of Portuguese gaols would be exceedingly disagreeable, for the management is thrifty in the extreme as regards bed and board, and fire and lighting. So that British sailors of the occasionally disorderly and criminal class coming to Portuguese ports with their pleasant memories of the comforts and luxury, and even dignity, of prison life in England, who have incautiously found their way into Portuguese gaols, have been really quite glad to get out again.

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CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

It is beginning to weigh a little on my conscience that I may have caused some offence to the excellent people who are the subject of the foregoing chapters. Once before, I made free in print with what seemed to me to be certain shortcomings in the Portuguese, and I was taken to task pretty severely for doing so. I had said that modern Portuguese poetry was, in comparison with the nation's own great achievements in that line of past days, a dead thing. I might have said as much of certain national literatures nearer home, with as much truth and far less danger.

When my observations came under the Portuguese reviewer's lash, he was scornfully indignant :—' What!' was the tenor of his remark, ‘is this malignant foreigner not aware that the great poet Costa, the immortal Silva, Pinto,-that ornament of his country'-(here followed a list of some score more of contemporary immortals), still draw the breath of life in Portugal?'

We English have ourselves so outgrown this sort of sensitiveness, and mind so little what foreigners say of us, that this bitterness and indignation came to me with a certain freshness in it. A Portuguese writer who had stated his opinion that Milton and Shake

speare had no living representatives in modern England might perhaps feel as I did if an English weekly review answered his imputation by giving a list of the minor poets whom it massacres weekly, and a catalogue raisonné of the immortal Smiths, Browns, and Jenkinsons of modern English song.

ease.

People who are thin-skinned about censure are not, unfortunately, correspondingly mollified by approbation, and hear the hint of a fault with an indignation that is none the less strong that such a hint is accompanied by a hundred compliments. Else I should be at my If I have blamed, I have praised much oftener; but there is no pleading a set off in this kind of suit. It arrests all flow of soul in a writer to have to think of these things while he is writing, and, for my part, I do habitually not think of them. It never struck me till just now what a scrape I had probably got into; and now it is too late and no use to do anything but try and get out of it with the best grace possible.

If I have offended my Portuguese friends by plain speaking, I must make my justification for it in certain heterodox and unscientific opinions which I hold upon the races of mankind-a confession of which opinions nothing but the present emergency should draw from

me.

The reader shall perceive at once how it is my ethnology that shall excuse my plain speaking.

There are a certain number of plain men, of whom I am one, who refuse to entangle our understandings with prevailing dogmas on ethnology, and are so little in the fashion that we commit ourselves thoroughly to none of the many conflicting theories on this subject to which the last twenty years have given birth. I know enough of such theories to know that not two of them fit into each other, and that the advocates of each theory

wrangle more and more as they get further back into antiquity. Scepticism which would come very badly from an ethnologist of any of the advanced schools is no offence at all from me, who am an ethnologist (if I deserve so learned a name) of no school at all.

I have listened to a great deal of profound and complicated talk of Aryans and Caucasians and IndoEuropeans, and of course as an unprejudiced person I see that 'there is a good deal in it;' but to be frank, an ethnology which teaches me that I am first cousin to the 'mild Hindoo' finds me but a cold believer. Better at once embrace the whole human race and be that impossible being—a citizen of the world. For my own part I am altogether wanting in the tolerance necessary for this breadth of view, and my sympathies have not latitude enough to make me feel quite like a man and a brother towards Negroes, and shock-headed Papuans, and skew-eyed Chinamen. It is very narrow and uncharitable, but I hereby disown all my poor and distant relations, and I utterly disbelieve in the title of many who claim my cousinship. I am an anthropological nonconformist, and am not going to pin my faith to any new-fangled genealogical tree found for me, as heralds find coats of arms for parvenus, by the last

fashionable member of a learned Society.

I

Until things are made a good deal clearer to me, refuse to trace my lineage direct to the Caucasus or the Himalayas. All that I can be quite sure of at present is, that I am a European: that is the world of which I constitute myself a citizen, and Europe is bounded for me by the nearest frontiers of Russia and of Turkey, for I will admit neither Turks nor Russians into my family party.

With these limitations, I find a sufficient family likeness to myself wherever I go in Europe, and Greeks and Italians, Dutchmen, Germans and Frenchmen, Spaniards and Portuguese, are all my friends and my kinsmen. Their ideas are my ideas, their logic is mine, I sympathize with their weaknesses, for I share them, and as often as not I agree in their prejudices. In what family do the members hesitate to point out a relation's foibles? Why should I then be shy of telling home truths to the Portuguese? I am of the family party myself, and have a family right to speak out my mind. If we were perfectly wise at home, it might be a point of generosity to hold one's tongue, but I know of no such cause for silence. I confess that I like the Portuguese all the better every time I discover the reflection among them of some fine old British prejudice, and my heart warms to them when I find that there are-numbers for numbers-almost as many fools in Portugal as in Great Britain. Every discovery like this is a new evidence of consanguinity.

Of

Here then is my apology and sufficient excuse. course there is another side of the question for those who hold these old-fashioned views of the families of nations, and so far as Portugal is concerned it is, to speak quite seriously, a very pleasant side, and no Englishman can observe without a strong sympathy many qualities and aspirations in the Portuguese akin to his own; their loyalty to their king and their ancient liberties; the constant ardour of independence that has marked every page of their history; and their faith in good hard blows for the maintenance of their national existence against all comers. These things are recog