LISBON—CADIZ
A great misfortune which befalls a man who has but a single day to stay
in a town, is that fatal duty which superstition entails upon him of
visiting the chief lions of the city in which he may happen to be. You
must go through the ceremony, however much you may sigh to avoid it;
and however much you know that the lions in one capital roar very much
like the lions in another; that the churches are more or less large and
splendid, the palaces pretty spacious, all the world over; and that
there is scarcely a capital city in this Europe but has its pompous
bronze statue or two of some periwigged, hook-nosed emperor, in a Roman
habit, waving his bronze baton on his broad-flanked brazen charger. We
only saw these state old lions in Lisbon, whose roar has long since
ceased to frighten one. First we went to the Church of St. Roch, to see
a famous piece of mosaic-work there. It is a famous work of art, and
was bought by I don’t know what king for I don’t know how much money.
All this information may be perfectly relied on, though the fact is, we
did not see the mosaic-work: the sacristan, who guards it, was yet in
bed; and it was veiled from our eyes in a side-chapel by great dirty
damask curtains, which could not be removed, except when the
sacristan’s toilette was done, and at the price of a dollar. So we were
spared this mosaic exhibition; and I think I always feel relieved when
such an event occurs. I feel I have done my duty in coming to see the
enormous animal: if he is not at home, virtute mea me, &c.—we have done
our best, and mortal can do no more.
In order to reach that church of the forbidden mosaic, we had sweated
up several most steep and dusty streets—hot and dusty, although it was
but nine o’clock in the morning. Thence the guide conducted us into
some little dust-powdered gardens, in which the people make believe to
enjoy the verdure, and whence you look over a great part of the arid,
dreary, stony city. There was no smoke, as in honest London, only
dust—dust over the gaunt houses and the dismal yellow strips of
gardens. Many churches were there, and tall half-baked-looking public
edifices, that had a dry, uncomfortable, earth-quaky look, to my idea.
The ground-floors of the spacious houses by which we passed seemed the
coolest and pleasantest portions of the mansion. They were cellars or
warehouses, for the most part, in which white-jacketed clerks sat
smoking easy cigars. The streets were plastered with placards of a
bull-fight, to take place the next evening (there was no opera that
season); but it was not a real Spanish tauromachy—only a theatrical
combat, as you could see by the picture in which the horseman was
cantering off at three miles an hour, the bull tripping after him with
tips to his gentle horns. Mules interminable, and almost all
excellently sleek and handsome, were pacing down every street: here and
there, but later in the day, came clattering along a smart rider on a
prancing Spanish horse; and in the afternoon a few families might be
seen in the queerest old-fashioned little carriages, drawn by their
jolly mules and swinging between, or rather before, enormous wheels.
The churches I saw were of the florid periwig architecture—I mean of
that pompous cauliflower kind of ornament which was the fashion in
Louis the Fifteenth’s time, at which unlucky period a building mania
seems to have seized upon many of the monarchs of Europe, and
innumerable public edifices were erected. It seems to me to have been
the period in all history when society was the least natural, and
perhaps the most dissolute; and I have always fancied that the bloated
artificial forms of the architecture partake of the social
disorganisation of the time. Who can respect a simpering ninny,
grinning in a Roman dress and a full-bottomed wig, who is made to pass
off for a hero? or a fat woman in a hoop, and of a most doubtful
virtue, who leers at you as a goddess? In the palaces which we saw,
several Court allegories were represented, which, atrocious as they
were in point of art, might yet serve to attract the regard of the
moraliser. There were Faith, Hope, and Charity restoring Don John to
the arms of his happy Portugal: there were Virtue, Valour, and Victory
saluting Don Emanuel: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic (for what I
know, or some mythologic nymphs) dancing before Don Miguel—the picture
is there still, at the Ajuda; and ah me! where is poor Mig? Well, it is
these State lies and ceremonies that we persist in going to see;
whereas a man would have a much better insight into Portuguese manners,
by planting himself at a corner, like yonder beggar, and watching the
real transactions of the day.
A drive to Belem is the regular route practised by the traveller who
has to make only a short stay, and accordingly a couple of carriages
were provided for our party, and we were driven through the long merry
street of Belem, peopled by endless strings of mules,—by thousands of
gallegos, with water-barrels on their shoulders, or lounging by the
fountains to hire,—by the Lisbon and Belem omnibuses, with four mules,
jingling along at a good pace; and it seemed to me to present a far
more lively and cheerful, though not so regular, an appearance as the
stately quarters of the city we had left behind us. The little shops
were at full work— the men brown, well-dressed, manly, and handsome: so
much cannot, I am sorry to say, be said for the ladies, of whom, with
every anxiety to do so, our party could not perceive a single good-
looking specimen all day. The noble blue Tagus accompanies you all
along these three miles of busy pleasant street, whereof the chief
charm, as I thought, was its look of genuine business—that appearance
of comfort which the cleverest Court-architect never knows how to give.
