is a print of St. Iago on horseback, most apostolically cleaving down a Turk.'

Our travellers proceeded, and Mr. Southey remarks, when they entered the village Puerto de Santa Cruz, where we dined, the people came round us to know if we were the cavaliers come to pay the king's debts. Here we bought a very favourite and indeed a very excellent dish of the Spaniards; it is lean pork highly seasoned with garlic, and steeped in red wine.

If the king of Spain have one solitary spark of sense glimmering in the dark lantern of his head, he must be seriously grieved to behold the wretched state of his dominions. Fancy cannot conceive a more delightful climate. Here is wine to gladden the heart of man, corn to support him, and oil to make him of a cheerful countenance.

'We travel leagues without seeing a village, and when we find one, it consists of such sties as are fit only for the pig part of the family. As for the towns it is not possible to give an Englishman ideas of their extreme poverty and wretchedness. You may conceive the state of the kingdom by this circumstance, we have now travelled six hundred miles without ever seeing one new house or one single one.

Tuesday 19.] We slept at Miajadas last night; here as usual we were entertained with complaints of the court. The girl told us that the king's train had broken five glasses in one evening. "And did they pay for them?" "Pay for them! the cursed gang! not a maravedi."---The room we were in was arched like a cellar, and we descended two steps to enter it it was so damp that I concluded any vermin that had accidentally dropt there must have caught cold and died of an asthma. I was lamentably mistaken.

'I wish some sudden business would recall the king immediately to Madrid, that he might find what kind of roads his subjects were obliged to travel, every august bone in his body would ache before he got half way. They were levelled for his journey, and every person obliged to whitewash the front of his house, that his majesty might witness the cleanliness of his subjects!

The marquis de Conquista passed us on the road, escorting the camaressa of the queen to the court, a beautiful woman who had been detained by indisposition at his seat near Truxillo. Two men rode by the coach singing to her as she went along. This made the road cheerful and agreeable, but alas! we suffered for it at night!

'Descended from Lobon we skirted the plain for two leagues to Talaveruela, a large and miserable place. Here the marquis had pre-occupied the house, and we could only procure a most deplorable room, with a hole above the roof to admit light as if up a chimney. It was long before we could procure chairs or table. Here we dressed ourselves to pass the courts and custom-houses to-morrow, and a most curious scene did our dressing-room exhibit; it was not possible to procure a looking-glass to shave by! They spread beds for us on mats upon the floor. The roof was of cane, and the rats running over it in the night shook down the dirt on our heads. I lay awake the whole night killing the musquitoes as they settled on my face, while the inhabitants of the bed entertained themselves so merrily at my expence, that Sangrado himself would have been satisfied with the bleeding which I underwent.

'We travelled two leagues over a flat and unpleasant country, which, Colmenar says, is sometimes so infested by grasshoppers that the king is obliged to send a body of men to burn them. Badajos, the frontier town, then appeared at the distance of a league, with its fort; and three leagues beyond, the Portuguese town of Elvas, and fort La Lippe. A regiment of cavalry is encamped under the walls: the men indeed are in tents, but the horses have no shelter; and the rains are daily expected. At every gate of the fortifications we were examined, and delay to us was not only unpleasant but dangerous, lest the calessa should be embargoed. We drove to the custom-house, and if ever I were to write a mock heroic descent to the infernal regions, I would not forget to make the adventurer pass through one of these agreeable establishments. There is a heavy and oppressive duty laid on money here; a traveller will of course carry as little Spanish gold into Portu

gal as possible, for it is of no use to him on the road, and he will lose thirty per cent. by the exchange.

About a league beyond runs a rivulet that separates the two kingdoms. The royal tent of Portugal is pitched on the bank, and a wooden bridge built for the meeting exactly where carriages used to ford the stream. But vulgar wheels must not profane the bridge which shall be trod by the august hoofs of their sacred majesties horses! and we were obliged to pass the water where it was so deep as to wet our baggage.

'Here all was gaiety, and glad to have escaped from Spain, we partook of the gaiety of the scene. Booths were erected: the courtiers passing from one town to the other, and crowds from both thronging to see the royal tent. Yet even here when the two courts are about to meet on such very uncommon terms of friendship, the national prejudices are evident. Manuel bought some oranges for us; he was within ten yards of Spain, and you may conceive his astonishment when they abused him for being a Spaniard.

