Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 56, No. 345, July, 1844

Pombal, in his memoir, imputes a portion of the poverty of Portugal to her possession of the gold mines of Brazil. This is one of the paradoxes of the last century; but nations are only aggregates of men, and what makes an individual rich, cannot make a nation poor. The true secret is this—that while the possession of the gold mines induced an indolent government to rely upon them for the expenses of the state, that reliance led them to abandon sources of profit in the agriculture and commerce of the country, which were of ten times the value. This was equally the case in Spain. The first influx from the mines of Peru, enabled the government to disregard the revenues arising from the industry of the people. In consequence of the want of encouragement from the government, the agriculture and commerce of Spain sank rapidly into the lowest condition, whilst the government indolently lived on the produce of the mines. But the more gold and silver exist in circulation, the less becomes their value. Within half a century, the imports from the Spanish and Portuguese mines, had reduced the value of the precious metals by one half; and those imports thus became inadequate to the ordinary expenses of government. Greater efforts were then made to obtain them from the mines. Still, as the more that was obtained the less was the general value, the operation became more profitless still; and at length both Spain and Portugal were reduced to borrow money, which they had no means to pay—in other words, were bankrupt. And this is the true solution of the problem—why have the gold and silver mines of the Peninsula left them the poorest nations of Europe? Yet this was contrary to the operation of new wealth. The discovery of the mines of the New World appears to have been a part of that providential plan, by which a general impulse was communicated to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Europe was preparing for a new vigour of religion, politics, commerce, and civilization. Nothing stimulates national effort of every kind with so much power and rapidity, as a new general accession of wealth, or, as the political economist would pronounce it, a rise of wages, whether industrial or intellectual; and this rise was effected by the new influx of the mines. If Peru and Mexico had belonged to England, she would have converted their treasures into new canals and high-roads, new harbours, new encouragements to agriculture, new excitements to public education, new enterprises of commerce, or the colonization of new countries in the productive regions of the globe; and thus she would at once have increased her natural opulence, and saved herself from suffering under the depreciation of the precious metals, or more partially, by her active employment of them, have almost wholly prevented that depreciation. But the Peninsula, relying wholly on its imported wealth, and neglecting its infinitely more important national riches, was exactly in the condition of an individual, who spends the principal of his property, which is continually sinking until it is extinguished altogether.

Another source of Peninsular poverty existed in its religion. The perpetual holidays of Popery made even the working portion of the people habitually idle. Where labour is prohibited for nearly a fourth of the year by the intervention of holidays, and thus idleness is turned into a sacred merit, the nation must prepare for beggary. But Popery goes further still. The establishment of huge communities of sanctified idlers, monks and nuns by the ten thousand, in every province and almost in every town, gave a sacred sanction to idleness—gave a means of escaping work to all who preferred the lounging and useless life of the convent to regular labour, and even provided the means of living to multitudes of vagabonds, who were content to eat their bread, and drink their soup, daily at the convent gates, rather than to make any honest decent effort to maintain themselves. Every country must be poor in which a large portion of the public property goes to the unproductive classes. The soldiery, the monks, the state annuitants, the crowds of domestics, dependent on the families of the grandees, all are necessarily unproductive. The money which they receive is simply consumed. It makes no return. Thus poverty became universal; and nothing but the singular fertility of the peopled districts of Spain and Portugal, and the fortune of having a climate which requires but few of the comforts essential in a severer temperature, could have saved them both from being the most pauperized of all nations, or even from perishing altogether, and leaving the land a desert behind them. It strangely illustrates these positions, that, in 1754, the Portuguese treasury was so utterly emptied, that the monarch was compelled to borrow 400,000 crusadoes (L.40,000) from a private company, for the common expenses of his court.

