132 Anecdotes of Brazil. [FEB. 



a long subsequent period of years, attended with results as beneficial as 

 they afterwards proved vicious. 



No one, who is not blinded by bigotry or hurried away by feelings of 

 romance, will regret the abolition in Europe of the Society of Jesus ; 

 but I know not if he can view with equal complacency the abolition of 

 this celebrated order in South America. The many vices so justly 

 charged to the disciples of Loyola must not prevent our acknowledging 

 the numerous benefits which both literature and science have received 

 from them. It is here, in South America for the discovery of most of 

 the valuable productions of which Europe is indebted to the Jesuits 

 that the lover of humanity may be permitted to mourn over their fall. 

 Their singular system of government at the missions the subject of such 

 contending opinions will be best estimated by comparing the present 

 deplorable state of morals in those districts with the period when they 

 were subject to the jurisdiction of their order. To the absence of all 

 religious instruction is to be attributed the singular state of manners 

 which so strongly marks the interior province of Brazil. The clergy 

 are in numbers few, while their flocks are scattered over benefices 

 which in extent, at least, will rival a European province. Although I 

 have witnessed some splendid instances of religion and piety among the 

 clergy, the major part of them are totally indifferent to the spiritual 

 weal of their flocks. Thus it but too often happens that those great 

 scenes of life birth, marriage, and death pass unhallowed by the rites 

 of religion, and fail to excite those finer feelings which embellish our 

 existence. 



If the interior provinces of the empire are so miserably provided with 

 spiritual pastors, the remark does not apply to the sea-coast, in the 

 towns of which the church militants, from the haughty Dominican to the 

 dirty Franciscan, literally swarm. I have often been forcibly struck 

 with the exquisitely fine taste for the picturesque displayed by these rever- 

 end fathers in the choice of the sites of their convents. In fact, all the 

 ceremonies of the Romish church are on a scale of gorgeous magnifi- 

 cence, admirably calculated for the purpose of dazzling the imagination 

 of an ignorant people. On one occasion, I lionized, in company with a 

 party of British officers, the city of Bahia. Among other objects, we 

 visited the convent of St. Francis, which, for its extent and the splen- 

 dour of its internal decorations, powerfully elicited the admiration of the 

 late king on his first arrival at Brazil a sovereign whose ideas of con- 

 ventual magnificence were certainly fixed at an elevated point. After 

 devoting some time to its numerous chapels and richly-decorated shrines, 

 our attention was forcibly arrested by a most singular spectacle. In a 

 small glass case was a wax figure of the infant Jesus, but dressed in a 

 style so singularly outre, as Avould have provoked the risibility of a San- 

 ton. Picture for a moment the infant Saviour in a wig a I'aile de pigeon 

 a court-dress of la vieille COM/% blazoned with stars and orders a 

 cocked-hat and sword completed the toilette! certainly calculated to 

 produce a laugh at the expense of our cicerone, who apparently guessed 

 what was passing in our minds ; for he said to us 



" Senhores, in religion, as in every thing else, fashion will assert her 

 empire. Formerly, the image of the Saviour, arrayed in the simple 

 tunic of the East, was sufficient to command the reverence of the multi- 

 tude ; but now," he added, with a smile, " nothing goes down with them 

 but a full court-dress/' 



