1829. ] Popery in Portugal. 43 
falsehood and vulgarity of which are familiar in our mouths as house- 
hold words. It is a presumption in favour of any man, that the most 
violent aspersions upon him have been cast by recognized and undenied 
vehicles of filth, And we must subjoin one word in favour of old Euro- 
pean prejudices, that we do not like an old European kingdom—our 
oldest ally—the country of Vasco de Gama, and Alboquerque, and 
Camoens, to be governed from a mushroom Transatlantic nation, 
planted by itself. If Don Miguel be not fit to govern Portugal, let some- 
body else be found—but not, directly or indirectly, in Rio Janeiro. 
-We have said that we excuse ourselves from a long recapitulation of 
Captain Johnson’s constitutional reasonings on the subject of the Cortes of 
Lamego, and other similar bodies—we have also said, that we dismiss 
from our minds the acceptance of Don Miguel’s authority, by any other 
orders but the influential one. We have waived both considerations for 
the same reason. There might have been a constitution in Portugal 
some hundred of years ago ; we mean such an order of things as, under 
propitious circumstances, might have brought about the due checking of 
the monarchical, aristocratical, and ecclesiastical powers for the benefit 
of the people, without risking or endangering any of those privileges of 
the three orders which conduce to the proper stability of the state, 
the true liberty of the subject, and thence to the happiness and protection 
of all orders of the community. Such a predisposition did exist among 
all the Gothic race—it existed in a high degree among the inhabitants of 
the Iberian peninsula, famed in remote antiquity for a love of freedom, and, 
what was still more rare in those days, for a tolerable understanding of the 
‘means of attaining it in practice. But it has gone. The same withering 
and desolating power to which Don Miguel looks for his election to 
the throne, without which, his claims, deduced from the days of the 
Alfonsos and Diegos, would be as nothing ; without which, his lawyers 
and his pamphleteers would not find any necessity to trouble themselves 
in making out his case ; that power, that influential body to which we have 
before alluded, has suppressed even the forms of freedom in Portugal, 
as it has suppressed them in Castile and Arragon, and as it will suppress 
“them every where that its blighting and soul-destroying influence 
extends. 
It is unnecessary to say, that the power to which we allude is popery. 
In this country, we see its foul visage thickly veiled ; in Ireland, it is 
‘more uncovered ; in France, when it dares, it looks with hideous scowl 
__ upon a loathing people ; but in such a country as Portugal, where it is 
unchecked by the contact of protestantism, or the diffusion of knowledge, 
it rears its head in all the pride and all the horrors of tyranny, haughty 
and abominable in all the consciousness of being paramount and 
irresistible. On this rock Don Miguel may set his throne. The contest 
is nothing to us. Put him down, and under another name we shall have 
the loathsome reign of the priests and friars—even if that name should be 
~ Donna Maria’ de Gloria, the little lady of Laleham, ruling under the 
Vice royalty of the swift-footed Palmella. A greater change than such 
shallow fellows as the marquis and his companions have dared to dream 
of, must be effected before the real incubus of Portugal is shaken off: 
the constitution must be made by more vigorous hands than theirs—in 
a word, we do not expect any good to Spain or Portugal, until we see 
there the determination of a Henry the Eighth, ay, even were it accompa- 
nied by his roughness. The ingrained villanies of popery are not to be 
Bs Stl 
