“Our trunk arrived by the last packet: a joyful arrival, for I was beginning to be as bare as a plucked ostrich. . . . . We go on comfortably; as clean as an English house upstairs, as dirty as a Portuguese one below. Edith, like Mr. Pitt, is convinced of the impossibility of reform. Manuel will clean the kitchen, indeed, but immediately he will scrape the fish-scales all over it. These people have no foresight. We, however, are very well off; and, for a Portuguese, our Maria Rosa is extraordinarily tidy.
“ —— is here, the Wine Street man,
and he goes to market himself; and I am going to cultivate his acquaintance, in
order to find out what good things may have escaped my appetite here. Nothing
like a Bristol pointer at an eatable thing. . . . . My uncle has enough to do
with burying and christening among the soldiers, though the priests poach among
his flock sadly. We profit somewhat by the war, getting most excellent pieces
of the sirloin from the rations. The summer we pass at Cintra, whither,
however, we shall not go till July, for in June we have to see the procession
of the ‘Body of God,’ of
| Ætat. 26. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 75 |
“I read nothing but Spanish and Portuguese. Edith knows enough of the common words to get all needful things done about the house. We have had an infinite number of visitors, and our debt is not yet paid off. . . . .
“Edith has seen
the aqueduct. Even after having seen it, I was astonished at its magnitude.
Shakespeare’s
‘lessen’d to a crow’ seemed hardly hyperbolical,
when I looked down from the middle arch upon the brook of Alcantara: the women
washing there would have escaped my sight if I had not seen them moving as they
walked. It is a work worthy of Rome in the days of her power and magnificence.
The Portuguese delight in water; the most luscious and cloying sweetmeats
first—for instance, preserved yolk of egg—and then a glass of
water, and this is excellent which comes by the aqueduct. The view from the top
is wonderfully fine: a stony shallow brook below, a few women washing in it,
bare-kneed, the sides sprinkled with linen drying in the sun; orange, and vine,
and olive-yards along the line of fertility that runs below the hills, and
houses scattered in the little valley, and bare dark hills and windmills, and
houses far beyond and distant mountains. She has also seen the new convent. The
inside of the church is of marble, and the colour very well disposed. You will
remember that a marble room, chilling as it would be in England, is
| 76 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 26. |
“We have had three illuminations for the new Pope. . . . . We had another illumination for the christening of a princess. These things are not, as in England, at the will of the mob. An illumination is proclaimed; at a proper hour the guns fire to say ‘now light your candles;’ at ten they fire again to give notice you may put them out: and if you do not illuminate, you are fined about thirty shillings,—but no riots, no mobbing, no breaking windows. . . . .
“The literature of this place takes up much of my
| Ætat. 26. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 77 |
“God bless you.
