LISBON : OENEHAL VIEW. 17 



proud Portuguese beggar disdains to interfere with an 

 occupation fitted only for slaves, and, as he shrugs his 

 fllioiildors, exclaims in the well-known proverb, 'The 

 Almighty made the Portuguese first, and then made the 

 Gallcgo to wait upon him.' Methinks, however, that the 

 despised Gallego has the best of the argument, as ho 

 pockets the affront and jingles the money he is collecting 

 wherewith to retire to his native mountains and end his 

 days in comfort, and whispers to himself, sotto voce, in the 

 proverb he knows so well, 'We are Grod's people; it is 

 their water, but we sell it them.' 



I have said that there are few carts in Lisbon, but 

 nothing will rivet the attention of the newly-landed tra- 

 veller more than the sight which will soon catch liis eye 

 of some antiquated plaustrum moving slowly through tlie 

 streets. These ancient and most clumsy but picturesque 

 vehicles can never have altered their shape since the days 

 of Virgil, and assuredly, from the indescribable groaning 

 and squeaking the}'' emit in all other places save the 

 capital (where such music is now forbidden under the 

 penalty of a heavy fine), they still deserve the epithets 

 bestowed by that poet, ' Stridentia, gemeniia xjlaustra.' 

 Their peculiarity consists in the ponderous axle, to which 

 heavy solid wheels' without spokes are firmly fixed, and 

 which revolves with the wheels, not without labour and 

 pain ; add to this a few planks for the bed, witli or without 

 sides OS the case m.ay be, a long pole and an elaborately 

 carved yoke, a pair of cream or dun-coloured oxen, and 

 a picturesque carter, armed with a long ox-goad, and 

 dressed in various coloured garments, and we have before 

 us the identical cart which not only Virgil and Juvenal 

 have described, but wJiich Homer too has portrayed, and 

 of which we may see an exact representation taken from a 

 bas-relief at Pome, and equally applicable to the antique 

 woin of Homer and Virgil, or the modern cart of 



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