The carriages (the canvas one with four seats and the chaise in which I
drove) were brought suddenly up to a gate with the Royal arms over it;
and here we were introduced to as queer an exhibition as the eye has
often looked on. This was the state-carriage house, where there is a
museum of huge old tumble-down gilded coaches of the last century,
lying here, mouldy and dark, in a sort of limbo. The gold has vanished
from the great lumbering old wheels and panels; the velvets are wofully
tarnished. When one thinks of the patches and powder that have simpered
out of those plate-glass windows—the mitred bishops, the big-wigged
marshals, the shovel- hatted abbes which they have borne in their
time—the human mind becomes affected in no ordinary degree. Some human
minds heave a sigh for the glories of bygone days; while others,
considering rather the lies and humbug, the vice and servility, which
went framed and glazed and enshrined, creaking along in those old
Juggernaut cars, with fools worshipping under the wheels, console
themselves for the decay of institutions that may have been splendid
and costly, but were ponderous, clumsy, slow, and unfit for daily wear.
The guardian of these defunct old carriages tells some prodigious fibs
concerning them: he pointed out one carriage that was six hundred years
old in his calendar; but any connoisseur in bric-a-brac can see it was
built at Paris in the Regent Orleans’ time.
Hence it is but a step to an institution in full life and vigour,— a
noble orphan-school for one thousand boys and girls, founded by Don
Pedro, who gave up to its use the superb convent of Belem, with its
splendid cloisters, vast airy dormitories, and magnificent church. Some
Oxford gentlemen would have wept to see the desecrated edifice,—to
think that the shaven polls and white gowns were banished from it to
give place to a thousand children, who have not even the clergy to
instruct them. “Every lad here may choose his trade,” our little
informant said, who addressed us in better French than any of our party
spoke, whose manners were perfectly gentlemanlike and respectful, and
whose clothes, though of a common cotton stuff, were cut and worn with
a military neatness and precision. All the children whom we remarked
were dressed with similar neatness, and it was a pleasure to go through
their various rooms for study, where some were busy at mathematics,
some at drawing, some attending a lecture on tailoring, while others
were sitting at the feet of a professor of the science of shoemaking.
All the garments of the establishment were made by the pupils; even the
deaf and dumb were drawing and reading, and the blind were, for the
most part, set to perform on musical instruments, and got up a concert
for the visitors. It was then we wished ourselves of the numbers of the
deaf and dumb, for the poor fellows made noises so horrible, that even
as blind beggars they could hardly get a livelihood in the musical way.
Hence we were driven to the huge palace of Necessidades, which is but a
wing of a building that no King of Portugal ought ever to be rich
enough to complete, and which, if perfect, might outvie the Tower of
Babel. The mines of Brazil must have been productive of gold and silver
indeed when the founder imagined this enormous edifice. From the
elevation on which it stands it commands the noblest views,—the city is
spread before it, with its many churches and towers, and for many miles
you see the magnificent Tagus, rolling by banks crowned with trees and
towers. But to arrive at this enormous building you have to climb a
steep suburb of wretched huts, many of them with dismal gardens of dry
cracked earth, where a few reedy sprouts of Indian corn seemed to be
the chief cultivation, and which were guarded by huge plants of spiky
aloes, on which the rags of the proprietors of the huts were sunning
themselves. The terrace before the palace was similarly encroached upon
by these wretched habitations. A few millions judiciously expended
might make of this arid hill one of the most magnificent gardens in the
world; and the palace seems to me to excel for situation any Royal
edifice I have ever seen. But the huts of these swarming poor have
crawled up close to its gates,— the superb walls of hewn stone stop all
of a sudden with a lath- and-plaster hitch; and capitals, and hewn
stones for columns, still lying about on the deserted terrace, may lie
there for ages to come, probably, and never take their places by the
side of their brethren in yonder tall bankrupt galleries. The air of
this pure sky has little effect upon the edifices,—the edges of the
stone look as sharp as if the builders had just left their work; and
close to the grand entrance stands an outbuilding, part of which may
have been burnt fifty years ago, but is in such cheerful preservation
that you might fancy the fire had occurred yesterday. It must have been
an awful sight from this hill to have looked at the city spread before
it, and seen it reeling and swaying in the time of the earthquake. I
thought it looked so hot and shaky, that one might fancy a return of
the fit. In several places still remain gaps and chasms, and ruins lie
here and there as they cracked and fell.