Wholly and justly disclaiming the imputation which would pronounce Portugal a dependent on England, it is impossible to turn a page of her history without seeing the measureless importance of her English connexion. Every genuine source of her power and opulence has either originated with, or been sustained by, her great ally. Among the first of these has been the wine trade. In the year 1756—the year following that tremendous calamity which had sunk Lisbon into ruins—the wine-growers in the three provinces of Beira, Minho, and Tras-os-Montes, represented that they were on the verge of ruin. The adulteration of the Portuguese wines by the low traders had destroyed their character in Europe, and the object of the representation was to reinstate that character. Pombal immediately took up their cause; and, in the course of the same year, was formed the celebrated Oporto Wine Company, with a capital of £120,000. The declared principles of the establishment were, to preserve the quality of the wines, to secure the growers by fixing a regular price, and to protect them from the combinations of dealers. The company had the privilege of purchasing all the wines grown within a particular district at a fixed price, for a certain period after the vintage. When that period had expired, the growers were at liberty to sell the wines which remained unpurchased in whatever market they pleased. Monopolies, in the advanced and prosperous career of commercial countries, generally sink into abuse; but they are, in most instances, absolutely necessary to the infant growth of national traffic. All the commerce of Europe has commenced by companies. In the early state of European trade, individuals were too poor for those large enterprises which require a large outlay, and whose prospects, however promising, are distant. What one cannot do, must be done by a combination of many, if it is to be done at all. Though when individual capital, by the very action of that monopoly, becomes powerful enough for those enterprises, then the time is at hand when the combination may be dissolved with impunity. The Oporto Wine Company had no sooner come into existence, than its benefits were felt in every branch of Portuguese revenue. It restored and extended the cultivation of the vine, which is the staple of Portugal. It has been abolished in the revolutionary changes of late years. But the question, whether the country is yet fit to bear the abolition, is settled by the fact, that the wine-growers are complaining of ruin, and that the necessity of the case is now urging the formation of the company once more.

The decision of Pombal's character was never more strongly shown than on this occasion. The traders into whose hands the Portuguese wines had fallen, and who had enjoyed an illegal monopoly for so many years, raised tumults, and serious insurrection was threatened. At Oporto, the mob plundered the director's house, and seized on the chief magistrate. The military were attacked, and the government was endangered. The minister instantly ordered fresh troops to Oporto; arrests took place; seventeen persons were executed; five-and-twenty sent to the galleys; eighty-six banished, and others subjected to various periods of imprisonment. The riots were extinguished. In a striking memoir, written by Pombal after his retirement from office, he gives a brief statement of the origin of this company—a topic at all times interesting to the English public, and which is about to derive a new interest from its practical revival in Portugal. We quote a fragment.

"The unceasing and urgent works which the calamitous earthquake of November 1st, 1755, had rendered indispensable, were still vigorously pursued, when, in the following year, one Mestre Frei Joao de Mansilla presented himself at the Giunta at Belem, on the part of the principal husbandmen of Upper Douro, and of the respectable inhabitants of Oporto, in a state of utter consternation.

"In the popular outcry of the time, the English were represented as making themselves the sole managers of every thing. The fact being, that, as they were the only men who had any money, they were almost the sole purchasers in the Portuguese markets. But the English here complained of were the low traffickers, who, in conjunction with the Lisbon and Oporto vintners, bought and managed the wines at their discretion. It was represented to the king, that, by those means, the price of wine had been reduced to 7200 rios a pipe, or less, until the expense of cultivation was more than the value of the produce; that those purchasers required one or two years' credit; that the price did not pay for the hoeing of the land, which was consequently deserted; that all the principal families of one district had been reduced to poverty, so much so as to be obliged to sell their knives and forks; that the poor people had not a drop of oil for their salad, so that they were obliged, even in Lent, to season their vegetables with the fat of hogs." The memoir mentions even gross vice as a consequence of their extreme poverty.

We quote this passage to show to what extremities a people may be reduced by individual mismanagement, and what important changes may be produced by the activity of an intelligent directing power. The king's letters-patent of 1756, establishing the company, provided at once for the purity of the wine, its extended sale in England, and the solvency of the wine provinces. It is only one among a thousand instances of the hazards in which Popery involves all regular government, to find the Jesuits inflaming the populace against this most salutary and successful act of the king. At confession, they prompted the people to believe "that the wines of the company were not fit for the celebration of mass." (For the priests drink wine in the communion, though the people receive only the bread.) To give practical example to their precept, they dispersed narratives of a great popular insurrection which had occurred in 1661; and both incentives resulted in the riots in Oporto, which it required all the vigour of Pombal to put down.

But the country and Europe was now to acknowledge the services of the great minister on a still higher scale. The extinction of the Jesuits was the work of his bold and sagacious mind. The history of this event is among the most memorable features of a century finishing with the fall of the French monarchy.

