2 EXCURSIONS IN MADEIRA 



opposed to me were so various, that, notwithstanding every effort 

 on the part of my friends there, it was nearly a month before I 

 had collected the information, which " I apprehend must ere this 

 have been laid before the public, and which, scanty as it may 

 seem, is, I have been assured, all that exists on the subject. 



It has almost always been the custom with every Portuguese, 

 holding a distinguished appointment, such as that of a minister 

 or governor, to preserve copies of all the despatches and instruc- 

 tions written and received by him during his administration, as 

 well as of every other official document, and to have them bound 

 together on his retirement, and deposited in the family library, 

 like any other historical volume, for his own justification, and for 

 the honour and instruction of his descendants. Thus, much has 

 escaped in manuscript, which would have been condemned by that 

 Inquisition which allowed no man a bible, which authorised the 

 Custom-House to rob the foreigner even of his prayer-book, 

 which stole any man from his family whom a malignant or de- 

 signing neighbour fee'd them to impale, and which had not even 

 forbearance enough to reply, " Monsieur, vous etes bien curieux," 

 (as the guard did to a poor Frenchman hurried away to the 

 Bastille,) when their victim dared to entreat an explanation beyond 

 the vague charge of impiety. Some of the nobility, no doubt, as 

 liberal lovers of literature, would always have been ready to open 

 these manuscript volumes, to any inquu'er who had desired to 

 throw light on Portuguese diplomacy and Portuguese discoveries, 

 for both of which a blank seems to have been left in modern 

 history ; — but the greater number have hitherto been either too 

 narrow-minded and suspicious to do so, or, occupying their whole 

 lives to prove that " Kings have descended from them, and not 

 they from kings" — a vaunt not unfrequently blazoned in letters 



^ An account of the discoveries of the Portuguese in the interior of Angola and 

 Mozambique. 