Although the palace has not attained anything like its full growth, yet
what exists is quite big enough for the monarch of such a little
country; and Versailles or Windsor has not apartments more nobly
proportioned. The Queen resides in the Ajuda, a building of much less
pretensions, of which the yellow walls and beautiful gardens are seen
between Belem and the city. The Necessidades are only used for grand
galas, receptions of ambassadors, and ceremonies of state. In the
throne-room is a huge throne, surmounted by an enormous gilt crown,
than which I have never seen anything larger in the finest pantomime at
Drury Lane; but the effect of this splendid piece is lessened by a
shabby old Brussels carpet, almost the only other article of furniture
in the apartment, and not quite large enough to cover its spacious
floor. The looms of Kidderminster have supplied the web which ornaments
the “Ambassadors’ Waiting-Room,” and the ceilings are painted with huge
allegories in distemper, which pretty well correspond with the other
furniture. Of all the undignified objects in the world, a palace out at
elbows is surely the meanest. Such places ought not to be seen in
adversity,—splendour is their decency,—and when no longer able to
maintain it, they should sink to the level of their means, calmly
subside into manufactories, or go shabby in seclusion.
There is a picture-gallery belonging to the palace that is quite of a
piece with the furniture, where are the mythological pieces relative to
the kings before alluded to, and where the English visitor will see
some astonishing pictures of the Duke of Wellington, done in a very
characteristic style of Portuguese art. There is also a chapel, which
has been decorated with much care and sumptuousness of ornament—the
altar surmounted by a ghastly and horrible carved figure in the taste
of the time when faith was strengthened by the shrieks of Jews on the
rack, and enlivened by the roasting of heretics. Other such frightful
images may be seen in the churches of the city; those which we saw were
still rich, tawdry, and splendid to outward show, although the French,
as usual, had robbed their shrines of their gold and silver, and the
statues of their jewels and crowns. But brass and tinsel look to the
visitor full as well at a little distance,—as doubtless Soult and Junot
thought, when they despoiled these places of worship, like French
philosophers as they were.
A friend, with a classical turn of mind, was bent upon seeing the
aqueduct, whither we went on a dismal excursion of three hours, in the
worst carriages, over the most diabolical clattering roads, up and down
dreary parched hills, on which grew a few grey olive-trees and many
aloes. When we arrived, the gate leading to the aqueduct was closed,
and we were entertained with a legend of some respectable character who
had made a good livelihood there for some time past lately, having a
private key to this very aqueduct, and lying in wait there for unwary
travellers like ourselves, whom he pitched down the arches into the
ravines below, and there robbed them at leisure. So that all we saw was
the door and the tall arches of the aqueduct, and by the time we
returned to town it was time to go on board the ship again. If the inn
at which we had sojourned was not of the best quality, the bill, at
least, would have done honour to the first establishment in London. We
all left the house of entertainment joyfully, glad to get out of the
sun- burnt city and go HOME. Yonder in the steamer was home, with its
black funnel and gilt portraiture of “Lady Mary Wood” at the bows; and
every soul on board felt glad to return to the friendly little vessel.
But the authorities of Lisbon, however, are very suspicious of the
departing stranger, and we were made to lie an hour in the river before
the Sanita boat, where a passport is necessary to be procured before
the traveller can quit the country. Boat after boat laden with priests
and peasantry, with handsome red-sashed gallegos clad in brown, and
ill-favoured women, came and got their permits, and were off, as we lay
bumping up against the old hull of the Sanita boat; but the officers
seemed to take a delight in keeping us there bumping, looked at us
quite calmly over the ship’s sides, and smoked their cigars without the
least attention to the prayers which we shrieked out for release.