The passion of Rome for territory has been always conspicuous, and always unsuccessful. Perpetually disturbing the Italian princes in the projects of usurpation, it has scarcely ever advanced beyond the original bounds fixed for it by Charlemagne. Its spirit of intrigue, transfused into its most powerful order the Jesuits, was employed for the similar purpose of acquiring territorial dominion. But Europe was already divided among powerful nations. Those nations were governed by jealous authorities, powerful kings for their leaders, and powerful armies for their defence. All was full; there was no room for the contention of a tribe of ecclesiastics, although the most daring, subtle, and unscrupulous of the countless slaves and soldiers of Rome. The world of America was open. There a mighty power might grow up unseen by the eye of Europe. A population of unlimited multitudes might find space in the vast plains; commerce in the endless rivers; defence in the chains of mountains; and wealth in the rocks and sands of a region teeming with the precious metals. The enterprise was commenced under the pretext of converting the Indians of Paraguay. Within a few years the Jesuits formed an independent republic, numbering thirty-one towns, with a population of a hundred thousand souls. To render their power complete, they prohibited all communication between the natives and the Spaniards and Portuguese, forbidding them to learn the language of either country, and implanting in the mind of the Indians an implacable hatred of both Spain and Portugal. At length both courts became alarmed, and orders were sent out to extinguish the usurpation. Negotiations were in the mean time opened between Spain and Portugal relative to an exchange of territory, and troops were ordered to effect the exchange. Measures of this rank were unexpected by the Jesuits. They had reckoned upon the proverbial tardiness of the Peninsular councils; but they were determined not to relinquish their prize without a struggle. They accordingly armed the natives, and prepared for a civil war.

The Indians, unwarlike as they have always been, now headed by their Jesuit captains, outmanoeuvred the invaders. The expedition failed; and the baffled invasion ended in a disgraceful treaty. The expedition was renewed in the next year, 1755, and again baffled. The Portuguese government of the Brazils now made renewed efforts, and in 1756 obtained some advantages; but they were still as far as ever from final success, and the war, fruitless as it was, had begun to drain heavily the finances of the mother country. It had already cost the treasury of Lisbon a sum equal to three millions sterling. But the minister at the head of the Portuguese government was of a different character from the race who had, for the last hundred years, wielded the ministerial sceptres of Spain and Portugal. His clear and daring spirit at once saw where the evil lay, and defied the difficulties that lay between him and its cure. He determined to extinguish the order of the Jesuits at a blow. The boldness of this determination can be estimated only by a knowledge of the time. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Jesuits were the ecclesiastical masters of Europe. They were the confessors of the chief monarchs of the Continent; the heads of the chief seminaries for national education; the principal professors in all the universities;—and this influence, vast as it was by its extent and variety, was rendered more powerful by the strict discipline, the unhesitating obedience, and the systematic activity of their order. All the Jesuits existing acknowledged one head, the general of their order, whose constant residence was at Rome. But their influence, powerful as it was by their open operation on society, derived perhaps a superior power from its secret exertions. Its name was legion—its numbers amounted to thousands—it took every shape of society, from the highest to the lowest. It was the noble and the peasant—the man of learning and the man of trade—the lawyer and the monk—the soldier and the sailor—nay, it was said, that such was the extraordinary pliancy of its principle of disguise, the Jesuit was suffered to assume the tenets of Protestantism, and even to act as a Protestant pastor, for the purpose of more complete deception. The good of the church was the plea which purified all imposture; the power of Rome was the principle on which this tremendous system of artifice was constructed; and the reduction of all modes of human opinion to the one sullen superstition of the Vatican, was the triumph for which those armies of subtle enthusiasm and fraudulent sanctity were prepared to live and die.

The first act of Pombal was to remove the king's confessor, the Jesuit Moreira. The education of the younger branches of the royal family was in the hands of Jesuits. Pombal procured a royal order that no Jesuit should approach the court, without obtaining the express permission of the king. He lost no time in repeating the assault. Within a month, on the 8th of October 1767, he sent instructions to the Portuguese ambassador at Rome, to demand a private audience, and lay before the pope the misdemeanours of the order.

