RECOLLECTIONS OF BRAZIL. 



DOMESTIC MANNERS. 



ONE of the most celebrated lawyers of the present day has often 

 been heard to say, that during the whole course of his long and ar- 

 duous career, and with all his professional experience, he had never 

 yet been able to discover the true meaning of the word " gentleman/' 

 The Arabs have upwards of one hundred words for the horse alone ; 

 but the copiousness of the Arabic is absolute povert}', when com- 

 pared with the ductile flexibility of our English tongue, which pos- 

 sesses a word that defines at once every class of his majesty's liege 

 subjects. 



" Gentleman," however, is not the only word in our language which, 

 as our French neighbours would say, "fait le desespoir," of our lexi- 

 cographers ; there is still another term, the application of which is 

 equally vague and indefinite one that is applied to that nondescript 

 race who, on making the tour of Europe in a well-padded travelling 

 chariot, are deemed qualified for the traveller's club. But, by the 

 shade of that prince of travellers, Marco Polo by the shade of Baum- 

 garten, whose eagle eye saw the traces of Pharoah's chariot wheels on 

 the shores of the Red Sea, when I look upon that " servile Pecus," I 

 am not only tempted to say with Burke, " the days of chivalry are 

 past," but to go farther, and exclaim, the days of travellers are past ! 



The bell of the Igrega Madre was just tolling the hour of Ave 

 Maria, and the vesper hymn floated sweetly on the evening breeze, as 

 I slipped out of the narrow precincts of a canoe, in which I had been 

 confined for nearly two days, and once more stretched my limbs on 

 " porto," as it was pompously called, of St. Joam de Pernaiba, a little 

 town on the banks of the mighty river of that name. For eighteen 

 days previously I had been travelling through an uninterrupted 

 desert, and after narrowly escaping the jaws of an alligator while 

 taking a siesta on the banks of a river. After declining the warm 

 and lasting embraces of a huge boa after but I must say no more, 

 lest I shock my reader's nerves, or expose mine own to even & severer 

 shock, by a charge of Brucism suffice it, therefore, to say, with only 

 half a skin, for the musquitoes and a tropical sun had taken woeful 

 liberties with the other division, I arrived at the aforesaid Villa de 

 Pernaiba, where so tranquilly flows on the tide of human existence, 

 from the cradle to the grave, unmarked by aught to diversify its un- 

 deviating strait line of monotonous uniformity, that my arrival caused 

 even more sensation than that of a Russian grand duke, or a Turkish 

 plenipotentiary extraordinary at Mivart's or the Clarendon. 



" Tel brille au second rang, qui s'eclipse au premier." 



In our last we endeavoured to give our readers some insight into 

 the domestic organization of the aboriginal inhabitants of Brazil, w r e 

 shall now reverse the picture, and exhibit the manners of the European 

 conquerors the Brava gente Braziliera, as they call themselves. 