If we were glad to get away from Lisbon, we were quite as sorry to be
obliged to quit Cadiz, which we reached the next night, and where we
were allowed a couple of hours’ leave to land and look about. It seemed
as handsome within as it is stately without; the long narrow streets of
an admirable cleanliness, many of the tall houses of rich and noble
decorations, and all looking as if the city were in full prosperity. I
have seen no more cheerful and animated sight than the long street
leading from the quay where we were landed, and the market blazing in
sunshine, piled with fruit, fish, and poultry, under many-coloured
awnings; the tall white houses with their balconies and galleries
shining round about, and the sky above so blue that the best cobalt in
all the paint-box looks muddy and dim in comparison to it. There were
pictures for a year in that market-place—from the copper-coloured old
hags and beggars who roared to you for the love of Heaven to give
money, to the swaggering dandies of the market, with red sashes and
tight clothes, looking on superbly, with a hand on the hip and a cigar
in the mouth. These must be the chief critics at the great bull-fight
house yonder by the Alameda, with its scanty trees, and cool breezes
facing the water. Nor are there any corks to the bulls’ horns here, as
at Lisbon. A small old English guide who seized upon me the moment my
foot was on shore, had a store of agreeable legends regarding the
bulls, men, and horses that had been killed with unbounded profusion in
the late entertainments which have taken place.
It was so early an hour in the morning that the shops were scarcely
opened as yet; the churches, however, stood open for the faithful, and
we met scores of women tripping towards them with pretty feet, and
smart black mantillas, from which looked out fine dark eyes and
handsome pale faces, very different from the coarse brown countenances
we had seen at Lisbon. A very handsome modern cathedral, built by the
present bishop at his own charges, was the finest of the public
edifices we saw; it was not, however, nearly so much frequented as
another little church, crowded with altars and fantastic ornaments, and
lights and gilding, where we were told to look behind a huge iron
grille, and beheld a bevy of black nuns kneeling. Most of the good
ladies in the front ranks stopped their devotions, and looked at the
strangers with as much curiosity as we directed at them through the
gloomy bars of their chapel. The men’s convents are closed; that which
contains the famous Murillos has been turned into an academy of the
fine arts; but the English guide did not think the pictures were of
sufficient interest to detain strangers, and so hurried us back to the
shore, and grumbled at only getting three shillings at parting for his
trouble and his information. And so our residence in Andalusia began
and ended before breakfast, and we went on board and steamed for
Gibraltar, looking, as we passed, at Joinville’s black squadron, and
the white houses of St. Mary’s across the bay, with the hills of Medina
Sidonia and Granada lying purple beyond them. There’s something even in
those names which is pleasant to write down; to have passed only two
hours in Cadiz is something—to have seen real donnas with comb and
mantle—real caballeros with cloak and cigar—real Spanish barbers
lathering out of brass basins—and to have heard guitars under the
balconies: there was one that an old beggar was jangling in the market,
whilst a huge leering fellow in bushy whiskers and a faded velvet dress
came singing and jumping after our party,—not singing to a guitar, it
is true, but imitating one capitally with his voice, and cracking his
fingers by way of castanets, and performing a dance such as Figaro or
Lablache might envy. How clear that fellow’s voice thrums on the ear
even now; and how bright and pleasant remains the recollection of the
fine city and the blue sea, and the Spanish flags floating on the boats
that danced over it, and Joinville’s band beginning to play stirring
marches as we puffed out of the bay.
The next stage was Gibraltar, where we were to change horses. Before
sunset we skirted along the dark savage mountains of the African coast,
and came to the Rock just before gun-fire. It is the very image of an
enormous lion, crouched between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and
set there to guard the passage for its British mistress. The next
British lion is Malta, four days further on in the Midland Sea, and
ready to spring upon Egypt or pounce upon Syria, or roar so as to be
heard at Marseilles in case of need.
To the eyes of the civilian the first-named of these famous
fortifications is by far the most imposing. The Rock looks so
tremendous, that to ascend it, even without the compliment of shells or
shot, seems a dreadful task—what would it be when all those mysterious
lines of batteries were vomiting fire and brimstone; when all those
dark guns that you see poking their grim heads out of every imaginable
cleft and zigzag should salute you with shot, both hot and cold; and
when, after tugging up the hideous perpendicular place, you were to
find regiments of British grenadiers ready to plunge bayonets into your
poor panting stomach, and let out artificially the little breath left
there? It is a marvel to think that soldiers will mount such places for
a shilling—ensigns for five and ninepence—a day: a cabman would ask
double the money to go half way! One meekly reflects upon the above
strange truths, leaning over the ship’s side, and looking up the huge
mountain, from the tower nestled at the foot of it to the thin
flagstaff at the summit, up to which have been piled the most ingenious
edifices for murder Christian science ever adopted. My hobby-horse is a
quiet beast, suited for Park riding, or a gentle trot to Putney and
back to a snug stable, and plenty of feeds of corn:- it can’t abide
climbing hills, and is not at all used to gunpowder. Some men’s animals
are so spirited that the very appearance of a stone-wall sets them
jumping at it: regular chargers of hobbies, which snort and say “Ha,
ha!” at the mere notion of a battle.