Those instructions charged the Jesuits with the most atrocious personal profligacy, with a design to master all public power, to gather opulence dangerous to the state, and actually to plot against the authority of the crowns of Europe. He announced, that the king of Portugal had commanded all the Jesuit confessors of the prince and princesses to withdraw to their own convents; and this important manifesto closed by soliciting the interposition of the papal see to prevent the ruin, by purifying an order which had given scandal to Christianity, by offences against the public and private peace of society, equally unexampled, habitual, and abominable. In 1758, the representation to the pope was renewed, with additional proofs that the order had determined to usurp every function, and thwart every act of the civil government; that the confessors of the royal family, though dismissed, continued to conspire; that they resisted the formation of royal institutions for the renewal of the national commerce; and that they excited the people to dangerous tumults, in defiance of the royal authority.

Their intrigues comprehended every object by which influence was to be obtained, or money was to be made. The "Great Wine Company," on which the chief commerce of Portugal, and almost the existence of its northern provinces depended, was a peculiar object of their hostility, for reasons which we can scarcely apprehend, except they were general jealousy of all lay power, and hostility to all the works of Pombal. They assailed it from their pulpits; and one of their popular preachers made himself conspicuous by impiously exclaiming, "that whoever joined that company, would have no part in the company of Jesus Christ."

The intrigues of this dangerous and powerful society had long before been represented to the popes, and had drawn down upon them those remonstrances by which the habitual dexterity of Rome at once saves appearances, and suffers the continuance of the delinquency. The Jesuits were too useful to be restrained; yet their crimes were too palpable to be passed over. In consequence, the complaints of the monarchs of Spain and Portugal were answered by bulls issued from time to time, equally formal and ineffective. Yet even from these documents may be ascertained the singularly gross, worldly, and illegitimate pursuits of an order, professing itself to be supremely religious, and the prime sustainer of the "faith of the gospel." The bull of Benedict the XIV., issued in 1741, prohibited from "trade and commerce, all worldly dominion, and the purchase and sale of converted Indians." The bull extended the prohibition generally to the monkish orders, to avoid branding the Jesuits especially. But a bull of more direct reprehension was published at the close of the year, expressly against the Jesuits in their missions in the east and west. The language of this document amounts to a catalogue of the most atrocious offences against society, humanity, and morals. By this bull, "all men, and especially Jesuits," are prohibited, under penalty of excommunication, from "making slaves of the Indians; from selling and bartering them; from separating them from their wives and children; from robbing them of their property; from transporting them from their native soil," &c.

Nothing but the strongest necessity, and the most ample evidence, would ever have drawn this condemnation from Rome, whether sincere or insincere. But the urgencies of the case became more evident from day to day. In 1758, the condemnation was followed by the practical measure of appointing Cardinal Saldanha visitor and reformer of the Jesuits in Portugal, and the Portuguese settlements in the east and west.

Within two months of this appointment the following decree was issued:—"For just reasons known to us, and which concern especially the service of God and the public welfare, we suspend from the power of confessing and preaching, in the whole extent of our patriarchate, the fathers of the Society of Jesus, from this moment, and until further notice." Saldanha had been just raised to the patriarchate.

We have given some observations on this subject, from its peculiar importance to the British empire at this moment. The order of the Jesuits, extinguished in the middle of the last century by the unanimous demand of Europe, charged with every crime which could make a great association obnoxious to mankind, and exhibiting the most atrocious violations of the common rules of human morality, has, within this last quarter of a century, been revived by the papacy, with the express declaration, that its revival is for the exclusive purpose of giving new effect to the doctrines, the discipline, and the power of Rome. The law which forbids the admission of Jesuits into England, has shared the fate of all laws feebly administered; and Jesuits are active by hundreds or by thousands in every portion of the empire. They have restored the whole original system, sustained by all their habitual passion for power, and urging their way, with all their ancient subtlety, through all ranks of Protestantism.

The courage and intelligence of Pombal placed him in the foremost rank of Europe, when the demand was the boldest and most essential service which a great minister could offer to his country; he broke the power of Jesuitism. But an order so numerous—for even within the life of its half-frenzied founder it amounted to 19,000—so vindictive, and flung from so lofty a rank of influence, could not perish without some desperate attempts to revenge its ruin. The life of Pombal was so constantly in danger, that the king actually assigned him a body guard. But the king himself was exposed to one of the most remarkable plots of regicide on record—the memorable Aveiro and Tavora conspiracy.

