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PEDRO'S REVENGE.

of Portugal in blood-and was preparing a war of extermination against his father, when his mother interposed, and prevailed upon him to lay down his arms and submit to a reconciliation. The king sent the assassins of Iñez out of the country, ordered masses to be said for her soul, and sought in every way to remove the resentment of his son.

In a short time afterward the king died, and Pedro ascended the vacant throne. His first thought was vengeance on his wife's murderers. They had taken refuge in the dominions of Pedro of Castile-and to get control of their persons, Pedro entered into a treaty with that monarch for the mutual surrender of fugitives. There were in Portugal at that time some Castilians of high rank, who had fled from their own country to escape their sovereign's unprovoked animosity. They had been kindly received by Alfonso, and advanced to places of trust under him. His son's thirst for vengeance, which had grown with want of gratification, instigated him to violate the sacred rites of hospitality, and to deliver them up to their master. Nay, the better to secure the great purpose of his mind, he agreed to contract his three sons to the daughters of the Castilian Pedro by Maria de Padillaand indeed would have sacrificed the crown itself to this same end. By these efforts he obtained possession of two of the assassins, Gonsalves and Coelho; Pacheco had received timely warning of his danger, and escaped into Arragon. All that the most ingenious mind could refine into torture was practiced upon these miserable wretches; their sufferings were long, agonizing, and terrible, till the recollection of their crime was almost lost in the ferocity of the torments by which it was expiated. Thus far Pedro's conduct appears to have been natural, if not even justifiable; but his next step

argued an extravagance amounting to monomania. As if all he had done had not appeased the manes of Iñez, or sufficiently attested his sense of her irreparable loss, he convoked the Cortes of his kingdom, and after a solemn oath to the assembly that he had obtained the Papal dispensation, and been lawfully married to Iñez de Castro, in the presence of the Bishop of Guarda and his own chief equerry, whose oaths confirmed his, he ordered her corpse to be raised from the tomb, to be clad in royal robes, and to be crowned with all the civil and religious pomp due a living queen; he went still further: he required all the chief nobility and courtiers, whose homage would have been her right in life, to kneel and kiss the hand moldering from the grave her step-son and his heir, the Infante Ferdinand being the first, from his superior position, to perform the ceremony. Was ever a wife more madly loved or avenged?

How it is with others I know not, but I like these scenes of the historical picturesque, and would rather visit places famous in story, however otherwise insig nificant, than multitudinous cities, or even nature's nobler creations.

To reach Coimbra, you go through Oporto; and to reach Oporto, or Porto, as it is called by the inhabitants, you take the sea, the only traversable highway from one place to another; for the roads are abominable, and the estalagems or inns villainous. Porto, when it was a general entrepôt for the deposit of South American productions, coffee, rice, sugars, and cotton, flourished and grew rich; this trade fell off, however, with the establishment of unrestricted communication between the Brazils and other countries, and Porto languished till within a few years; its commerce has somewhat revived, and with increasing manufactures and

exports, promises again to be prosperous. Wine, salt, and fruits of all kinds constitute its principal exportation. The Douro, upon which the city lies, has, like the Tagus, a dangerous bar at its outlet, which, with its shifting sands, renders navigation always delicate, sometimes dangerous. Indeed, in winter, when the full force of westerly winds, and the Atlantic waves act upon the coast, an attempted entrance would be fatal.

Porto has many elegant edifices, lay and religious, clean streets, gardens filled with the purple grape, lemon-trees, and the loaded lime and orange-trees; the Indian cane with its gorgeous blossom, the flowering aloes, and the myrtle-tree with its pendant vine; but what lives most gratefully in my recollection is the pork I was wont to eat there. The animal that affords it feeds upon the sweet acorn to render his flesh more palatable. The natives, who never or seldom drink to excess, gormandize upon this juicy delicacy. Many a Jew, I was told, who had resisted the fires of the Inquisition, christianized to enjoy the porcine morceau; as Henry the Fourth said of Paris, so thought the Jew of pork: "It was well worth a mass.”

Oporto is best, or most favorably known to other countries from its wine, the annual export of which is (or was) about eighty thousand pipes. This trade, however, is diminishing. England once, and even now, its best customer, imports less annually. It is present ton there to affect a taste for French and lighter wines; and some of the acti laudatores temporis pretend to find a deterioration of the national character in conse

were

quence. "Your old two-bottle men," they say, 66 always to be depended upon; they had stamina of principle as well as of constitution. But your modern gentry are like the wine they drink-frothy, bodyless, and unreliable."

CHAPTER XIV.

EARLY HISTORY OF PORTUGAL-THE ROMAN DOMINATION-THE ARABS-THE RECAPTURE OF LISBON BY THE CRUSADERS-THE DISCOVERIES UNDER DOM MANUEL AND DOM HENRIQUE

BUT Portugal lives best in history. Her glories are all of the past. Her Titanic era has been succeeded by a generation of pigmies, whose boast should be their opprobrium. When we travel through Portugal, contemplate her crumbling monuments, familiarize ourselves with her annals, and behold her as she is, we feel the same difficulty in associating the past with the present as the traveler who discovers the mounds and other indications of superior intelligence on the banks of the Ohio, and wonders in view of the Indians, what has become of the enlightened architects who fashioned them. The degenerate Portuguese of the present day, so far from being able to emulate, are incapable of recording the deeds of their ancestors.

Portugal was known to the early nations, and has indeed been one of the battle-grounds of Europe for many centuries. The Phenician navigators visited its shores, and established commercial relations with its inhabitants; they were followed by the Carthaginians, who in their turn gave way to the universal Roman. "Where the Roman conquers," says Tacitus, "he inhabits." The northern portions of Iberia and Lusitania (for such was the ancient appellation of Portugal)

succumbed, after a series of protracted and sanguinary combats, to the conquerors of Hannibal, and thus for the first time lost their hitherto fiercely asserted independence; a thousand years of rapine, neglect, and decay have since succeeded; but we still behold the solid remains of the massive aqueducts, the magnificent bridges and roads of this wonderful people. Rome seems still to contend with time for eternity of duration.

On the fall of the Western empire, in the fifth century of the Christian era, the Visigoths and Suevi partitioned Portugal, and were themselves, two centuries later, overcome at the battle of Xerès de la Frontera by the Arabian Moors, when their king, Roderic, was entirely defeated. The whole of the Peninsula fell into the possession of the victorious Arabs, and formed the caliphate of Spain. This conquest humanized the Peninsula; for the followers of Mohammed were more advanced in the sciences and arts of civilized life than the so-called Christians, who had received their religion not from Nazareth, but Rome. A taste for liberal arts, and a devotion to scientific pursuits accompanied and illustrated the Arab's career of glory, while they refined his manners and softened his heart. A chivalric bearing springing from a consciousness of individual merit, lent to their actions a character of grandeur, which their daily life confirmed. I shall have much to say of these extraordinary people when I speak of Spain. It is sufficient here to say that the civil wars into which their impetuous ambition led them, broke down their dominion in the Peninsula, and prepared the way for its reconquest by the Goths.

About three centuries after the defeat of Roderic, "the last of the Goths," Alphonso VI. of Castile, backed by the Crusaders whom religious bigotry at