VALPARAISO. 179 



pictures and sculpture by native hands that adorn the churches of 

 Quito and Lima. Such as I have seen here, in the ceiling of the 

 Merced for instance, are well for the place ; and are evidently the 

 work of some of the Spanish monks, who have decorated their 

 churches with as much of splendour in the taste of Europe as their 

 circumstances would permit. The likenesses I have seen are cer- 

 tainly a degree better than the portraits of China, but they are equally 

 stiff; and though the Madonas have an air of grace something like 

 those ancient ones painted before the revival of art, they are ill 

 drawn, and, above every thing, the extremities are hardly defined 

 at all. I do not believe that there is a single painter, native or 

 foreigner, now in the whole of Chile. I am sorry that they have 

 something of more pressing importance than the fine arts to attend to. 



July \Oth. — Capt. breakfasted with me, and afterwards 



was so kind as to accompany me in a round of calls, by way of re- 

 turning the visits of the English ladies here. It is curious, at this 

 distance from home, to see specimens of such people as one meets no 

 where else but among the Brangtons, in Madame D'Arblay's Ceci- 

 lia, or the Mrs. Eltons of Miss Austin's admirable novels ; and yet 

 these are, after all, the people most likely to be here. The country 

 is new ; the government unacknowledged by our own ; the merchants 

 are chiefly such as sell by commission, for houses established in 

 larger and older states ; and, as all Englishmen, from the highest to 

 the lowest, love to have their home with them, the clerks, who fall 

 naturally into these sort of employments, either bring or find suit- 

 able wives : therefore society, as far as relates to the English, is of a 

 very low tone. The sympathies of the heart, however, are as lively 

 here as in more polished circles ; and, while one turns one moment 

 in disgust from the man who * familiarly calls his wife by one nick- 

 name, and his daughter by another ; yet the next, one looks at him 

 with respect as the benevolent receiver and comforter of the sick and 

 the dying, whose house has been the asylum, and his family the 

 attendants, of more than one of Ills countrymen, who have ended their 

 being thus far from their friends and native land. 



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