On the night of the 3d of September 1758, as the king was returning to the palace at night in a cabriolet, attended only by his valet, two men on horseback, and armed with blunderbusses, rode up to the carriage, and leveled their weapons at the monarch. One of them missed fire, the other failed of its effect. The royal postilion, in alarm, rushed forward, when two men, similarly waiting in the road, galloped after the carriage, and both fired their blunderbusses into it behind. The cabriolet was riddled with slugs, and the king was wounded in several places. By an extraordinary presence of mind, Don Joseph, instead of ordering the postilion to gallop onward, directed him instantly to turn back, and, to avoid alarming the palace, carry him direct to the house of the court surgeon. By this fortunate order, he escaped the other groups of the conspirators, who were stationed further on the road, and under whose repeated discharges he would probably have fallen. The public alarm and indignation on the knowledge of this desperate atrocity were unbounded. There seemed to be but one man in the kingdom who preserved his composure, and that one was Pombal. Exhibiting scarcely even the natural perturbation at an event which had threatened almost a national convulsion, he suffered the whole to become a matter of doubt, and allowed the king's retirement from the public eye to be considered as merely the effect of accident. The public despatch of Mr Hay, the British envoy at Lisbon, alludes to it, chiefly as assigning a reason for the delay of a court mourning—the order for this etiquette, on the death of the Spanish queen, not having been put in execution. The envoy mentions that it had been impeded by the king's illness,—"it being the custom of the court to put on gala when any of the royal family are blooded. When I went to court to enquire after his majesty's health, I was there informed that the king, on Sunday night the 3d instant, passing through a gallery to go to the queen's apartment, had the misfortune to fall and bruise his right arm; he had been blooded eight different times; and, as his majesty is a fat bulky man, to prevent any humours fixing there, his physicians have advised that he should not use his arm, but abstain from business for some time. In consequence, the queen was declared regent during Don Joseph's illness."

This was the public version of the event. But appended to the despatch was a postscript, in cipher, stating the reality of the transaction. Pombal's sagacity, and his self control, perhaps a still rarer quality among the possessors of power, were exhibited in the strongest light on this occasion. For three months not a single step appeared to be taken to punish, or even to detect the assassins. The subject was allowed to die away; when, on the 9th of December, all Portugal was startled by a royal decree, declaring the crime, and offering rewards for the seizure of the assassins. Some days afterwards Lisbon heard, with astonishment, an order for the arrest of the Duke of Aveira, one of the first nobles, and master of the royal household; the arrest of the whole family of the Marquis of Tavora, himself, his two sons, his four brothers, and his two sons-in-law. Other nobles were also seized; and the Jesuits were forbidden to be seen out of their houses.

The three months of Pombal's apparent inaction had been incessantly employed in researches into the plot. Extreme caution was evidently necessary, where the criminals were among the highest officials and nobles, seconded by the restless and formidable machinations of the Jesuits. When his proofs were complete, he crushed the conspirators at a single grasp. His singular inactivity had disarmed them; and nothing but the most consummate composure could have prevented their flying from justice. On the 12th of January 1759, they were found guilty; and on the 13th they were put to death, to the number of nine, with the Marchioness of Tavora, in the square of Belem. The scaffold and the bodies were burned, and the ashes thrown into the sea.

Those were melancholy acts; the works of melancholy times. But as no human crime can be so fatal to the security of a state as regicide, no imputation can fall on the memory of a great minister, compelled to exercise justice in its severity, for the protection of all orders of the kingdom. In our more enlightened period, we must rejoice that those dreadful displays of judicial power have passed away; and that laws are capable of being administered without the tortures, or the waste of life, which agonize the feelings of society. Yet, while blood for blood continued to be the code; while the sole prevention of crime was sought for in the security of judgment; and while even the zeal of justice against guilt was measured by the terrible intensity of the punishment—we must charge the horror of such sweeping executions to the ignorance of the age, much more than to the vengeance of power.

This tragedy was long the subject of European memory; and all the extravagance of popular credulity was let loose ill discovering the causes of the conspiracy. It was said, in the despatches of the English minister, that the Marquis of Tavora, who had been Portuguese minister in the East, was irritated by the royal attentions to his son's wife. Ambition was the supposed ground of the Duke of Aveira's perfidy. The old Marchioness of Tavora, who had been once the handsomest woman at court, and was singularly vein and haughty, was presumed to have received some personal offence, by the rejection of the family claim to a dukedom. All is wrapped in the obscurity natural to transactions in which individuals of rank are involved in the highest order of crime. It was the natural policy of the minister to avoid extending the charges by explaining the origin of the crime. The connexions of the traitors were still many and powerful; and further disclosures might have produced only further attempts at the assassination of the minister or the king.