Our hurry at Badajos allowed us no time to dine: here we fell to our brawn and bread and cheese, with the comfortable feeling of being near home. My uncle entered into conversation with a Portuguese officer who wished himself a general that he might have the pleasure of giving no quarter to the French: "Cruel dogs, said he, to make war upon the church! Look at this bridge, he cried, each nation built half, but I need not tell you which half the Portuguese built: they do every thing well! so strong--so durable! it will last for ever! As for the Spanish part (and he lifted up his eyebrows as he spoke) the first rain will sweep it away!" The Spaniards are not inferior in rhodomontade and national prejudices; one of them after passing through the tent, which contains a suite of eight handsome rooms, beside the bed-chambers, turned round with a sneer, "We have better apartments for the pigs in Spain !" No passion makes a man a liar so easily as vanity.

'Friday.] Colonel M. an Englishman in the Portuguese service, procured us a room in the house where he himself lodged at Elvas, and we enjoyed the novelty of tea and toast and butter. Some of the Portuguese nobility dropped in in

the evening. The conversation turned upon the Spanish court, and it was remarked that the queen of Spain had her Cortejo with her. Yes, it was replied, and a certain noble family accompanies the court, because you know the king cannot do without a wife.

The night was very tempestuous; the doors and windows were like Mr. Shandy's, and clattered with the wind. We breakfasted early, and left Elvas in a wet morning. Fort La Lippe, which is deemed impregnable, lies on a high hill, to the right. We passed under a very fine aqueduct of four rows of arches. The country is beautifully varied, but we were obliged to let down the apron of the calessa, and could only walk between the storms.

If Anaxagoras had travelled the two leagues from this place to Estremos, he would have thought pounding in a mortar comfortable by comparison. The best apartment here is occupied, and we are in a lumber room, where an old chest serves us as a table. There is a picture here of a sick man in bed and the virgin in the air praying for him. The inscription says that our lady saved the life of Antonio Sardinho, in 1761.

The Portuguese estalagems are perhaps better than the Spanish posadas. The beds here, instead of being made on bedsteads, are placed on a kind of stair or platform raised about eight inches from the floor. We have seen no candles since we left Madrid, but the lamps improve as we approach Lisbon. Here it has three branches as usual; an eye-screen projects before two of them, and a little extinguisher, a pointed instrument to raise the wick, and a small pincers to prune it, all of brass, are suspended by brazen chains between the branches.

'Here we witnessed the whole process of dressing Joze's rabbit. The spit was placed either above, below, by the side of, or in the fire: to know when it was done they crack'd the joints? they then laid it by till it cooled, then tore it piecemeal with their fingers, and fried it with onions, and garlic, and oil.

They say turnspits run away whenever they hear the word wheel, and I believe I shall soon have the same antipathy.

We left Montemor after dinner merrily, in expectation of reaching Aldea Gallega to-morrow night. It was a bad sign to stop half an hour while the calessero tied the spokes together; however we might certainly have safely reached the end of the stage with care. I have long been in doubt which is the more obstinate beast, the old mule or the old muleteer---the fourlegged one is the more rational. Joze, as usual, left the beasts to their own guidance, and the grey mule, as usual, chose a dry path for himself; this path unluckily lay down the bank, and the crazy wheel gave way. The old gentlemen who had very quietly suffered the mule to do this mischief, now threw his hat upon the ground, and was guilty of heresy, in asserting the mule had a soul; that he might commit blasphemy by assigning it over to the everlasting care of three hundred devils. Alas! we were upon a wide heath, and not one solitary imp appeared to help us. Here my uncle and I passed no very agreeable tete-a-tete from five till seven, in a dark cloudy evening, till the calessero returned with two men and à cartwheel, with which we contrived to go back two miles to the Ventas Silveyras, the most filthy and miserable hovel to which our ill fortune has yet conducted us.

'At Ventas Silveyras as usual we met no blankets; and as they were likewise without sheets, we of course lay down in our clothes. Never did I behold so horrible a woman as the hostess there; her face in its happiest moments expressed sullen and brutal ferocity; when roused into anger, which happened upon every slight occasion (for evil tempers take fire like rotten wood) it was that of a fury or a fiend. When we asked what was to pay, this woman enumerated the articles to her husband, "they had pepper," she began---“ they had salt--they had onions." Here we began our protest---“ no onions." "They had pepper," said she again,---" they had salt--they had the room--they had beds:" "Without sheets or blankets," we added, "and they had oil."

As we sat by the kitchen fire this evening, a Portuguese chose to entertain us by relating his history. "I was on board a ship when I was young," said he, "but I quarrelled with another boy; he struck me with a stick, and I stabbed