1826,.) ( 29h). 
PORTUGAL SKETCHES.* 
Iv the days of our youth—now, alas! many days ago—Spain, Italy, and 
Portugal were fipe places for.romance. We had high-souled, and high-fore- 
headed Dons and Grandees, magnificent and murdérotis Marcheses, stilletto- 
bearing Hidalgos, amorous nuns, bloody monks, converts, 6range-groves, lutes 
and moonlight serenading, and sonnets, canzonets and’ ¢aterwauling, through 
whole reams of A. K. Newman. A change has sitce come over the spirit of 
our dream, and the Northern Magician, 
“ Who writes while he’s shooting or fishing,” 
has wiled us away from the:‘sunny skies of the Peninsula. to\ the heather and 
moor of Scotland, :to make. love to high-checkboned damsels, or be terrified by 
awful predictions of ancient beggarmen, or decayed gypsies, 
Yet still the old romance, haunts-us about the former lands. of gestic lore. 
The campaignsin Spainand Portugal did a great deal to diminish the romantic 
feeling, we admit. It was a sore:blow to fiod a nunnery little ;more than a 
boarding-school for young ladies, not further advanced in civilization than 
those similar seminaries°on the Paddington-road or Ratcliffe-bighway. Even 
all the value of intrigue; with all its amusing adjuncts, was sadly cut up when 
our officers, after a little practice, found that there was. no need of scaling 
walls, bribing porters, knitting rope-ladders, doubling up duennas, hiding from 
abbesses, and all the other terrible inconveniences which beset us, in romance— 
but that, on the contrary, the young ladies of a nunnery were as:ready to listen 
to reason as any other young ladies in the world, without putting their friends 
to aay unnecessary trouble on the’ subject.’ A visit of a Frenchy battalion to a 
convent very particularly mpsetiagreat many established notions. on this score, 
As for friars, 
“* White, black, and grey, and all their trumpery,” 
who could ever put them dowh'as/any thing more picturesque*than your every- 
day field-preacher, after having emptied ’a half jar of port or xeres:with them for 
breakfast ;—been cheated by them at piquet,—seen them dragging baggage- 
waggons, or found them ‘very busy in picking the pockets of the dead on a field of 
battle. Then as for asassins ;—why they, instead of being the fine-spoken fellows 
who figure in our books, were not, on the whole, a higher order of animals than 
the gentlemen who figure in the front of Newgate, at eight o’clock in the 
morning, shortly after:an Old Bailey session. Condes, Marquesas, Caballeros, 
Fidalgos, Hidalgos, were discovered to be common sort of folks, who ate and 
drank pretty much after the fashion of other eaters and drinkers in this our 
terraqueous globe. It is not to be denied that a campaign ina country ruins 
much of romance. Suttlers and commissaries, majors and adjutants, provost- 
marshals and troop quarter-masters, come very badly in contact with the pictu- 
resque or the sentimental. A ghost cannot come within fifty miles of such 
people. Try to conceive a spectre rising with a bloody dagger in the right 
hand, and a lurid light, throwing a horrid glare over an apartment, in the left, 
appearing to Mr. Timothy Higginson, commissary’s clerk of the third brigade of 
the second division; on two-and-ninepence a day, distributing rations of pork 
(even not supposing it measly): aye, or to Brevet-major Mugg himself, of the 
50th, or the dirty halfthtindieds stationed in bivouac at a pot-house, flanked 
by adunghill, 9°" 9° ( if 
As the memory of the campaign subsided, these impicturesque events were 
forgotten ; and if we mistake not, we ate now on the eve of another series of 
romances on Spain_ and Portugal. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. We cannot 
now so easily get to the Penitsula, and ‘the old’ spirit is reviving. And as 
balloons are sent tip’ to ‘see Which’ ‘way the’ wind blows, we have here a very 
light, pleasant, and gas-like ‘Voliinié sent’ into the market, ‘to prepare us, as we 
prognosticate, for a new fight’ ‘of aérial’ fiction, according tothe ancient and 
* Sketches of Portuguese Life, Manners, Costume, and: Character, illustrated by — 
Tw Plates, 8yo, 
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