It was now determined to act with vigour against the Jesuits, who were distinctly charged with assisting, if not originating, the treason. A succession of decrees were issued, depriving them of their privileges and possessions; and finally, on the 5th of October 1759, the cardinal patriarch Saldanha issued the famous mandate, by which the whole society was expelled from the Portuguese dominions. Those in the country were transported to Civita Vecchia; those in the colonies were also conveyed to the Papal territory; and thus, by the intrepidity, wisdom, and civil courage of one man, the realm was relieved from the presence of the most powerful and most dangerous body which had ever disturbed the peace of society.

Portugal having thus the honour of taking the lead, Rome herself at length followed; and, on the accession of the celebrated Ganganelli, Clement XIV., a resolution was adopted to suppress the Jesuits in every part of the world. On the 21st of July 1773, the memorable bull "Dominus ac Redemptor," was published, and the order was at an end. The announcement was received in Lisbon with natural rejoicing. Te Deum was sung, and the popular triumph was unbounded and universal.

We now hasten to the close of this distinguished minister's career. His frame, though naturally vigorous, began to feel the effects of his incessant labour, and an apoplectic tendency threatened to shorten a life so essential to the progress of Portugal; for that whole life was one of temperate and progressive reform. His first application was to the finances; he found the Portuguese exchequer on the verge of bankruptcy. A third of the taxes was embezzled in the collection. In 1761, his new system was adopted, by which the finances were restored; and every week a balance-sheet of the whole national expenditure was presented to the king. His next reform was the royal household, where all unnecessary expenses—and they were numerous—were abolished. Another curious reform will be longer remembered in Portugal. The nation had hitherto used only the knife at dinner! Pombal introduced the fork. He brought this novel addition to the table with him from England in 1745!

The nobility were remarkably ignorant. Pombal formed the "College of Nobles" for their express education. There they were taught every thing suitable to their rank. The only prohibition being, "that they should not converse in Latin," the old pedantic custom of the monks. The nobles were directed to converse in English, French, Italian, or their native tongue; Pombal declaring, that the custom of speaking Latin was only "to teach them to barbarize."

Another custom, though of a more private order, attracted the notice of this rational and almost universal improver. It had been adopted as a habit by the widows of the nobility, to spend the first years of their widowhood in the most miserable seclusion; they shut up their windows, retired to some gloomy chamber, slept on the floor, and, suffering all kinds of voluntary and absurd mortifications, forbade the approach of the world. As the custom was attended with danger to health, and often with death, besides its general melancholy influence on society, the minister publicly "enacted," that every part of it should be abolished; and, moreover, that the widows should always remove to another house; or, where this was not practicable, that they "should not close the shutters, nor 'mourn' for more than a week, nor remain at home for more than a month, nor sleep on the ground." Doubtless, tens of thousands thanked him, and thank him still, for this war against a popular, but most vexatious, absurdity.

His next reform was the army. After the peace of 1763, he fixed it at 30,000 men, whom he equipped effectually, and brought into practical discipline.

A succession of laws, made for the promotion of European and colonial trade, next opened the resources of Portugal to an extent unknown before. Pombal next abolished the "Index Expurgitorius"—an extraordinary achievement, not merely beyond his age, but against the whole superstitious spirit of his age. He was not content with abolishing the restraint; he attempted to restore the PRESS in Portugal. Hitherto nearly all Portuguese books had been printed in foreign counties. He established a "Royal Press," and gave its superintendence to Pagliarini, a Roman printer, who had been expatriated for printing works against the Jesuits. Such, in value and extent, were the acts which Portugal owed to this indefatigable and powerful mind, that when, in 1766, he suffered a paralytic stroke, the king and the people were alike thrown into consternation.

At length Don Joseph, the king, and faithful friend of Pombal, died, after a reign of twenty-seven years of honour and usefulness. Pombal requested to resign, and the Donna Maria accepted the resignation, and conferred various marks of honour upon him. He now retired to his country-seat, where Wraxall saw him in 1772, and thus describes his appearance. "At this time he had attained his seventy-third year, but age seemed to have diminished neither the freshness nor the activity of his faculties. In his person he was very tall and slender, his face long, pale, and meagre, but full of intelligence."

