1827.] Movements in Portugal. 237 



among men whose sense of personal interest to speak of no spark of mili- 

 tary spirit would reject the return to a system under which private 

 soldiers begged their bread in the public streets ; and officers waited as 

 footmen behind the chairs of nobles. It woulci be sustained also by as 

 many of the lower classes and of the peasantry, as the influence of those 

 persons of rank who were engaged in it, could detach from the dominion of 

 the priest. But these last would not be very many ; and we repeat 

 though without being in the slightest degree discouraged by the fact that 

 we believe, if Portugal could be polled though the wealth, and the in- 

 formation would be greatly in favour of the constitutional cause the 

 numerical balance would be against it. 



And this position of parties fully explains a circumstance, which six 

 weeks since excited some degree of surprise and disgust in this country- 

 to wit that the British troops were not received with acclamations and 

 embraces on their first landing, by the people of Lisbon. The fact is, that 

 men's personal feelings speaking of the community three times in four, 

 are stronger than their political ones ; and the classes that formed the con- 

 stitutional party in Portugal, were just those to whom the importation of a 

 foreign army was sure to be the most particularly distressing and offensive. 

 To the nation at large, scarcely any measure could be so peculiarly un- 

 grateful. All the recollections in the minds of the people, connected with 

 British " occupation," were of a bitter and degrading character. They 

 were recollections of a time when the Portuguese seemed intruders in their 

 own land. When their very enemy looked only to the legions of a stranger ; 

 and treated their alliance, or their hostility, as a matter almost of contempt. 

 When a host of foreigners, too powerful to be very courteous, disposed of 

 the strength of the resources of the very honours, of their country ; and 

 the natives relied on them, in helplessness, for that protection, which how- 

 ever compelled to receive it the human heart may repay, but seldom can 

 forgive. Then the constitutional party (par preference) was made up of 

 a set of individuals, who had still more paramount, because more personal, 

 aversions to the appearance of a British force. If the mob had been 

 " constitutional" we should have been cheered in the streets ; the nobility 

 could not have been very immediately annoyed by us; and, if we had had 

 the monks, we should have commanded a high mass or a Te Deum. But 

 the soldiers of the constitutional cause, had no desire for the presence of a 

 body of troops, beside whose splendour they could not stand for a moment, 

 without a mortifying exhibition of their own inferiority. And the citizens 

 had no glimpses of "the English again in Portugal," except of their 

 houses filled, and their streets beset, by a crowd of overbearing strangers ; 

 with all the horrible nuisances of the former occupation, grown ten times 

 more intolerable upon subsequent reflection, than they had been in the 

 turbulent time of their first endurance. We stood in Portugal pretty 

 nearly as the Irish Catholics stand in England : our cause (political) had 

 the sanction, and good wishes, of the best of the country, the constitu- 

 tional : our persons, the affection hardly of any body. And there will be 

 nothing very surprising to any of the officers who served in the Peninsula 

 during the last war, although it should be believed that a very large 

 proportion of the constitutional party but for the seasonable apprehen- 

 sion of vengeance to be exacted by their opponents if victorious would 

 have been content to let their cause fail, rather than encounter the alterna- 

 tive of supporting it by foreign interference. 



These suspicions and apprehensions however, before this time, have 

 disappeared. The Portuguese, no doubt, would soon discover that it was one 



