! Lovely ! '

I easily perceived that my intelligent-looking acquaintance had belied his expression, and was talking nonsense. There was indeed some little attempt at a picture, but the result was absolute failure. Nature indeed always draws correctly-so does photography-but of composition, harmony, effect, breadth, keeping, suggestiveness (the most important of all), there was not a trace. Offences there were against every canon of art, as we dwellers upon earth have come to lay them down. The red and yellow of the bare cliff-side were crude, and harmonized neither with sea nor sky; the sky looked more like a newlypainted blue wall than the transparent vault of heaven; the water between us and the cliff was deplorable as water, it seemed distinctly convex instead of flat, as I have too often seen the seas and lakes of young amateurs in water-colour art; the foam of the waves on the shore could have been represented by a line drawn in white chalk with a ruler. The puny stonepines-those charming accessories in my acquaintance's eyes were in fact no more picturesque than, and very like, a long row of dark green cotton umbrellas opened and planted in the ground. It was altogether as an art-work a pitiable failure.

As one secret of the art of being good company is

to know less and have worse taste than one's companion, of course I expressed nothing of my views to the intelligent-looking person in question. If these pages should unfortunately fall under the eye of my acquaintance, if he should remember his fellow-passenger on the ferry-boat, who affably responded, ‘Ah, to be sure!' to his eulogy of the southern shore of the Tagus, he must bear him no malice, but reflect that thought is free and tastes may differ.

I lost sight of my acquaintance at the station, Barreiro: he may have gone east; I went south to Setubal. Had he been with me, I suspect that we should have found ourselves in most perfect accord in our opinion of the hideous and dreary wastes of country over which the train passes. Never, I think, anywhere have I seen agriculture fighting at such odds against the soil, and fighting successfully too, for these thin, sandy dunes, with here and there a mud creek, here and there a patch of rusty moorland, the whole flat stretch of country treeless, dreary, barren, inhospitable, produce the best-flavoured and most famous wine of Southern Portugal-the Lavradio, so called from the hamlet of that name, whence, too, a name far better known to England than the wine, that of H.E. the late Count of Lavradio, the most popular of Portuguese ministers at the Court of St. James's.

Had Dante chosen to represent the future state of the wicked and impenitent farmer, he might have placed him in some such region as that which we are now passing through. Mr. Arch himself could wish our English tenant-farmers no worse an Inferno!

Soil, sun, and wind fight against the tiller of the land.

The soil is no more consistent than the contents