But Pombal had been too magnanimous for the court and nobles; and the loss of his power as minister produced a succession of intrigues against him, by the relatives of the Tavora family, and doubtless also by the ecclesiastical influence, which has always been at once so powerful and so prejudicial in Portugal. He was insulted by a trial, at which, however, the only sentence inflicted was an order to retire twenty leagues from the court. The Queen was, at that time, probably suffering under the first access of that derangement, which, in a few years after, utterly incapacitated her, and condemned the remainder of her life to melancholy and total solitude. But the last praise is not given to the great minister, while his personal disinterestedness is forgotten. One of the final acts of his life was to present to the throne a statement of his public income, when it appeared that, during the twenty-seven years of his administration, he had received no public emolument but his salary as secretary of state, and about L.100 a-year for another office. But he was rich; for, as his two brothers remained unmarried, their incomes were joined with his own. He lived, held in high respect and estimation by the European courts, to the great age of eighty-three, dying on the 5th of May without pain. A long inscription, yet in which the panegyric did not exceed the justice, was placed on his tomb. Yet a single sentence might have established his claim to the perpetual gratitude of his country and mankind—

"Here lies the man who banished the
Jesuits from Portugal."

Mr Smith's volume is intelligently written, and does much credit to his research and skill.

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN

PART XII

Have I not in my time heard lions roar?
Have I not heard the sea, puft up with wind,
Rage like an angry boar chafed with sweat?
Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,
And Heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?
Have I not in the pitched battle heard
Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets clang?"

SHAKSPEARE

Elnathan was a man of many cares, and every kind of wisdom, but one—the wisdom of knowing when he had wealth enough. He evidently loved accumulation; and the result was, that every hour of his existence was one of terror. Half the brokers and chief traders in France were already in prison; and yet he carried on the perilous game of commerce. He was known to be immensely opulent; and he must have regarded the day which passed over his head, without seeing his strong boxes put under the government seal, and himself thrown into some oubliette, as a sort of miracle. But he was now assailed by a new alarm. War with England began to be rumoured among the bearded brethren of the synagogue; and Elnathan had ships on every sea, from Peru to Japan. Like Shakspeare's princely merchant—

"His mind was tossing on the ocean,
There where his argosies with portly sail,
Like signiors, and rich burghers of the flood.
Or, as it were, the pageants of the sea,
Did overpower the petty traffickers,
As they flew by them with their woven wings."

The first shot fired would inevitably pour out the whole naval force of England, and his argosies would put their helms about, and steer for Portsmouth, Plymouth, and every port but a French one. If this formidable intelligence had awakened the haughtiness of the French government to a sense of public peril, what effect must it not have in the counting-house of a man whose existence was trade? While I was on my pillow, luxuriating in dreams of French fêtes, Paul and Virginia carried off to the clouds, and Parisian belles dancing cotillons in the bowers and pavilions of a Mahometan paradise, Elnathan spent the night at his desk, surrounded by his bustling generation of clerks, writing to correspondents at every point of the compass, and preparing insurances with the great London establishments; which I was to carry with me, though unacquainted with the transaction on which so many millions of francs hung trembling.

His morning face showed me, that whatever had been his occupation before I met him at the breakfast-table, it had been a most uneasy one. His powerful and rather handsome physiognomy had shrunk to half the size; his lips were livid, and his hand shook to a degree which made me ask, whether the news from Robespierre was unfavourable. But his assurance that all still went on well in that delicate quarter, restored my tranquility, which was beginning to give way; and my only stipulation now was, that I should have an hour or two to spend at Vincennes before I took my final departure. The Jew was all astonishment; his long visage elongated at the very sound; he shook his locks, lifted up his large hands, and fixed his wide eyes on me with a look of mingled alarm and wonder, which would have been ludicrous if it had not been perfectly sincere.

"In the name of common sense, do you remember in what a country, and in what times, we live? Oh, those Englishmen! always thinking that they are in England. My young friend, you are clearly not fit for France, and the sooner you get out of it the better."

I still remonstrated. "Do you forget yesterday?" he exclaimed. "Can you forget the man before whom we both stood? A moment's hesitation on your part to set out, would breed suspicion in that most suspicious brain of all mankind. Life is here as uncertain as in a field of battle. Begone the instant your passports arrive, and never behind you.—For my part, I constantly feel as if my head were in the lion's jaws. Rejoice in your escape."