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Ferreira has not ventured upon any such theory of Fatalism, and the consequence is that, taken as a whole, his tragedy as a reading play utterly fails in satisfying us that it is a true drama-that it is a true

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CLOISTERS OF BELEM CONVENT: RENAISSANCE PERIOD.

representation of the motives and the passions, the As a deeds and the talk, of actual men and women. literary work, however, and for the purposes of the theatre, his tragedy is excellent. Depending upon a continued use of declamatory eloquence, his language

is never once exaggerated, and the sentiments of the various characters, if they are sustained in a somewhat monotonous key, are never either unnatural or ignoble ; but as a work of general human interest for modern readers it fails entirely, from the very nature of its scope and conception.

The two great poets whose works I have reviewed begin a period which is the most glorious in Portuguese literature. This Augustan age culminated in the Lusiads of Camoens, whose genius would almost seem to have blinded foreign students of his country's literature to the merits of his precursors and his contemporaries. Among these, Miranda and Ferreira-the Chaucer and Dryden of Portugal-hold the highest place; men of the most original genius, whose great reputations are acknowledged, while their lives and their works are all but forgotten, even in the country of their birth :

Ils meurent, et le monde n'en connaît que les noms.

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CHAPTER IV.

MODERN PORTUGAL: COUNTRY LIFE AND SPORT.

Most travellers to Portugal land at Lisbon and dine at the table d'hôte of one of the three or four principal hotels of that sunny capital. I appeal to the majority of persons so landing and dining, if they have not heard at their very first dinner something equivalent to the following remark: 'Portugal is a country a hundred and fifty years behind the rest of the world.' I have myself heard and read this exact chronological comparison very often. I have heard it made when I was a new-comer, and too ignorant to dispute it; and since then I have heard the proposition laid down again and again, when I was too sure of the ignorance of the speaker to pay any attention to him.

Of course it is a foolish and ignorant error, and deserves to be shown to be so. First, what is the rest of the world that Portugal has not caught up by a century and a half? It is Europe, presumably, for of course no nation in the Eastern world is in the race even now with the little Western kingdom; and again, we must leave out of comparison those sinks of political iniquity, the upstart republics of South and Central America. The great and respectable parvenu of North America has no past, no real history apart from that of the mother country, and must therefore be excluded from comparison. Then, too, the rest of the world' must exclude the Turkey and Russia of to-day, for in Portugal at least there is free thought and free speech, equal justice, and neither the bastinado nor the whip,

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neither impalement, nor pachas, nor sentinel house porters, nor Siberia, nor the Sultan, nor the Czar. The comparison, too, must exclude even modern Italy, where, besides the foul Camorra plague and the religious feud, half the land is still cursed with brigandage; and Spain, which is to the full as bad with bigots and brigands; and Greece, which is more thief-ridden than either.

So the charge dwindles down to this, that the Portuguese nation is only behindhand in civilisation to the few nations of Western Europe who, in respect of progress, and civilization, and humanization, are, and long have been, the very salt of the earth; say Germany, France, and Great Britain, the four small constitutional Governments of the North, and Switzerland, whose peculiar institutions and circumstances make comparison not possible.

Now, Portugal is seriously accused of being a hundred and fifty years behind these favoured nations in all that distinguishes a crowd of savages from a coherent nation of thinking men. Let us see how

laughably unjust the statement is.

Let us take France, and even less than a hundred and fifty years will bring us into the company of Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour, a demoralised Court, and a down-trodden people-poor and miserystricken, enslaved by superstition, ignorance, and the tyranny of priest and noble. What is there in all this to compare with modern Portugal? A century and a half ago in Germany, to take no worse a part of it than Prussia, we have that most unmitigated and grotesque of all royal and domestic tyrants, the father of the great Frederick, and a people not unwilling or unworthy to be governed by such a wretch. England at

the beginning of the eighteenth century we know all about; and if any one will seriously contend that a minister as corrupt as Walpole could govern in modern Portugal for a day, he must know very little of government in that country. If he supposes that a country like our own under the First or Second George, in which one great party was openly treasonable to the Throne and the Constitution, in which armed rebellion was ready to break out at a hint from a neighbouring sovereign, and of which one great division was enslaved and terrorised by political and religious disabilities, and another division so lawless that the writs of the King's Law Courts would not run through it-if any man can draw a parallel between such a country and the Portugal of to-day, he is either too ignorant to be heard at all, or his statement is, as polite psychologists who hesitate over a stronger term, say- an act of imperfect cerebration.'

The amiable poet who moralised to the effect that but a small ingredient in the mass of human suffering was that part which

Laws or kings can cause or cure,

never perhaps went very deeply into the ethics of tyranny. Let tyrannical kings and laws, he argued, do their worst, they must at the last leave our reason, our faith, and our conscience' to us. I should be very sorry, for my own part, to try the experiment in Poland or in Turkey; but, be this as it may, Goldsmith overlooked, I think, the suffering caused by those meddlesome laws which the stupidity of our ancestors imposed, and which that of many contemporary governments still imposes, upon every transaction in the traffic of man with man.

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