172 Portugal Illustrated. [Aueust, 
Petrea hospitality ; to do justice to which, it might be added, in all fair cal- 
culation of proportionable powers, that the steam-engine force of an ostrich’s 
stomach, or the iron digestion of a turkey, could alone be adequate,” &c. 
It would scarcely be supposed of a traveller, who set out with the 
view of making his readers better acquainted with the country he was 
to visit than the inhabitants of it themselves, that this fierce philippic 
against Portuguese hospitality is pronounced merely on the authority 
of report? This, however, undoubtedly is the fact; for the author 
declares, at the time when he writes it, that he has never “in any one 
instance” been a visitor in any Portuguese family! Such a description 
as is here given may be true of the household of persons in narrow cir- 
cumstances, but certainly bears no resemblance to the style of domestic 
arrangement in the dwellings of persons of fortune or condition. 
Throughout Mr. Kinsey’s work, however, constant references will be 
found to the “pride and poverty” of the nobility and gentry, and the 
“beggared and degraded condition” of the lower classes ; and as there is 
a great deal of error and exaggeration about many of these statements, we 
may find room for a few words upon the real position of the case. 
The Portuguese of the upper classes, are, like most of the natives of 
southern climates, habitually abstemious. The people at large, for the 
sake of enjoying a larger portion of the luxury of leisure, are contented 
to consume a less amount of the luxuries of beef and wine than the 
English are accustomed to do. The chief objection arising to this system 
is a political and a public one—by diminishing the amount of national 
exertion, it weakens the strength of a country and lessens its resources: 
that the personal happiness of individuals is increased by the state of 
incessant exertion—between acquirement and expenditure—in which 
we live in England, has never yet been shewn entirely to our satisfaction. 
Still there is none of that slovenliness and offence about the domestic 
arrangements of the Portuguese of respectability, which Mr. Kinsey is 
so ready to impute. Their cuisine is bad enough ;—they say that it is bad, 
but that the English is worse—a point, however, on which we take 
leave to think they are entirely mistaken ; but still it would be difficult 
to find more scrupulous neatness and cleanness than pervades all the 
chamber and table arrangements of a respectable Portuguese house ; 
and Mr. Kinsey’s account of the distress of the lower orders is entirely 
over-rated. For instance, Mr. K. describes the water-carrier and 
porter of Lisbon, as “ earning with difficulty sixpence a day ;” we can 
assure him that he is totally mistaken as to this fact; and he himself 
states, directly afterwards, that his “ savings” out of these earnings, are 
in general “ sufficient to enable him, in the course of some fifteen years, 
to return to the mountains of his own native Galicia, and to purchase a 
little plot of culturable ground, upon which he erects a small cottage,” 
&c. &c. A labourer, who accomplished this in fifteen years in Eng- 
land, would think that he had little to complain of. And again, Mr. Kinsey 
is everlastingly complaining of the paucity of the population—of “the 
want of sufficient hands even for the purposes of agriculture”—a state of 
things hardly consistent with the existence of a very low rate of wages 
to labourers? But what is the fact, as to this point, where we have an 
opportunity of getting at it directly. Mr. Kinsey does once—we believe 
it is only once—tell us the actual wages paid for labour in one of the 
districts which he visited ; and his words are these: at the time he writes, 
he is at Oporto—* The labourers in the quarries, on the banks of the 
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