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.
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