which the town and the highlands behind it rise amphitheatrewise; the view of the blue waters of the bay, always lively with boats and fishing-smacks; the daily arrival of great ocean-going steamers; the fine mountain scenery, with fresh vistas of jagged peaks and ravine chasms from every point of view, and varying hourly with every change of cloud and shadow; the charming seaside ride and drive, known as the Caminho Novo; the excellent English club and readingroom; and, above all, the hospitality of the English residents;—all these things help to make the visitor's time pass pleasantly.

CHAPTER X.

CUSTOMS OF THE PORTUGUESE PEOPLE.

THOUGHTFUL travellers in the Peninsula are generally curious to find traces of the old Moorish culture in the land, and this curiosity is no doubt partly due to that Orientalism and sympathy with things Semitic, which is latent in all of us of northern blood who have read the 'Arabian Nights' in our childhood, and have dreamed of genii, and calenders, and enchanted palaces. In the Peninsula, however, the interest and the curiosity in things eastern come not alone from any such false glamour of the fancy as this, which vanishes (except in a few well-noted cases) in those who come face to face with eastern life. Here, in this southwestern corner of Europe, we know we are on the actual footsteps of the vanished race who first, in the night of the Dark Ages, woke all the dormant arts of culture, who revived the long-dead sciences; among whom chivalry was born, humanity was practised, the 'point of honour' made almost a point of law, and the intercourse of man with man softened and refined by fixed ceremonial usage. We are here in the land through which mainly all this passed to the rest of Europe, and among the people who were the first pupils of the cultured and generous Saracens, and who imbibed something of their learning, their chivalry,

and their civilisation, and overthrew them at last by the practice of some of the very arts they had learnt from them. It is not strange, then, that knowing this strangers coming to the Peninsula follow out with the deepest interest the traces which so many hundred years have not nearly effaced among southern Spaniards and among Portuguese, and which traces are, in my observation, far fresher in Portugal than in Spain.

It is interesting enough to observe how this culture and superiority of intellectual training and accomplishment gave the Arabs (as we have recent very good reason to know these qualities always will give their possessors) military as well as social and political ascendency, and how their lessons were slowly imparted to the races they encountered; how through the Saracens of the period of the Crusades, not only the whole science of the attack and the defence of strong places was taught to the more backward Europeans, but what was far more important, the peaked saddle and firm stirrup-hold, the curb and curb chain, the use of the lance, and the swift evolutions of the Oriental horsemen became known to the slow and unwieldy cavalry of the Peninsular kings and princes. This invaluable knowledge had for centuries settled the tenure. of empire upon the Saracens, and when it was imparted to the conquered Goths, it helped mainly to turn the tide in their favour.

It is not, however, upon these great causes of the making or the marring of empires that I wish now to dwell, but upon lessons taught in Saracen times in the domain of domestic and social life-the songs, the dances, the legends, the daily usages of the people. The Saracens had, no doubt, themselves much to learn at first from the Romanized Goths and semi-Gothic

tribes of the Peninsula; but when the tide of conquest rolled back those of the Christians who kept their independence to the fastnesses and backwoods of the country, culture and civilisation went back too among them, while all the arts of peace advanced among the Saracens in a manner which is still a marvel to the historian. Those of the Christians who remained in the country under Saracen dominion became semi-Saracenized, and the existence of the Moçarabes is proof enough how the Christians were won by the superior culture of the conquering race. In time came the long and final struggle for existence between the two faiths and the two races-the Peninsular Crusade which I have described in a previous chapter. It was in the course of it that Christian and Infidel came into close contact, and an incident of it was that the Saracens taught the uncouth Portuguese Cymons all the sweet civilities of life.'

6

The graver historical student may not care to consider whether, among other social customs, the Serenade is a Saracen introduction into Europe. I am convinced that it is, and, in spite of its name, I believe the guitar on which it is accompanied to be a modification of a Saracen instrument.' I defy any critic to prove that

1 The older-fashioned lute is, I suspect, the origin of the guitar, though the lute, in its latest form, was a more complicated instrument; and the name guitar is no doubt a Romance word, and was coined later than the instrument was first used in Europe. I do not think it can be found mentioned before the Roman de la Rose, and there it is called guiterne. If etymology could quite be trusted, it was the Portuguese who first taught the name and use of the Arabic lute to the rest of Europe, for they only of European nations have preserved in Alaude its full Arabic name, Al ud. Even in Spanish it is shortened to laude.

any such nightly love-song as the true Peninsular serenade, so accompanied, was ever poured forth under the windows of any lady whatever, till the Saracens invaded Europe. The Greeks knew of nothing of the sort, their domestic institutions were quite opposed to such proceedings; so indeed were, and still are, those of the Moslems themselves; but the Moslems of Spain and Portugal were never very strict observers of their own institutions. The ancient Romans knew not of any night-sung passion-song, nor, to the best of my belief, did any barbarian nation. Again, the serenade has never thriven in any land beyond those countries in which the Arabs first taught it; in Provence, in troubadour times, it was a custom; in Italy, in Spain, and in Portugal it has never died out.

The serenade in these southern countries of course has none of that foolish flavour of romance which we, who frequent the opera and have heard the serenade. in Don Giovanni a dozen times, connect with it. It is nothing more than a delicate compliment to the object of a man's affections, and means no more than when an Englishman gives his future bride an engaged ring, a Frenchman a box of bonbons or a bouquet, or than when a German sends his betrothed a pound of knödels or a Strasburg sausage.

Not but that the serenade is a rare thing even in Andalusia. The people there are not all young and impulsive, or incautiously trustful of themselves to the air of night. Even in Seville itself the guitar tinkles chiefly to less romantic strains than those of love.

The guitar is certainly, in our critical northern eyes, an effeminate instrument, and a man who plays upon it in an English drawing-room can no more hope to preserve any appearance of manly dignity than if he were