I Asked The Boy Whether He Or His Parents Were Acquainted With The
Scripture And Ever Read It; He Did Not, However, Seem To Understand
Me.
I must here observe that the boy was fifteen years of age,
that he was in many respects very
Intelligent, and had some
knowledge of the Latin language; nevertheless he knew not the
Scripture even by name, and I have no doubt, from what I
subsequently observed, that at least two-thirds of his countrymen
are on that important point no wiser than himself. At the doors of
village inns, at the hearths of the rustics, in the fields where
they labour, at the stone fountains by the wayside where they water
their cattle, I have questioned the lower class of the children of
Portugal about the Scripture, the Bible, the Old and New Testament,
and in no one instance have they known what I was alluding to, or
could return me a rational answer, though on all other matters
their replies were sensible enough; indeed, nothing surprised me
more than the free and unembarrassed manner in which the Portuguese
peasantry sustain a conversation, and the purity of the language in
which they express their thoughts, and yet few of them can read or
write; whereas the peasantry of England, whose education is in
general much superior, are in their conversation coarse and dull
almost to brutality, and absurdly ungrammatical in their language,
though the English tongue is upon the whole more simple in its
structure than the Portuguese.
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